In Defense of Me, Me, Me

[Addison]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-13/in-defense-of-me-me-me.html

May has not been the best time to be a young American.

First, David Leonhardt of the New York Times introduced us to "the idle young American," explaining: “Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.”

Perhaps more of us should attend college? Not so fast: Recent college graduates seem to be having a hard time getting and keeping jobs because they’re badly behaved. Mark Bauerlein published an op-ed at Bloomberg View about graduates’ lacking professionalism, which cites various complaints by people who work in human resources. During job interviews, “applicants check their phones for texts and calls, dress inappropriately and overrate their talents.”

Still, untucked shirts seem to be the least of 20-somethings’ problems. Bauerlein is among those quoted in the most recent Time cover-story, a millennial magnum opus titled, “The Me Me Me Generation.” Writer Joel Stein opens with the admission: “I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow.”

Stein goes on to provide a more nuanced and ultimately redeeming portrait of millennials, roughly defined as those born between 1980 and 2000. Despite being a lazy 22-year-old, I read the piece several times (unlike others who wasted their day refashioning the cover). Then again, maybe I read it because I’m so self-absorbed that I jump at the opportunity to read about me (me, me).
If you take away our technologically advanced props (but don’t you dare), it's unclear if our unappealing character traits are unique to our generation; they may simply result from being young. Maybe we don't actually get more pleasure from that boy “liking” our Instagram photo than our mothers did from a clandestine note in class. Our self-congratulation is just more publically available -- the better to quantify and cobble into studies.

Elspeth Reeve at the Atlantic Wire provides a nice recap of a century's worth of splashy conclusions about young people. (I'm not a huge fan of her suggestion that magazine writers base their impressions of the spoiled, arrogant young from the rich brats who work as their interns: I was once an editorial intern at Time.)

More interesting was Reeve’s counter to Stein’s data: “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health. 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982." Reeve points to another paper that refutes this claim and concludes that, "Basically, it's not that people born after 1980 are narcissists, it's that young people are narcissists, and they get over themselves as they get older. It's like doing a study of toddlers and declaring those born since 2010 are Generation Sociopath" because they will "Throw Full Bowls of Cereal Without Even Thinking of the Consequences."

. . .

[MichiganVote]

1. And businesses are professional?

They don't return calls, they don't send out the reject letters anymore leaving applicants to grope in the dark,

you're too short, too tall, too many degrees, not enuf' degrees, too young, too old, too bald, too fat, too sick, too unemployed, too white, too black, talk too much, talk too little, too excited, not excited enuf', want too much money, cost too much in health care, walk funny, too pretty, you're female, you're male, you belonged to a union, you don't go to church, your too experienced, not experienced enuf', your school is wrong, your car sucks, you're married, you're gay, you quit your last position, you were fired from your last position, you write poorly, your spelling stinks, you have a foreign name, you lived abroad, you're...American

What the fuck is the matter with America and jobs??? I'll tell you what the fucking problem is, the problem is that US businesses are now a pansy assed, anti risk taking, bullshit bunch of babies, who want to pick people apart like daisies for THEIR perceived weaknesses WHEN US business IS the problem.

Its not the American fucking worker, Its not the young American fucking worker. Its the fucking business in the US who are STUCK on STUPID with shit for brains Human Resource Department employees who probably graduated in the bum fuck bottom of their local community college studying volleyball for dimwits.

American business: Get The Fucking Stick Out Of Your ASS.

Thanks, I feel better.

[SheilaT]

2. There has simply never been a time when

the older generation didn't think the rising youth were a worthless lot.

I'm a baby boomer, 64 years old, and I can recall very clearly when I was first getting into the workforce that the general opinion of our elders were that we were lazy, incompetent, ignorant, and unlikely to ever make anything of our collective selves.

And you can go back and back and back, and read similar opinions in every era we have records for.

In general, the only thing wrong with young people is that they are young and inexperienced. They age, get experience, and for the most part do just fine.

[Addison]

3. You got it Sheila

And I love your signature line . . . wish I had heard that one when I was Algebra class. You know, back when I was a lazy, narcissistic teenager

[SheilaT]

4. Yeah,

I wish I'd heard it also back then, when I was likewise a lazy, narcissistic teen.

I always think of my h.s. algebra teacher when I look at it.