<p>I don’t know, maybe being the tail end of the baby boom/ beginning of gen x, having parents who were from the so called greatest generation gives me a different perspective, but I think classifying millenials as anything is as dangerous as classifying anything:</p>
<p>“The Depression era people (our parents) grew up with nothing, lived through a time of much higher unemployment with no safety net and yet the attitude of that generation is ‘work, work, work, save, save, save’. This generation (again just some of them) see is as futile.”</p>
<p>That is one of the stereotypes I am talking about, Tom Brokaw and others have made this into the ‘greatest’ generation and so forth, and like anything else, it is part true, and part quite frankly myth. Being frugal, working hard and so forth were part of that generation, but it also was not consistent. A lot of young people in the 1930’s gave up, they were nihilistic, a lot of people lost faith, birth rates plummeted because people were unsure of the future. Millions of young people were riding the rails from here to there, not really even knowing what they were looking for. Eric Severeid (yeah, the old dude who used to do commentaries on CBS evening news when I was a kid), talked about being young in that time…what is lost is what programs like the CCC were about, it was trying to give the young people some direction, some sense of purpose…we see the result after it was all over, my father saw it as it was happening. </p>
<p>As far as work work, work, some had tremendous work ethic, but some of them didn’t, do you think the stereotype of the lazy guy working in the union, the guy at work whom everyone loved but just seemed to be there, weren’t based in part in fact? Those 1950’s tv shows lampooned it, because it did go on…and of course, we had the ‘bad crowd’ that everyone was afraid of, the motorcycle gang types, etc…:). </p>
<p>I think it is likewise had to classify millenials or gen x types. Gen X were supposed to work in McJobs and be slackers, now we hear how they are so much better than their descendants. Baby Boomers were a bunch of spoiled kids, coddled by 'that d*** doctor Spock", hippy war protesters, etc…and well, now we look back and realize they didn’t tune out and drop acid for long…</p>
<p>Millenials face things we never did. The kids obsessed about grades always existed, of course, those to whom anything less than an A was a disaster, friends of mine, especially the kids of Asian and south Asian parents, were like this, as well as a lot of the Jewish kids, so it was there; Roger Kahn, the author of the great book “The Boys of Summer” about the Brooklyn Dodgers, described the NYU of the late 1940’s as being full of fellow Jews, heading for medical or law school, where the works of Chaucer didn’t matter unless it counted towards a grade in a class…you get the idea. Today, though, this has been serialized all over the place, the mania for GPA and test scores is at a rate unheard of in my generation. Kids in grade school obsess over GPA’s, as if not having a 4.0 in 4th grade will ruin them, they are afraid to take chances, in high school they won’t take a challenging class that will stretch them, for fear they will not get an A and wipe out their chances, the whole world seems to be revolving around numbers and letter grades…schools, to answer this challenge, have responded by dumping hours of homework on a kid, in part because people heard what the homework load was like on kids in Asia and other parts of the world, and decided this was the magic formula (and also a cheap way to try and show how good an education they were giving), and then we have the hysteria over EC’s as well…</p>
<p>And want to know something? They are handling it better than I would expect, I give them a lot of credit. Yeah, I see the kids living off mom and dad, I see the kids from all over the country coming to NYC, working in marketing or whatever they do, with the rent paid for by mom and dad, I saw the privileged kids at the school my S went to, where they fully expected that mom and dad would be there…but I also see a lot more hardworking kids trying to make a life out of the mess that is out there, that they didn’t create. Want my honest opinion, a lot of these kids put most of the kids I grew up with to shame, in my generation, growing up in the burbs, we faced a lot better times and there was an assumption we would do as well or better than our parents, these kids know it won’t be that easy. Kids in my generation could get a degree in a tech field, and know they could get a decent paying job, these days, thanks to outsourcing and the visa system, they face salaries and such that have been hit hard, especially for entry level positions, where companies would rather take some kid from India or China on an H1B, because it is so much cheaper…that didn’t exist when I was growing up, unless you happened to be a Phd in organic chemistry or solid state physics or an Phd in engineering…</p>
<p>But these kids for the most part fight the good battle, and if mom and dad are helping to pay for it it probably is because we haven’t left them much of a legacy…kids need to go to college, and the cost of it, even at public universities, have gone crazy, and in a tight job market employers are picking what they see as the cream of the crop…so kids pile on loans to go to more prestigious schools, in the hope it gets them in the door.</p>
<p>As far as the kid in the article, it sounds like he is someone marching to the beat of his own drum, and there are always kids like that. Music has never been easy, and even the most successful bands will tell stories of living out of their car and living on canned tuna and ramen noodles, classical musicians even then will tell you how hard it was to make it. The kid in the article isn’t lazy, he isn’t materialistic, he has decided that life for him right now is a lot more than being a salary slave trying to make his way up the job ladder, he is finding something for himself. Being in IT, there are more than a few people who went that path, then figured out they needed to do more to make a living and have a chance at a family and such,but for now he is doing his own thing on his own dime. Kids like that IME often end up a lot more grounded and easy to work with, they tend to be centered, they have gotten out their wanderlust or whatever, and also aren’t the type who comes out of school thinking a)the world owes them something or b)that the purpose of life is to get ahead no matter how you do it, and everything is a battle to take anything they can anyway they can get it…Given half a chance, I think this generation may end up more grounded than mine ever was, and they may have to work twice as hard as we did to do it, but maybe they will be the ones to reject all the crap and realize what they want out of life:). Slackers, lazy people, morons, entitled people, exist and existed in any generation, and I think it is age and myopia that makes people think the latest generation is crap. I see my son and the other kids who are taking a jump off the deep end to try and go into music, working harder than the kids in ivy league schools who want to be investment bankers for the most part, simply because they love it enough to do that, and that tells me that kids haven’t changed all that much, it is us, the old grouches, who have. I think what we want is the perceived world of the carefree 20’s, when all we had to worry about was ourselves, not the reality of these kids lives, which is often a lot more stress filled than anything we faced.</p>
lol</p>