Alone Again ~ Naturally
Mar. 8th, 2008 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanOn yet another day when 26yr-old Junior has texted me to let me know he's not coming to work, as he's "too tired to drive after coughing all night" (is that a euphemism I'm unaware of?), whilst firing up the work computer, I found this opinion piece on a LimitedNews website that sums up my current feelings...
Why older people hate Gen Y
By Sarah Wilson. March 08, 2008
IN a previous life working in women's magazines, we had this term for that thing you do where you compete to post the most random YouTube feed on your Facebook Superwall or group email - thus gaining flimsy pop cultural credibility.
We called it "superwall bragging".
This week I superwall-bragged a video called "I hate Young People" to everyone I know who is safely over the age of 30.
The gist is this: Old people frothing about how young people don't work hard enough, have entitlement issues, are too goddamn optimistic and wear their pants too low.
The responses that came back confirmed what I've been thinking lately - it really has become quite the thing to hate young people.
It's become a sport, a cause du jour for notoriously whiney Generation Xers (those born between 1961 and 1981) and conservative Baby Boomers at office water coolers around the country.
In an ideal world I'd leave Corey Worthington out of anything I ever write as it just adds fuel to his blazing fame.
But he has, of course, become a pinata boy for the movement against young people, specifically Generation Y (born after 1982). And his commitment-lite, attitude-heavy antics gave us the ammunition we needed to launch our tirade.
The real battleground for this all-out intergenerational spat, however, is the workplace.
Multiple research findings reveal young people are regarded as having a shocking work ethic.
They want the top job, but expect to work fewer hours and earn more money for it. Oh, and they'd like every second Friday off.
Retention rates are the real bugbear.
Gen Y change jobs every two years and will have 29 jobs across their career.
Gen X will have eight.
A study in the US last month found 70 per cent of hiring managers feel they have to convince young people to take the job.
Imagine!
The anecdotal evidence is even more compelling. I once had a work experience student pin me against the photocopier and drill me about how long it would take for her to have my job if she were to choose us as her employer.
The same girl announced three days into her stint, she "didn't complete six years of high school to do photocopying" as she strutted out to take an extended networking lunch break. True story.
Gen Y's defence is, well, why not. It's a buyers' market.
To pour acid on the seeping wound, a new industry has evolved geared at coaching oldies in the tip-toeing art of accommodating young people's needs in the office.
Motivational types share how to keep them happy - and believing they'll be running the show in 18 months. (Google "Generation Y" and "workplace". You'll see what I mean.)
After all, they're our future. And their chirpy, "no-failure" approach (they're a generation who haven't experienced a recession and are described as the most positive generation to have ever walked) is great for team projects. And inventing social networking sites.
Then there are the motivational books. Hundreds are published each month; mostly written by Gen-Yers living at home with Mum and Dad.
My favourite is the recent bestseller The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, a former breakdancer and tango champion who has never worked in the IT industry.
He now makes a squillion on the motivational circuit telling ageing geeks in Silicon Valley they've got it all wrong.
Postscript: Ferriss, now 30, spends his free time studying yabusame (horseback archery) in Japan. Such a brilliant clash of cultural wrongness!
And did you read this week that a report has slammed New Zealand Rugby for failing to understand a generation of "passive", "uncommitted" and needy youth, blaming the body for a drop in players.
So the feeling out there, if I'm reading it correctly, is young people get to behave like precocious brats, and get rewarded for it, while the rest of us do the hard yards.
It's kind of like the prodigal son's brother (did he have a name?) who slogged it out on the farm while his younger brother ran amok. And who got the royal treatment from Dad? Well, we all know how that one ended.
Hating young people is nothing new. Once a generation hits the age where they move to the suburbs to have kids and tuck their T-shirts into jeans, they tend to have a problem with anyone younger than them.
It's called the generation gap.
What's new is that the generation gap is eroding. Old people now want to be like young people.
They're not moving on. Thirty somethings aren't having kids nor playing by the usual rules, and 40-year-old mums are shopping at Supre and drinking UDLs at music festivals, while their husbands dress like Corey Worthington (damn, I've done it again!) in fluorescent sunglasses and ironically sloganed hoodies.
They're fake young people.
You get the impression they find the breezy, life-in-balance and esteem-laden ways of Gen Y far more fun than the earnest Reality Bites-esque melancholia they inherited from their own youth.
Problem is, they're still seething that in their day they had to look everything up in the World Book Encyclopaedia, and actually use a bibliography.
And had three masters degrees but still couldn't get a job at McDonald's when they left university.
This is why we hate young people. They're so much better at being young people.
Edit: And in other news, these photos from the Sydney Morning Herald were taken in the aftermath of the shooting spree in an Israeli religious college.
The Palestinians pictured celebrating the news are in a 'refugee camp' in Israel... presumably a fairly secure location with armed guards etc... The man on the right, waving a pistol around, is easy enough to accept, albeit culturally sickening ~ anyone can smuggle guns into a refugee camp (or so it would seem), but what I want to know is HOW did the man on the left get hold of a set of bagpipes??!!
