I’ve coined a new term for the gallows humor that my generation indulges in because we have an overheating planet, a dim political future, a crushing economy, and a real avocado toast problem:
Millennihilism
It appeals to a nietzche audience.
I AM SO MAD I DIDN’T THINK TO ADD THIS MYSELF
Tag: millenials
Personally, I’m still trying to figure out how $12/hr is considered “competitive pay”???? ????
i couldn’t live on minimum wage in 1992, i don’t know why people think you should be able to do it now, with everything so much more expensive.
gen x spent our 20′s crammed up 6 people to a 2-bedroom apartment, living on ramen and clothes shopping at the army surplus store, because minimum wage wasn’t a living wage in the 90′s. since then, rent has doubled, but minimum wage has gone up by a single dollar. so let me reiterate:
they’re not buying anything because you’re not paying them anything, you egregious slime molds.
Just in case you forgot the sort of capitalist hell hole we’re living in rn, here’s your friendly daily reminder. ☺
– Mod A
The thing is, of course, that these corporate fuckheads have attempted to cut costs by foisting training off on education, because they don’t have to pay for education. We have the same problem in the UK: corporations are complaining about a lack of skilled labour, but studies have shown that what’s actually happening is that they’re refusing to hire anyone who hasn’t already got experience in the role. Employers refuse to train people because they consider that the job of schools and universities; schools and universities don’t train people because it is literally impossible.
Of course, the buck gets shifted to young unemployed people – if they didn’t go to university, then it’s their fault that they’re not employable because they didn’t go to university; if they did go to university, then it’s their fault because they chose a bad programme, or didn’t do enough internships, or just aren’t trying hard enough to get a job. If a graduate gets a job delivering pizzas to tide them over, it’s their fault for wasting their skills and creating an effective employment gap. If they hold out for a career position, it’s their fault for being too picky.
The primary solution for corps is to employ immigrants from countries where job training is accessible. This feeds back into anti-immigrant sentiment and is now leading to governments attempting to exclude immigrants. Historically these efforts have included caveats to allow corporations to continue to hire “skilled” workers internationally, but these are now starting to be rolled back.
Here’s to corporations suffocating under the weight of their own selfishness.
Yup. The primary generational difference between “Millennials” and previous gens work-wise is that employers were willing to pay for training then, and they aren’t now. They’ve cut training programs to increase quarterly returns and now expect workers to have all the skills and knowledge they require at hiring, and complain about them when they don’t. In effect, they want an education system that teaches every child how to do every potential job so that they don’t have to pay for on-the-job training, which is ridiculous. Obviously not all are like this, HEB in Texas has a great employee education program for instance, but enough are that it’s a serious problem.
Note to Millennials from GenX:
So you know those news stories about how Millennials don’t buy enough breakfast cereal or paperback books or homes or whatever the hell that Boomers are complaining that “kids these days” don’t spend money on? And y’all are like “LOL, no cash my pal”?
I think there’s something more insidious going on. You see, they thought they had you. Forget the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, they had Disney Channel and Nickelodeon feeding you ads all day long. Your generation got advertising in your schools. Your parents took you to prosperity doctrine spewing MegaChurches (it’s Mega so it’s gotta impress the kids, right?).
They thought you were going to be their generation of super-consumers.
You are generations distant from the great depression, and the 1979 energy crisis. Boomers want to pretend that the 2008 housing bubble wouldn’t affect the little kids. And plus, we had grown past the era of Yankee thrift and hippie DIY frugality. Right? And there was no mopey Kurt Cobain glamorizing thrift-store flannel shirts. You guys were going to out-consume the Boomer generation. They were sure of it.
Those think pieces? They’re Boomer disappointment that you have found value in something other than your place as a mindless consumer.
And yeah, I’m not going to pretend that y’all have more cash than you do. It was fucking idiotic to think they were going to raise a consumer generation without having to pay them the money they would need to buy even life’s necessities. And I could write a book about how my generation was complicit in destroying the old values around work and loyalty that left your generation screwed. Really, I’m genuinely sorry for the mistakes we made.
But you guys have given a big middle finger to the generation who thought that they could manipulate you from birth into manipulable-money-spending-machines. And I’m way fucking proud of you for that.
