Iâm just going to put this out there: Stumptown is the most overrated coffee ever. Portland Roasting is where itâs at.
Regarding the whole âEverybody Gets a Trophyâ thing, you need to remember that Millennials were children and never asked to get a trophy just for showing up. It was the Boomer parents of these Millennials who invented the whole âEverybody Gets a Trophyâ thing.
Fucking Baby Boomers and their narcissism.
er I think that would be the Boomerâs childrenâs children.
Sadly I think it is my generation and the one after that has forgotten that lifes highs are so much better when compared to the lows and are afraid to let kids fail.
Itâs not simply a matter of comparison and making your warm fuzzies fuzzier, either. Failing is a learning experience. Itâs how you ascertain and address your weaknesses and grow stronger. Groundless praise, (or simply praising the product, rather than the work put into it), both generates complacency and ill-prepares the students for times in the future when they inevitably WILL fail.
Still, self-esteem is important, especially for kids living in environments that devalue them, or belonging to demographic groups which are systematically devalued. What seems to be important, at least according to recentish studies, is to praise studentâs work, rather than the product (unless the product is genuinely A+ praiseworthy). Students then associate praise with the effort put into the task, rather than with wrapping it up and crapping out something âgood enough.â
The only way it could be the Boomerâs childrenâs children is if the family always has kids at 15-16 and the Boomers are from early in the generation (1946+16+16 is 1978).
The thing about failure today is that for most people, failure is not a real option. If you fail, you often donât get a second chance. And then you have a permanent mark of failure on your CV that can really screw you over because jobs are still scarce - and those unpaid internships are also scarce, and very competitive - and thereâs usually another person who didnât have that failure (or was willing to lie outright about it).
So not only were we not brought up to handle failure well (though Iâll say I have in fact learned a lot from my failures), but the older generations have also given us a world where failure is often pretty much permanent. Of course, older people are affected by that too - all the older people who lost their decent-paying job after years or decades through no fault of their own (hard to even call that failure, but thatâs what itâs seen as) and never found something remotely as good (if they found another job at all) can speak to that.
As a Gen-Xer, I feel like my generation was written off as a loss a long time ago, and that weâve spent our lives with ever declining resources, trying to hold things together long enough for the millenials to have a chance to survive.
And it ticks me off when people bash millenials.
Speaking as a Gen-Xer with no kids, I think the oft-ridiculed Millenials have been handed a shit sandwich.
Er right - Boomerâs children. I got carried away with the children. Not in an unmarked van sort of wayâŚ
It does have things both ways a bit, but Iâm not sure the intent of that comic was to bash millennials.
No, it was clearly mocking the way Millenials are routinely mocked, pointing out theyâve got serious problems.
Also there seems to be a certain group of people who when they need cheap labor like to say you have too much self-esteem and deserve no inherent respect, and that if you wish any in future youâll have to earn it. However, when they want to make a moral judgement about you they tell you your problem is you have no self-respect.
Introducing Matt Walsh, champion douchenozzle.
EDIT:
Thatâs Walshâs preface to his article, on why heâs opposed to $15/hour wages for fast-food workers. Hereâs a direct link.
He seems to have no problem making pronouncements on what people at the low end âdeserve to earn,â but heâll find all kinds of objections to anyone saying the same about athletes, CEOs, and other high end earners.
Let me tell a story.
I graduated in 2012, with very little debt, thank Christ. Nonetheless I couldnât find a job in my field, and for that mater only had two or three interviews in my first year out of school. I end up taking a job with a retail franchise opening a new store. The owner promised me full time work, well, once I start I end up getting the same hours as high school kids doing the same stock job as me; some guy the owner knew ended up with the full-time version of the job, and while my hours would inevitably creep upward as the manager liked my work, the owner would demand âfairnessâ in hours and the other part timers would end up taking my extra shifts.