And why...
Why older people hate Gen Y
By Sarah Wilson. March 08, 2008
IN a previous life working in women's magazines, we had this term for that thing you do where you compete to post the most random YouTube feed on your Facebook Superwall or group email - thus gaining flimsy pop cultural credibility.
We called it "superwall bragging".
This week I superwall-bragged a video called "I hate Young People" to everyone I know who is safely over the age of 30.
The gist is this: Old people frothing about how young people don't work hard enough, have entitlement issues, are too goddamn optimistic and wear their pants too low.
The responses that came back confirmed what I've been thinking lately - it really has become quite the thing to hate young people.
It's become a sport, a cause du jour for notoriously whiney Generation Xers (those born between 1961 and 1981) and conservative Baby Boomers at office water coolers around the country.
In an ideal world I'd leave Corey Worthington out of anything I ever write as it just adds fuel to his blazing fame.
But he has, of course, become a pinata boy for the movement against young people, specifically Generation Y (born after 1982). And his commitment-lite, attitude-heavy antics gave us the ammunition we needed to launch our tirade.
The real battleground for this all-out intergenerational spat, however, is the workplace.
Multiple research findings reveal young people are regarded as having a shocking work ethic.
They want the top job, but expect to work fewer hours and earn more money for it. Oh, and they'd like every second Friday off.
Retention rates are the real bugbear.
Gen Y change jobs every two years and will have 29 jobs across their career.
Gen X will have eight.
A study in the US last month found 70 per cent of hiring managers feel they have to convince young people to take the job.
Imagine!
The anecdotal evidence is even more compelling. I once had a work experience student pin me against the photocopier and drill me about how long it would take for her to have my job if she were to choose us as her employer.
The same girl announced three days into her stint, she "didn't complete six years of high school to do photocopying" as she strutted out to take an extended networking lunch break. True story.
Gen Y's defence is, well, why not. It's a buyers' market.
To pour acid on the seeping wound, a new industry has evolved geared at coaching oldies in the tip-toeing art of accommodating young people's needs in the office.
Motivational types share how to keep them happy - and believing they'll be running the show in 18 months. (Google "Generation Y" and "workplace". You'll see what I mean.)
After all, they're our future. And their chirpy, "no-failure" approach (they're a generation who haven't experienced a recession and are described as the most positive generation to have ever walked) is great for team projects. And inventing social networking sites.
Then there are the motivational books. Hundreds are published each month; mostly written by Gen-Yers living at home with Mum and Dad.
My favourite is the recent bestseller The 4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, a former breakdancer and tango champion who has never worked in the IT industry.
He now makes a squillion on the motivational circuit telling ageing geeks in Silicon Valley they've got it all wrong.
Postscript: Ferriss, now 30, spends his free time studying yabusame (horseback archery) in Japan. Such a brilliant clash of cultural wrongness!
And did you read this week that a report has slammed New Zealand Rugby for failing to understand a generation of "passive", "uncommitted" and needy youth, blaming the body for a drop in players.
So the feeling out there, if I'm reading it correctly, is young people get to behave like precocious brats, and get rewarded for it, while the rest of us do the hard yards.
It's kind of like the prodigal son's brother (did he have a name?) who slogged it out on the farm while his younger brother ran amok. And who got the royal treatment from Dad? Well, we all know how that one ended.
Hating young people is nothing new. Once a generation hits the age where they move to the suburbs to have kids and tuck their T-shirts into jeans, they tend to have a problem with anyone younger than them.
It's called the generation gap.
What's new is that the generation gap is eroding. Old people now want to be like young people.
They're not moving on. Thirty somethings aren't having kids nor playing by the usual rules, and 40-year-old mums are shopping at Supre and drinking UDLs at music festivals, while their husbands dress like Corey Worthington (damn, I've done it again!) in fluorescent sunglasses and ironically sloganed hoodies.
They're fake young people.
You get the impression they find the breezy, life-in-balance and esteem-laden ways of Gen Y far more fun than the earnest Reality Bites-esque melancholia they inherited from their own youth.
Problem is, they're still seething that in their day they had to look everything up in the World Book Encyclopaedia, and actually use a bibliography.
And had three masters degrees but still couldn't get a job at McDonald's when they left university.
This is why we hate young people. They're so much better at being young people.
Edit: And in other news, these photos from the Sydney Morning Herald were taken in the aftermath of the shooting spree in an Israeli religious college.
The Palestinians pictured celebrating the news are in a 'refugee camp' in Israel... presumably a fairly secure location with armed guards etc... The man on the right, waving a pistol around, is easy enough to accept, albeit culturally sickening ~ anyone can smuggle guns into a refugee camp (or so it would seem), but what I want to know is HOW did the man on the left get hold of a set of bagpipes??!!
And why...
