Read this HuffPo blog first, if you haven't seen it. I read it yesterday making the rounds on facebook. At first I didn't know what to make of it, other than the fact I didn't care for the word-play on "gypsy" (Generation Y Protagonist and Special Yuppies), which seems to disparage an entire ethnic group as self-centered and shiftless. Anyway, I think I figured out what it is I found troubling:
It's bullshit.
The author seems to ignore critical changes in the socio-economic, political, commercial and inter-personal fabric of American life over the course of recent history. It's not the idea that some people think they are "special" that's at issue, it's the explanation for why they think they are special, the degree to which they think they are special, and the suggestion that it's especially errant that I find problematic.
I agree with the basic premise that their parents are to blame, but it goes much deeper, including their grandparents as well as so many other changes and innovations that have occurred over the last century. However, I think that the issue is not that Gen Y or others errantly believe they are special, but that the prior generations did not think they themselves were special enough.
Follow me across the fold for a rebuttal to an attempt to denigrate an entire generation. (For the record, I'd be considered Generation X, not Generation Y, so I'm not taking this personally.)
Lucy's parents were born in the '50s -- they're Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not GYPSYs.
The "Greatest Generation" was conscripted into military service. So was much of the BabyBoomer Generation. This doesn't mean their sacrifice was any less. What it means is that everyone was at risk of going to war (unless you were a senator's son, but then you were demonstrably "special", if only by circumstance). This made war and peace a collectivist exercise. It caused people to band together, or at least that's the concept. However, the current paradigm of a "volunteer Army" reduces this conceptualization of civic responsibility. It seems to make some people think that "serving the country isn't special, it's what you do if you're not special enough to get a real career."
Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers.
...
They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.
They "Greatest Generation" also, during their years of leadership, struggled to reduce racial and gender discrimination, strengthen labor rights, create social safety nets, etc. (Yeah, some of them struggled to keep racism alive too, but it was that generation's fight.) They also innovated and saw large advances in technology, which would be used by their children, the BabyBoomer Generation, to exceed expectations due to both efficiency increases and, later, the ability to extract wealth from other countries. Who'dathunk it would come back to bite their children in the ass? (Lots of people, actually.)
After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers. As the '70s, '80s, and '90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy's parents did even better than they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.
Yes, by over-leveraging the future of their children's financial security through financial sector "reforms" and reducing their children's physical security through aggressive foreign policies.
With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy's parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren't alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.
Their children would have to be "whatever they wanted to be" because there was no longer a middle-class working paradigm to fall back on. Unions had been either eliminated or so retrenched that they became viewed with suspicions of selfishness to non-union workers. Regulatory changes that strove to reduce discrimination on the basis of gender, strove to reduce sexual harassment, required better working conditions, required fair labor practices all created a sense of entitlement. Thing is, those are things to which workers should be and feel entitled.
If not being ass-raped by a boss and forced to keep silent or lose a job and be blacklisted from other employers around town means thinking oneself is a special flower, then by all means be that special flower. If someone tells you to work off the clock through lunch, perhaps stating that "coffee is for closers," tell them that "a boot up the ass is for irascible bosses."
The author points out that "'a secure career' has gone out of style". Perhaps the search for one has simply become futile. There are no secure careers, not on a scale that can be applied to an entire generation. Blame the loss of manufacturing. Blame the loss of long-lived companies that promise pensions or some modicum of stability. Blame off-shoring and out-sourcing and importing employees on work visas. Blame automation. Blame competition from other countries. There are a lot of possible reasons to go around.
When BabyBoomers ask why the younger generations aren't being as successful, tell them it's because they refuse to retire or die off and let someone else take their place. Maybe it's the BabyBoomers who think they are special and that they need to be in control.
GYPSYs Are Delusional
"Sure," Lucy has been taught, "everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd." So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better --
There may be some validity to this, but we all know who told them they were special. The child worship of their parents has been maligned for decades,
at least by George Carlin. The big problem here may be insurance liability issues that has made an overabundance of caution a fact of life for children of BabyBoomers. Blame lawyers. Or blame the costs of healthcare and education incurred by parents in a modern society to create a propensity for smaller families with a subsequent rise in time and money invested per child inducing a concomitant rise in parental focus.
Some people want to blame collectivism and denigration of individual success. However, it's just as easy to blame capitalism. The Trophy-Industrial Complex has a tight grip on school administrations. More seriously, the emphasis on the concept of competition and even the ridiculous notion of "hyper-competitive" has led to an industry to supply such demand. Buying a student's way onto a "who's who" list, or requiring "teach to the test" curricula reinforces a superficiality of knowledge and performance instead of true understanding and development of character.
