Is Gen Y an arrogant and selfish generation who doesn’t understand or respect older generations?
Or are Baby Boomers jealous and resentful that they weren’t given the same opportunities as Gen Y?
Or is it just a matter of perspective?
Today, my 5:40 am walk to yoga class and chit-chat with Mom on the phone got a little heated. As I attempted to provide motivating advice, in my typical candid, assertive yet encouraging tone, Mom interpreted it as anything but inspiring. What resulted is the declamatory email exchange below (which we’re laughing about now).
Dear all 20 something, passion seeking, dream following, social media savvy young professionals!!
It has come to my attention that you think that your world has just evolved out of thin air. That you have all the answers and it mysteriously fell right into your lap!!
I must speak for the 40/50 somethings that have been there done that..worked our fingers to the bone to give you the ability to have the passion seeking, dream following attitude. As far as the rule of life goes or how I interrupted it, we give to the next generation and/or our children, a better life and better opportunities then we had ourselves. It is like the food chain and hopefully if the next generation is not so full of themselves they will be able to offer that to their offspring. We open our hearts and our mind to understand what it is you are passionately pursuing, please open your hearts and mind and understand that we have already been there and done that! Maybe in a different way but… done! We had a different opportunity presented to us in our 20 something stage of life. And that was…you are 18 now…there is the world…go get it! Period! And I think I speak for most of us!
So when you are talking to your ELDERS and wondering why they are complaining about the “economy” and having to “reinvent the wheel” of business — and in your mind you wonder why they are not actively pursuing their dreams — remember, we have pursued our dreams and you are our dreams!! Without us there is no you! So cut us slack please and ask yourselves, in 20, 30 years would you really want to be sitting in that back office interning for little or no money on your way to following your passion?! I think not! It is a rough time for my generation and although we are all thrilled with the intuition of your generation, don’t forget we helped you get there!!! Just saying!
We love and stand behind you 100%! Just stand next to us once in awhile and understand us as much as we understand you!
xoxo
Dear all well-established, hard(not smart)working, stubborn and successful 45 – 60 year old Baby Boomers,
Why do you become offended and outraged when we, Gen Y, confidently assert our opinion or interpretation of the world around us? It’s what you – our overly loving and pampering parents who did not want to make the same mistakes of the previous generation – encouraged us to learn and do.
Thank you for working your fingers to the bone to give us the ability to be passionate and pursue our dreams. And thank you for raising us with technology that allowed us to learn and grow at a pace much faster than any previous generation. We’re fortunate! Our generation isn’t pressured to get married at a young age, most everyone gets an amazing education and we travel from a young age because that’s the way you raised us. (Thank you!)
As a result, life is about us and making ourselves happy, making our personal dreams come true. Many Gen Yers aspire to change the world in a positive way – is that being full of ourselves? Just because most of us are actively pursuing our dreams, aren’t raising children and have learned to work SMART not hard, that doesn’t make us full of our ourselves. It makes us resourceful and ambitious. And frankly, when you accuse us otherwise, it comes off irrational, resentful, defensive and jealous.
So we think our life evolved out of thin air or that we have all the answers? Not so much. We recognize and understand your generation more than you think because we studied it in school. Instead, we think life is in our own hands and we’re actively pursuing that life we want to lead. We’re achievement-oriented, we have high expectations, we constantly seek out new challenges and we’re not afraid to question authority. Life to us is about meaning and creating value. Life to us is about enjoying the moment.
It’s not that we don’t think you’re not actively pursuing your dreams, it’s that we think you’ve lost your mojo a bit due to circumstances beyond your control. Living in a state of fear is no way to live at all. There’s always a solution in our minds and if you’re not happy, we think you should figure out the problem and solve it. Perhaps that’s harsh and seemingly impossible, but to us, there is no impossible. That’s just our mantra.
xoxo,
Gen Y
Final comment from Mom: Point taken! I guess we did our job well!
Tags: baby boomers, gen Y, generations, happiness, life, passions
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Wow – That is a serious conversation with mom! I think both groups have valid points. The boomers have been pushing us to grow up to be whatever we want to be and society and media have pushed us even further (think Super Sweet 16, anything Paris Hilton and any 16 year old rapper or B-Baller driving a Bentley). For the youngins like us we do demand more, because we want more out of like than a cubicle to call home for 40 or so years. We can (again generalizing, not everyone) tackle more due to innovation in technology but Boomers need to trust us first b/c they have dealt with those circumstances out of their control (re: government) and have also probably been burnt by a Gen-Y who overpromised and underdelivered (I get these all the time with Rock For Hunger volunteers – here one day promising the world and no-showing to the next 5 meetings).
