Why Generation Y doesn’t stand a chance

Okay.  I’ve given it to the boomers here and here.  Now it’s time to turn the cannon on myself and my peers.

I am a child of baby boomers.  Generation Y.  Echo boomers.  Millenials.  Whatever you want to call us.  Anyone born between about 1970 to 1990.  The simple truth is that we don’t stand a chance.  Here’s why.

Our upbringing was essentially an elaborate cultural experiment, unsurprisingly conducted by a generation who sought to improve the world.  If they couldn’t change their own world and the people around it, they could change what their children are taught about the world.  Not knowing any differently since no one ever told them any differently, they would create the world the boomers could only dream about – one in which everyone is special, all people are tolerated, no one is ever judged, war is never the answer, fossil fuels are evil, diversity is celebrated, opinions are shared, inclusivity is doctrine, political correctness reigns supreme, and the gravest sin on planet earth is to hurt someone’se feelings or damage their self esteem.  Marriage is about love and you should go to college to learn, not to make money.

The instrument of indoctrination, of course, was Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education which came just in time to ruin the national curriculum.

So, throughout ouf childhood we were raised to believe all of these grand social ideas.  The only problem with these grand concepts are all lies that no one – including our parents themselves – ever took particularly seriously when it came to self regulating their own septic behavior.  While we were busy learning about our self esteem and “caring and sharing”, our parents were splitting up the property in a no-fault divorce, our leaders were lying about blowjobs on the world stage, and the SUV became the best selling car make on the market.

I can’t tell you how many of my peers are completely incapable of functioning in the real world because they are operating under a belief in rules that their parents invented, their teachers enforced, and their world ignores, breaks, and mocks at every turn because they are totally contrary to human nature.  How can we possibly be expected to fix the world’s problems left in the wake of our inept parents when we are probably even worse equipped to deal with them than they ever were?

Let’s break down a list of many of the worst characteristics of generation Y:

Rampant nacissism.  The single greatest consequence of a lifetime told that you’re a special little unique flower who can grow up to be anything and anyone and whose opinions must be valued in the spirit of non-judgmentalism and whose actions must always be viewed through a compassionate lens of moral relativism is abject and complete narcissism.  I would say at least one out of two echo boomers goes through life believing in the validity of any idea that floats through their heads by the sole virtue that it originated from them.  When you are taught not to judge others (and they not to judge you), why waste the energy even considering anyone else’s point of view?  They have theirs and you have yours.  Neither opinion is ever better than any other.

Unrealistic expectations.  A large number of my peers grow up to expect a similar quality of life to the one in which they were raised without anyone ever taking the time to explain to them how it was achieved, let alone empasizing the fact that having 300 friends on MySpace is not enough to land a middle income lifestyle and that life itself is actually harder than it seems.  This, again, is a result of our school system, usually held hostage by adamant, frothing parents, shoveling lies about our abilities down our throats.  The truth of life is that we can’t be anything we want to be, but you’d never get that impression if you heard the ridiculous things said in public schools.  For example, a kid in a wheelchair is not walking disabled.  He’s “differently abled.”  A kid with an IQ of 80 is not retarded, he is “special”.  The truth is that the kid in the wheelchair is not going to play professional basketball and the kid with the IQ of 80 is not going to be a physics professor.  But we weren’t raised to believe that.   Our “self esteem” was more important than the truth about our abilities.

We weren’t raised with out interests in mind, we were raised by parents who wanted so desperately to have perfect children that were as good or better than everyone else’s children that they had to find every reason to make us out to be more than we were.  Our parents refused to accept the idea that we weren’t smart enough to get into or complete college – they pushed us to go – all of us – without thinking for a minute what might happen to our self esteem when we try and fail.  Because no matter how smart Mr. 80 thinks he is or has been told he is, he’s not going to earn a 4 year degree, unless we rig the system by introducing….

Drastically lowered expectations.  It’s not enough that our parents set us up to pursue life ambitions way out of our league, the only way for us to meet the expectations set out for us by our parents was to lower the expectations so even the most meager among us could present as a success and mom and dad could drive around with Honors Student bumper stickers on their gas-guzzling flip-mobiles.  Honors classes are the new average classes and average classes are the new special ed.  What are the new honors classes?  There are none, except in Japan.

And it’s not just schools.  My peers were hardly asked to do chores.  Even the losers got trophys at the end of a rec season.  We were hardly ever asked to sit through boring things like family dinners or church services, or even long car rides without DVD players.  We were disciplined by “time outs” instead of a solid hit to the face with the ring hand.  We learned to demand instant gratification over delayed gratification.  With all of the peripheral distractions – better TV, video games, the internet, cell phones – most of us have extremely low attention spans, bordering on and including ADD.  We lack attention to detail, and anything that isn’t fun, entertaining, or new is almost immediately discarded.  Barely any of my peers are capable of studying for any length of time.

With this littany of problems, the only remedy is to make things easier.  To make life easier.

Unwillingness to acknowledge anyone.  My generation does not respect anyone for any reason.  Age, experience, or expertise are not qualifications for respecting the opinions and ideas of other people over his own.  The only criteria an echo boomer has for listening to someone’s ideas is he agrees with them already.  Humility is a character trait almost entirely absent in the entire echo boomer generation.

Unfounded faith in ideas.  This is a direct result of being raised by an entire generation of dreamers.  The boomers, many of whom were hippies, tried to instill the beliefs about people and ideas they invented into their children, and in many of my peers, it took.  Many echo boomers believe wildly absurd things totally contrary to human nature because they had it beaten into them from an early age.  The most common of these is an overly optimistic prediction of the behavior of other people; i.e., a belief that left to their own devices, people will do good, not evil.  That all evil is merely a reaction to evils inflicted upon them (of course, where did evil start, one might ask?).  Coupled with an unwillingness to consider other ideas because they didn’t originate from themselves makes this a particularly nasty trait.

« Two Weeks in Review

Tying the Knot »