I wanted to hate this piece, but I can't. This idea of "post-emotional" is ridiculous, and probably overestimates how passionate previous generations were. There were a lot of half-hearted hippies and punks too. But I think he's right about a few things:
- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone
- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional
- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth. If you follow his descriptions, we are the most mature and responsible generation ever: we don't overtly express a futile belief in utopias, we lived the end of communism, we don't reject business, but instead try to infiltrate it with less greed, we don't manipulate people with emotional bullshit (love did not feed the world), we understand that you can change society by not being confrontational (hence we are "selling" ideas rather than screaming them). We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures, frowning upon the childishness of current-day blockbusters. I don't think Steve Jobs is an idol for us, we don't really have idols and myths, except maybe google.org or wikipedia. It's a good generation.
I'm much older than the generation he's talking about, and I think you're entirely right. I shouldn't expect too much understanding of grubby commerce from a former English professor, but I think the affect of a salesman and of an entrepreneur are worlds apart.
An entrepreneur is up to a whole thing, and deals with mainly closed feedback loops. A salesman is at best a fragment of a real enterprise, but is often, as in the case of a snake-oil salesmen, backed up by little or nothing. The feedback loops for a salesman are frequently open, allowing all manner of bullshit.
Further, even if he were right about entrepreneurship being more common, it still wouldn't be the dominant experience, so using it to explain a generation's affect is suspicious.
Instead, I think it's much more reasonable to look at the rise of electronic communication (cheap phone calls, texts, email, chat, Twitter, Facebook). It means, in effect, that each of us lives in our own virtual small town. People end up being pleasant to each other because when they aren't, the consequences are more likely to be felt and harder to dodge.
...we are the most mature and responsible generation ever
Just because the hipster ideal is more "mature and responsible" than related social movements which preceded it, does not make our generation more mature and responsible than those which preceded it.
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth.
Are those negative connotations necessarily unwarranted? For example, is everyone starting their own business and doing their own PR really the most effective way for us to organize ourselves?
We understand that you can change society by not being confrontational
Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?
We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures
Agreed. This is what I admire most about our generation.
> Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?
I think he covers this point here:
"Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) "
This is one of the silliest claims in his piece. It supports the thrust of his argument that our generation's friendliness is affected and skin-deep, and therefore we need anonymous outlets for our underlying negativity. But in reality vicious anonymous comments are outlets of the insecure and jaded. It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.
> It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.
I assume this is true, but can we be sure? What if the people who make nasty anonymous comments on the internet are actually nice in person? I know that I have hated people who hang on the same irc-channels than me, only to meet them in person later, and be surprised that they're not at all like they are online.
- Our generation is not all about hipsters. It happens to be much more fragmented than previous generations, u hear about hipsters because it's the most pervasive (and loud) pattern. I meant that as a generation we haven't created a fake utopia just for ourselves, we yearn for what is possible not just what is ideal (or i believe so, i dont know my generation that good)
- I think it will be, it is possible now to overthrow corporatism for a more ethical model where corporations will be socially responsible. Things like "PR" are slowly fading.
- Compared to May '68, or the Red Army Faction, it is.
i think i've found a way to hate it. the author is spot on, but entirely misses the point by labeling us "generation sell". it's not about the selling, it's about working for ourselves. the band as a self-promoting, self-managing independent entity isn't doing it to make money, they're doing their own sales so that their music remains their own. small-time independent entrepreneurs are very specifically not selling themselves. they're selling a product so they don't have to sell themselves to an employer. being a small business owner isn't about selling something, it's about not selling out.
I suspect most people still want the comfort of a stable job or career. Problem is that for the last ten years it has been hard to find good ones in the general economy, outside a few growth areas of questionable sustainability (housing, finance, health care). So the opportunity cost for 20-30 somethings to doing their own thing has fallen, even if people don't want to admit it.
The other difference is that startups and small businesses give people a more comfortable narrative of how their life is going. It is a lot more comforting to tell yourself, "I'm doing badly now so I will do better in the future," than "I'll never get a job that pays as well as my parents."
If this was not the case, there would be much less romanticization of venture capital and angel investment on these boards, more startups would be focused on revenue-generating than traction-generating products, and lifestyle businesses would not be perceived as failures of boldness for "not swinging for the fences".
