Originally Posted By: Pablo
Never said I think the world will go down in flames, but never before have we had a generation expect so much, from so few, for so little effort.
Well, never before has life been so easy: (even ordinary, working-class) people *do* enjoy a higher quality of life; both materialistically and culturally, with less effort and less hardship than at any point in human history.
I see, too, that young people's reticence to participate as a rat in the rat race may have equal part a disdain for the rat race than an aversion toward work. All of the young people I've ever met, and I'll include myself when I was [mumbles something] years younger have had astonishing amounts of energy and great levels of passion and drive. Directing that drive to make someone else wealthy or even to chase after wealth, though, may be losing it's novelty to a generation who don't regard material security as that much of a luxury. I'll bet the bright lights of Las Vegas and the skyscrapers in New York hold less of a "wow!" factor to those who've lived there their entire lives; likewise I think that people just entering the "real world" are finding less reward in having it said to them by the world "if you work work work work work for those that own the means of production, they'll throw enough peanuts at you that you can OWN SOME STUFF!"
I wonder if this attitude is a natural evolution of an industrial society, where things ebb and flow and balance each other. Perhaps these kids ARE going to have less, do less, own less, achieve less but will craft their world according to a different set of values. I just hope they don't go too far with it and I hope those values end up being good.
I wonder, too, if all of this complaining that's being done about the lazy so-and-so's growing up is also a natural reaction by a generation that worked worked worked worked so very hard to provide a better, easier life for those who are now going to live that life according to their own values, and not necessarily the ones that were intended to be carried on.
Who knows, Pablo? Maybe as these kids grow up they'll cultivate their sense of entitlement so that it seems natural to extend entitlement to the world's resources to everyone else, too; and instead of abiding by a world where everyone is competing with everyone else for artificially-limited resources they re-apportion society's wealth into some kind of first-generation Utopia that their kids and their kids and their kids can build upon? And instead of everyone holed up in boxes disconnected from each other, everyone ends up working together and singing Kumbaya? Wouldn't we look silly generations from now complaining that they aren't embracing an ethos of "work work work so you can acquire acquire acquire more more more"?
In summary: It seems that we have a generation of entitled, spoiled, bored rich kids who are looking for something else to do with their lives than scramble around for crumbs. They want to be important and do big things without having to actually put in effort to learn or to work toward anything. (I wonder, too, if these observations were made *verbatim* by generations that preceded *us*! I wonder what
my old man had to say about my work ethic and attitude years ago...) I work much, much, much less than I did when I had a full-time job and was also building up a business of my own: Now I spend all of my time with my kids! And I regard my work work work attitude of my 20's as a misguided, grievous error; all self-centred and self-serving and centred on getting stuff and things and travelling and me me me me me. *That*, ironically seems juvenile!