If certain people really believed that competition was everything, they would give away their children's inheritance and let them sink or swim on their own abilities. If they really stand on principle, they should be for the so-called "Death Tax".
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition of special:
Actually, they think they are
unique. The distinction is that while not everyone can be special, everyone can be unique. Fucking semantics. I suspect the author simply succumbed to selection bias in his choice of words. 'Cause who would read a blog about "GYPUY" except people whose initial idea is, "yeah, I do feel gypped by the socio-economic paradigm our parents established to steal out future from us."
Lest we forget, there was that whole dot-com bubble and promotion of the capitalist dream of making it big on Wall Street and flipping homes because "home values never decrease". There was that whole Y2K, 2012 disaster, and Christian Millennial eschatology promoting the end times because "we live in special times". There was the evolution of 24/7 hyper-partisanism via cable news and the internet that makes everyone think that the present epoch is the key to the survival of humanity, our culture, our country, our religion and that any deviation from perfect ideology will result in devastation on a scale never before witnessed in human history (ignore the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, etc). Yeah, conservatives say they hate the "self-esteem movement" and then try to tell you that only you and a ten dollar donation stand between prosperity and the end of the world. (Not that they're the only ones saying that.)
Actually, I think they're against the self-esteem movement because it makes people not want to kowtow like good little cannon-fodder.
"They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."
Sure, there are times where you should tell someone to "Suck it up, Buttercup," but a certain amount of human dignity is to be expected and demanded. There are fair labor laws for a reason. But this isn't a new phenomenon. For years, the Greatest Generation and the BabyBoomers worked in a paradigm where doing what you were told and being a hard worker was good enough to get you up the ranks, or at least get you the American Dream of a family, home, some leisure time and stability. The idea that one can only succeed (not to be confused with extraordinary achievement) by giving a mathematically impossible 110% is actually a recent idea. So, you can't really accuse them of being different if they have the same expectations as their parents, unless you like to move goalposts. Of course, the truth is that flat wages in a time of inflation make over-working necessary if one wishes to obtain the same amount of wealth, and that over-education and over-qualification appears to be necessary in order to compete, if only on paper.
Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.
Meh. Cable news, cell phones and even regular phones and newspapers make this not really that new of a phenomenon. In the past, you could perceive one's apparent status by the clothes they wore, the car they drove, the gossip your parents spread when they ask why aren't you like so-and-so who's doing this-and-that.
The problem, I think is not the projection of a gap between one's personal experience and one's perception of others' experience. It's the gap between one's personal and plausible experience and the experience of people at the very top. There is a very large and very real change in that metric over the last couple decades. The rich have become richer, the middle-class has become poorer, and the poor even poorer still. Aspiring to be as successful as one'e boss when one's boss makes 10% seems more attainable than when your boss makes 1000% more than you do.
The only difference about Facebook is that it's more immediate. Their falls from grace are also just as immediate. And really, who is that careful about Facebook image crafting. Drunken party pics and constant complaining and the fact that they are posting about their life instead of living it all seem to belie that proposed view of reality. Savvy internet users are savvy. This is just a case of oldsters trying to blame youngsters for being less sophisticated because they themselves can see the BS but can't see through it.
...while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation.
LMFAO Has this guy ever actually been on Facebook? Then again, I'm 40 now and despite being on Facebook since 2006 when I was back in college, maybe I'm an outlier and either have lots of shitty friends, have honest friends, or I'm more perceptive than the majority of people. (What me special? Copernicus, I can tell you what you can do with your Principle.)
So, here we get to the conclusatory suggestions to help "Lucy" deal with reality:
1) Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out -- just dive in somewhere.
In other words, keep trying to change the world, baby, just stop thinking you can. Don't focus on being special, surround yourself with ambiguity instead.
2) Stop thinking that you're special. The fact is, right now, you're not special. You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.
Don't judge yourself for who you are, but by what you can do for others. Did you know that there are job creators who will go to sleep tonight without a blowjob?
3) Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll never have any reason to envy others.
Just be you... (except for that part about being you). Become cynical. Or, learn to lie and make people think you're either successful or that you enjoy what you're doing and what the man is doing to you. Maybe you'll even start to believe you are successful after all.
And never forget, there's always a job in porn.