So I generally think generation-hate is ALSO a tool, but… I do think there is something to this.
children aren’t dumb. we knew that trophies meant nothing when everyone in the fucking class got one
Also who was giving out those fucking trophies? SPOILER ALERT IT WASN’T US. IT WAS YOU.
Who the fuck got trophies?? I got a piece of paper saying Participation on it with a cheap-ass shiny sticker in the corner!
Sometimes they were ribbons.
Sometimes they were just the gnawing awareness that you could never trust any praise an adult gave you.
^^^^
When I was in 7th grade, the administration at my middle school decided to make a bunch of changes to pep rallies, including changing the spirit award to the grade that showed the most school spirit to three spirit awards SO THAT EACH GRADE COULD HAVE ONE.
We decided in about 2.5 seconds that this was fucking stupid and that it was pointless to have a school-wide spirit contest IF NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY ABLE TO WIN. Our entire grade organized ourselves and boycotted the pep rally in protest. We still went to the pep rally, but the entire 7th grade sat quietly in the bleachers and refused to cheer or otherwise participate.
AND IT INFURIATED THE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION. INFURIATED THEM.
They ended up giving one spirit award to the 8th grade and two spirit awards to the 6th grade. At which point, our entire grade stood up and cheered, and the principal screamed into her microphone that we needed to sit down and stop cheering.
Because we hadn’t broken any school rules, the administration realized they couldn’t punish us, and they changed back to one spirit award and got rid of the other unpopular pep rally changes. But they never forgave us. The principal saved up all of her anger for a year and a half and then called a special “promotion ceremony rehearsal” for our grade right before we graduated from middle school specifically so that she could spend an hour yelling at us about how THIS WAS NOT FOR US, THIS WAS FOR OUR PARENTS AND OUR TEACHERS AND THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE SCHOOL, AND IF WE FUCKED THE CEREMONY UP IN ANY WAY, SO HELP HER, SHE WOULD MAKE OUR LIVES A LIVING HELL.
So, yeah, tell me again about how my generation expects trophies for participating. I dare you.
Someone somewhere has a great post about how all Millennials learned from this “everybody gets a trophy” culture foisted on us was to distrust conventional feedback methods (if everybody gets one, the system must be wrong and someone who tells me I’m good at something is probably lying). So the fact that we’re a generation filled with insecure overachievers with a well-documented lack of interest in conventional life markers is partly due to all those stupid participation trophies.
Ruined a perfectly good kid that’s what you did. Look at it. It’s got anxiety
i think adults were trying to fix that thing my generation had where if you weren’t good at something that was your identity henceforth. you were the girl who ran away from the ball, the boy who couldn’t spell wisconsin. what they failed to realize was that ‘honoring’ literally everyone didn’t keep kids from being singled out and mocked for their mistakes and failures, it just added a burden of having to pretend to appreciate these insulting empty gestures as well.
terrible idea all round imo.
when millennials were first heading into high school and college there was a huge trend in news stories about how stressed out our kids are, how their backs are getting messed up from carrying so many books, how they’re sleeping less and doing more school work, and how we should do more to help our kids have the childhoods we had because our kids are falling apart from stress and being forced to be more productive than kids should be. but then once millennials started hitting the workforce all the news was about how millennials are lazy and narcissistic and entitled lmao you were real concerned about us until you found out a 23 year old is more qualified to do your job than you
That’s because at some point in the middle we stopped being “their children” and became a bloc of terrifying outsiders with foreign values and little regard for what had been their established cultural norms.
I’d forgotten this but you’re right. I think it started earlier though, it started when we started out performing them on exams. Then suddenly all our schoolwork was easy and we were being rewarded for just showing up.
The opening to “A Tale Of Two Cities” but it’s about thinkpieces on Millennials.
We were The Greatest Generation, we were The Lost Generation; we were a generation of misers and a generation of wastrels, we worked ourselves to death and we did not work at all, we were too delicate and too rough and too reliant on others and too independent and entrepreneurial; we needed to buy more essentials and fewer luxuries unless it was just the other way around; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…
In short, this generation was so far like every other, before it and after it, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on us being received, one way or the other, as the final herald of the downfall of all civilization.
just moving along like everyone else 