Fast forwarding a couple months, and the guy he knew ended up fired, since it turned out he didnât particularly see the need to show up for shifts. I get the job Iâd been offered initially, and by Christmas am a keyholding supervisor. Still only making $0.50 over minimum wage mind, but at least itâs full time. At this point I go back to school part time since whatever this is, itâs not a career. By late summer, about a year after Iâm hired the owner is talking about having me do some shifts at another store he owns to train the staff there.
Around the same time the corporate office for the franchisor posts some district manager jobs. No, I donât have as much time in retail as most of their DMs, but most of what I have is in the company, and I have a reasonably relevant degree, which a lot of their people donât, so I apply. A couple of weeks later I show up for work and am kicked off the property. No explanation given, and I quote âno, thereâs no explanation, things just didnât work outâ. From what investigation Iâve done it seems that the corporate office determined I was somehow lacking in loyalty by virtue of wanting to work for corporate and demanded I be fired.
The guy also screws with my EI; I ask him to list the dismissal as a layoff âno, thatâs not how it happenedâ and everything gets delayed since the idiot case worker wouldnât take my word that it was without cause and decided to play phone tag with the store. To add insult to all of this, the guy screws me out of $150, having conveniently lost the agreement to pay for the first aid course heâd been ordered to send supervisors on. Of course I could sue for that, but $150 isnât going to cover courts costs even in small claims, and Iâd be trying to enforce a verbal agreement anyway.
So at this point every damn employer I go to has asked, as theyâre first fucking question, why I left that job. Any but for one place that hired me for a SHORT seasonal, and still retail,l contract theyâve pretty much all shoeâd me out the door as soon as they hear anything about a dismissal. Iâve talked to an employment councillor, whoâs advice amounted to saying I should forget about my field since Iâve got a years experience in retail, and that I shouldnât bother looking for full-time anything since thatâs ânot how things are done nowadaysâ. This same employment advisor was of the opinion I should stop volunteering with a couple local politicians since that âisnât going to get you a jobâ - a week before I got the only other full time contract Iâve had since I was fired, with one of those politicians. I havenât been back.
tl;dr worked in retail for a year, promoted quickly. Fired because looking for internal promotion scared them somehow. Other stores scared off by that. Employment advisor thinks retail is my âmost realistic optionâ and that I shouldnât even bother to look for full time work.
Apparently all it takes to get counted out more or less permanently for just about any gainful employment ever is bad luck.
Er? My mother was born in 1952. I was born in 71. My daughter (who is in college) was born in 96. Sheâs 19.
I graduated in 2008 with a B.S. in a non-BS field (geology) from a top-ranked private east coast university. I went to grad school immediately afterwards (at a not-as-good school, a poor choice on my part, chosen for the wrong reasons but I didnât know at the time) and ended up not finishing because my thesis advisor is an asshole (in 20 years at the school he has never had a grad student he was advising actually graduate⌠obviously didnât know that before signing up). Thereâs my big failure.
Iâve had a handful of job interviews, and one polite decline letter from a PhD program, after hundreds of job applications and several grad school applications. Mostly just silence. Itâs going to take someone consciously deciding to give me a huge break and that seems unlikely if not impossible (Iâm not well-connected although it seems like I should be).
Of course - in hindsight I recognize that I missed the huge opportunity that was North Dakota oil. If I had done that back in 2008 Iâd be rich right now. If I had done that in 2011 after giving up on grad school Iâd be almost rich at least. Now that I am willing to do that (there are many personal reasons Iâm extremely wary of it - and I didnât go into geology for the money, Iâll leave it at that) because there isnât much hope elsewhere, naturally that option dries up.
So yeah - one instance of bad luck is enough to ruin millennials. Has this ever been true quite so starkly, in modern times?
To be honest⌠I retain hope. I recognize that even long-term unemployed I am in an extremely privileged position, and my prospects are way better than for many, and I will get a decent job eventually. Still sucks though and will massively affect my lifetime earnings, and my prospects for owning a house and all that (as referenced in the comic).
âYou donât deserve a trophy just for showing up!â
â90% of Success is just showing up.â
