“They’re narcissistic. They’re lazy. They’re coddled. They’re even a bit delusional.”
That’s what Time Magazine thinks of our generation, the one that’s currently fighting to make a difference in a world that’s allowing us little chance.
It’s not just Time Magazine who thinks so. Many baby boomers make similar narrow-minded accusations.
And what is their hard-hitting evidence?
The number of us attending college is dropping. The number of us wanting to work from home is increasing. We’ve put ourselves in the middle of social media that centers the world around ourselves. And we feel entitled to benefits.
“I don’t think they can say much about us because we have different forces working against us,” junior Heather Nelson said. “We don’t do things the same way because the world is a completely different place … things have changed, and the way we respond to things has changed as well.”
Which is more than true — the world is a completely different place. What used to insure a secure future no longer does.
The entire system has been slowly crumbling the past few years, and for this reason the last generation’s expectations of us don’t fit. They aren’t fair to begin with.
A college education used to be something that quickly paid back for its own expenses. Now, it normally takes over a year for a college grad to find any sort of paying job, whether it be in their major or working for a fast-food restaurant. In fact, a third of college graduates end up moving back into their parents’ homes because their education no longer assures them any type of future.
And those who can get a job are normally faced with extremely low wages, making student loans and their interest rates more than just temporarily crippling.
So, we’re lazy because not all of us are jumping at the chance to enroll in a university?
If that view isn’t skewed enough, their generation is also the one making it harder for us to land jobs.
For example, USA Today took a survey and found “more than 70 percent of older employees are dismissive of younger workers’ abilities.”
This includes those of us who have worked our way through college and the debt it can bring.
Perhaps the biggest misconception concerning our generation is that we simply want too much. We only have higher expectations for ourselves because of what our parents were able to do and what we’ve been told we are able to do.
According to USA Today, “(Our generation) has been pampered, nurtured and programmed with a slew of activities since (we) were toddlers, meaning (we) are both high-performance and high-maintenance.”
It seems to me that the generation which raised us overlooks the “high-performance” part of that equation, seen in our generation’s ability to use technology, work around the current-day obstacles that we’ve grown up fighting, and the fact that we’ve become financially savvy in a time of economic distress.
“I think that (Millenials are) very innovative, because from the very beginning, they’ve had the opportunity to create through opportunities and technology that the baby boomers didn’t have,” says Steven Moran, director of Student Leadership and Engagement.
“If they’re going to look at our generation, they can be concerned,” Nelson said. “Not in a way that says we suck, but in a way that says, ‘How can we help raise them up?’”
After all, we are very different, but we’re currently sharing the same world. Rather than blindly slamming us, maybe it’s time the baby boomers and the media start respecting both our hardships and our abilities. [polldaddy poll=7412778]
