Saturday, April 10, 2010
Talkin Bout My Generation: Who We Are
That's us. It's who we've been branded as by whoever decides what generations are titled. The text generation. The twittering masses. Whatever we are, people want to define us, and sell to us. Those Miracle Whip ads (mayonnaise is HARDCORE) were made to get us to buy it. Everyone seems to have their opinion on us, so let's at least try to bust up some misconceptions.
Entitled. The word we all use for people who get something that they don't deserve. Apparently we're entitled because we believe in big salaries, big job titles, big lives. And you know what, they're right. We DO feel like we deserve all of that. But who can blame us? We're the ones who are paying an incredible amount of money for the same knowledge our parents got at a fraction of the price. We need a big salary because their generation made student loans a HUGE hurdle in our twenty-something lives. We'll be paying our school loans off at the same time as our mortgages. So maybe we do deserve that salary. Why else do we feel so entitled? We're the "good job for trying!" generation that got a trophy for being in last place, just because we participated. If you congratulate every kid for just being a part of something, we're going to want to be rewarded just for being there. Blame's on you, old fogies. And Big Lives? I blame celebrity culture, but maybe that's an argument for another time.
Nine to Five. Does anyone work those hours anymore? They don't make sense anymore, and maybe we're just the first people to pick up on this fact. In a globalized world, there is no nine-to-five. There is only working and not working. The last thing any of us wants to do is be stuck in rush hour, listening to some crappy morning or night DJ, to go into a meeting to accomplish something that could be done just as easily through Skype or AIM.
There's probably some truth to the idea that we're just not as smart as our generational predecessors, without using that darned "web thing." They probably know every state capital, who was Secretary of State in 1956, and how to quickly and painlessly do any long division we throw at them, but maybe that's irrelevant. We have technology, suckas. I bet we can find any of that information out just as quickly using google, wikipedia, or a calculator. So, unless we've crashed our plane onto a remote island and need to figure out who was the Chief of Staff under Hoover, I think we'll be alright.
So, that's part of who we are. I'm sure there's more. We're different, but we'll survive.
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