by Liz Galvao
Young people don’t know anything, but think they know everything. I believe that I know at least this much.
One thing I admit to not knowing is when exactly I will accept being lumped into a pre-labeled generation. My parents proudly identify themselves as Baby Boomers, yet I find it nothing but irritating to read descriptions of “Millennials.” The name itself scarcely makes sense, as most of us were born in the 1980s. It’s not that these descriptions don’t apply to me at all; I’m Internet-savvy, I listen to alternative music, and I spent a lot of energy getting into college. Yet these articles that break down my supposed personality and entitlement in the workforce make me feel like I’m part of a scientific experiment.
I have also generally not had a positive reaction to any sentence that begins with, “Your generation.” To be fair, most of these come from my father, who simultaneously blames my generation for the rise of reality television and is all too happy to remind me that we will have to deal with the effects of global warming, as he “will be dead by then.”
I resent being lumped into the Milennials just as I resent blanket statements about women or people from New Jersey. And in that respect I am sure I’m being truly young and truly dumb, to actually believe myself to be an individual and not a birth date with predetermined actions based on race, gender, and class. After all, what did I learn at my fancy liberal arts college if not that I’m white and privileged and should shut the fuck up about my problems?
You know, maybe they were right about us after all. Here I’ve been complaining about not having a job, companies expecting college graduates to intern full-time for nothing but a recommendation, how my friends with jobs are just doing work that means nothing to them to make a few bucks, etc. What is that but a sense of entitlement? Why should any of us deserve to do meaningful work or work that we enjoy right after a four-year vacation on our parents’ dime? We should be grateful for any opportunity to earn an honest living. Besides, it’s our fault that reality tv is so popular.
One Comment
this is a really interesting drome.
I think it’s particularly insulting for “our generation” to be chastised for being too reliant on technology, or addicted to TV and video games, and lazy when the only reason for these tendencies is the way the boomers set up the consumer culture that we were born into. There’s such a disconnect for me between the people that came of age during the radical 60s, and the people that put Reagan into power, spawned cable television and built an industry out of computers. How can they complain about how different we are when they constructed all of this for us to get hooked on?!
But I like that you turn it around at the end of your piece. It’s ultimately up to us what we do, what we choose to spend our time and well-earned (or not at all earned) money, and it’s certainly true that reality TV is popular because of US.
It’s funny, my older brother was saying to me today that he thought it was funny that struggling corporations like Radio Shack (who just recently tried to make everybody call it ‘The Shack’ cause it sounds hipper or something) give a shit about the young demographic because a) there aren’t too many of us compared to other markets and b) we don’t have any fucking money to spend at ‘The Shack’. Yet now that I think about it, it pays to cater to us young’uns, because our boomer elders will fork out the dough for all those digital thingies that we covet so hard.
I think ultimately we’re a product of the toxic environment our parent’s generation set up for us, but now that we’ve come of age, it’s our turn to influence the shape of things to come. Unfortunately, these habits our pretty deeply-ingrained and it’ll be hard to kick these patterns. I think that using this potentially distracting medium (internet) for the purpose of questioning that very medium (a la what’s on your thing) is a good first step for us to tackle these issues. we can work within this fucked up system. WE CAN OVERCOME