<p>I was going to include whining in the title of this thread, but thought that might be too… overt (not the word I was looking for, but I’m tired.)</p>
<p>I have noticed a pattern here, where a young person will present a problem, many thoughtful, caring adults will respond with good suggestions, and the response to almost all of them is… “I caaaaan’t,” followed by pathetic excuses and rationalizations for inertia.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s that my oldest is now out of college and I’m dealing with some of this kind of thing in person, but am I the only one who is getting tired of generation Whine?</p>
<p>A lot of us (and I am including myself) have managed to raise a generation of the entitled. Tackling a problem head-on and taking ownership of it doesn’t seem to be part of the wiring. Whining does.</p>
<p>Maybe because we’ve made it to the other side by hard work, perseverance, and dumb luck, and discovered that life can be hard AND good at the same time makes me less tolerant of this.</p>
<p>Am I the only one who feels this way?</p>
<p>If this post is too negative and nasty, let me know quickly and I’ll edit it out of existence… I just needed to vent a bit.</p>
<p>No, I think you are right. In my workplace(hospital), my manger has hired a lot of young people with only HS and maybe some college experience, but they constantly have to be directed and managed. Rarely do I see a self directed, enthusiastic person eager to learn anything. When I was a youngster just starting out in the workplace, I along with most of my peers were hungry and eager to learn.
It is not only in my workplace do I see this, but in other places of business that I frequent.<br>
On occasion do I experience a youngster that goes above and beyond the call lof duty.</p>
<p>It’s not just some in the younger generation who do that kind of whining and then rejecting advice, there are plenty of people our age and older do this including some of my EX friends.</p>
<p>Yes, you’ve described my mother perfectly…she went through the depression, so I don’t think it’s an entitlement problem. If anyone figures out what kind of problem it is and how to fix it, please tell, because I know I’ll feel bad if I punch my mother in the nose!</p>
<p>You can’t change the person. You can change your reaction to their whining. One way is by allowing yourself to realize that there’s nothing you can do to fix their problems. There really are some people who like to complain. It’s up to you whether to listen to that and whether to react to their complaints.</p>
<p>When it came to my complaining friends, I chose to hang around other people who are more positive about life.</p>
<p>I do think that those first years out of college are some of the hardest times, especially for kids who have been successful academically. Parents sometimes imply that if kids work hard and get good grades, go to a good college and do well, everything in life will follow easily from that…and that couldn’t be further from the truth. So I guess, if it was my kid, I’d try to shed the irritation and find out why they feel the situation is hopeless, and see what I could do (like, maybe talking about my own confusion and ineptitude at that age), to remind them that they do have the skills to do well, that these are hard economic times and no one is having lots of good fortune… But I do recognize the irritation, all too well.</p>
<p>Thanks, NSM. There are some people in my generation who are whiny. Others aren’t. In my experience, a lot of the ones who are whiny just haven’t had reason to prove to themselves that they’re capable of doing what needs to be done. Once they realize that they have no choice but to climb out of the nest and jump, then they tend to do a good job getting things done.</p>
<p>People usually rise to the occasion when you give them no choice but to rise to the occasion.</p>