So there is a balance of giving us opportunities and building trust that needs to happen to feed the ego of the select group of Gen-Y who want to take over the world.
P.S. You owe your mom a drink for that conversation.
I agree with Greg – you owe your mom a drink for that. Or a coffee or whatever. Haha this cracked me up… go Mom
I don’t know if I’ve personally spent too much time dwelling on the question of whether young workers are arrogant; I’m just trying to put my head down and get it done. If in a few years I’ve learned enough that I can put myself in a position to be successful, that would be ideal.
Good points on both sides – however, as a ‘Baby Boomer’, I do have to wonder why Gen Y considers hard work something to be avoided – yes, I recognize the need to work smarter – I advocate doing that whenever possible, and look for ways to do that myself.
I think what your Mom was trying to say in her message was that sometimes there is no option other than to work through difficult situations – working HARD is not a crime, and I think a balance of working hard/smart is needed – sometimes Gen Y thinks everything should be easy, and that can come off as arrogance.
As a ‘40 something’ GenX’er, please tell your Mom to leave my younger set OUT OF her little diatribe.
The fact of the matter is your parents left you with a crippling debt, and YOU WILL have to re-invent the wheel. Because they broke it.
The other thing is that you SHOULD be your own person. Cut the d@mned apron strings already.
If you don’t NOTHING will progress.
Don’t believe me? Then go here;
http://mindtaker.blogspot.com/2009/09/bruce-sterling-closing-talk-reboot-11.html
.. and look long and hard at the next 10 years after globalization, outsourcing, and other policies put in place by your parents and their generation.
Greg – great points! I think Gen Y’s idealistic and ambitious nature as well as their inexperience in dealing with conflict can result in overpromising and underdelievering. It’s not that they DON’T want to follow through with their promise but they take on so much that they end up not being able to deliver to some things. As a result, they (also generalizing) feel bad about the situation and rather than proactively addressing and managing their lack of follow-through, they do nothing and lose trust. I think there’s an opportunity to better help Gen Y and generations to follow to manage priorities while maintaining trus and learn to say no in an ever-increasing world of choices.
Greg & Royce – dinner & vodka for momma when she comes to play in SF.
Guy – Thanks for the comment! I do not think hard work is something to be avoided at all. I work hard every day but with a mass of resources at my fingertips, I’m able to do more in a more efficient manner. Some weeks I work 100 hours, some weeks I work 50… it’s all about finding better ways to do what I love. I also don’t really consider it “work” because what I do is enjoyable to me. Also – I didn’t mean to say that things that are difficult should be avoided. Difficulties in life help you grow as a person (see my post On Happiness). However, when I follow my intuition and passions, everything is easy because I love and enjoy what I’m doing the entire time. Things also tend to fall into place well for me this way.
Amber, thanks for posting this. Love the transparency
I think every generation has “pursued their dreams.” The unique ability of our generation to spread our ideas quickly and share our dreams with the world using the internet is what sets us apart from all previous generations. More people are choosing to “chase the dreams” because Gary Vaynerchuk is able to reach a mass audience with Viddler.
Every generation has gone through similar feelings and apprehensions. Every older generation feels some resentment toward the younger generation. This will always happen and I’m sure we’ll think that the generation after us feels entitled.
I need to have some fun conversations like this with my mom! hahahah
- Jun Loayza
Well I’m a Gen-Y’er and I didn’t avoid hard-work. I’ve been working since I was 16 starting at mundane jobs that required no creativity. Fortunately, I’m now able to use my brain. I think when older people say “hard-work”; they imply work that requires you to sweat that leads you into something that you are passionate about. As a young person that sits in an office at a downtown high-rise doing what I like, I can’t really say this is harder than my part-time “hard-work” jobs in college. Older people, like my parents had to do the hard-work jobs, not just for a college part-time gig, but as a lifework. I can work 120 hours of my day job and still have physical energy to exercise, but if my parents worked 100 hours in their “hard-work” jobs, they’d totally be drained. The older peeps do have a point, especially when I see that some of my co-workers never even had jobs during college let alone high school. They went from college to office desks.
My understanding of my parent’s generation doesn’t come from books, I know my parents generation because of what I’ve seen them do and the stories they tell. When I was younger seeing them work 16 hour days to support a family made me understand that hard work is good since following a such a concept allowed them to send 3 kids to college. I understand that any problems I have now is nothing compared to what they had to face when they were my age. At my age, they were probably just starting to move to a new country leaving behind parents/family that they would never see for years and when a reunion finally occurs, it involved visiting graves. My problem these days? Getting annoyed by neighbors who don’t want to pay $15 more on their homeowner’s association fees to get basic cable as standard in units for their whole building.