While some might desire the comfort of a stable job or career, the world is developing down a path where mobility is what counts and flexibility pays off. Companies can shift production fairly rapidly due to local economic conditions and the people that best adapt to this are generally the winners. I think with current globalization trends we are going to start to see more economic nomads maintaining a sense of community through the internet.
I'm not sure that's the angle many people are actually taking, though. It is possible to take the approach of being independent for creative control, and making money is a means to that end (so you don't have to sell yourself to a corporation). It's very tempting to subtly infuse everything with the selling goal, though, where all your decisions have this nagging backdrop of "will this sell? how will this contribute to my personal brand?" etc.
It's pretty difficult to keep the selling boxed up even if you want to, and really have it be only a means to an end that isn't the main influence on what you do. Even independent businesses that make a conscious effort not to have all their decisions driven by marketing (say, Dischord Records) don't entirely succeed, and it's probably even less the case for people who don't have that kind of active "anti-selling-out" mindset.
It might even be harder, in some cases, than in a normal job. There are a lot of corners of the corporate world where you can make decisions either entirely, or at least mostly, based on technical considerations, because how it's going to make money is someone else's job. The limit case is corporate research labs, where e.g. Bell Labs employees spent very little time thinking about whether their research was sellable; but in a more limited way it appears in lots of places. If you're an independent technical researcher, it's much harder to keep your thoughts off the selling angle, because your livelihood more directly depends on whether your research output will produce revenue.
Agreed. If you are an entrepreneur, it just becomes natural to think about everything in terms of market-value. I guess that this article could be a good alert to remember not to do that completely.
Selling is only a means for "Generation Sell". This fan of David Brooks is off the mark, mefeels. Millennials are not Mad Men. They want to create culture. (He mentions it offhand, in the article, though, so he knows it at some -- probably subconscious -- level. I gather that, as a self-described bobo -- he's kind of envious.) Creating culture -- that goes well with OWS.
"to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly."
I think the dominant belief of our generation is basically that you shouldn't talk unless you're selling something. I don't think that this is because the people doing the 'selling' are superficial, but rather because the general public is becoming less well-educated and capable of independent thought. So the burden of thought is essentially now placed almost entirely in the hands of third parties. It's an extremely troubling trend.
He has put his finger on some vital characteristics of the 2010 era. I think we could have some absolutely lovely flamewars about the causes and effects of those characteristics, but I really, really can't argue with his observations. I've observed that too, but not verbalized it.
Same thing here. I have felt this new "moral order" but this is the first time I've seen it linked to a salesman persona and used as a token to describe this generation.
I wouldn't say we're looking at a culture of salesmen. I'd say it's a culture of craftsmen. The salesman prizes negotiation; he does whatever he has to to get his commission. The craftsman focuses on building and presenting his product (and himself) in a way that maximizes the respect he gets from his peers. The difference between salesman and craftsman is subtle, but it's clear. And I think it's a good way to explain elements of youth culture that don't really jive with the article's point (e.g., the OWS movement).
Perfect example of the type of bullshit belief structure that generation sell is built on.
A craftsman focuses on making things. He focuses on his craft. Period. He does not focus on presenting his product at all. The product does not need presentation or sales, its craftsmanship stands for itself.
The difference between salesman and craftsman is that they are completely different things.
OWS has NOTHING to do with the article, except for the very end where he mentions a new culture forming.
I'm sure you know that words have meaning. You just aren't very good at working out what those meanings are or how they are different from eachother.
+1 to this distinction. For what the OP is observing in Portland (and other urban intellectual enclaves: NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc) - this is a much better characterization of the emergent DIY culture.
Still, I think the article itself is pretty narrow in trying to economically label a loosely defined generation. The data just isn't there to support any large scale, nationwide increase in owned-and-operated businesses that are drawing in significant revenue.
I looked for it, not incredibly exhaustively, but long enough to wonder if it's out there. Moreover, the stagnant wage and salary figures, combined with increased student debt loads seemed to crowd out and more promising spins on the reality of what's happening with the Millennials.
I would love to find data that supports a real economic movement back to craftsmen culture though.
This is clearly written by someone who has not interacted much with real-world entrepreneurs. "Agreeable" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of the entrepreneurs I've met. I'm not saying all entrepreneurs are cantankerous, but I would say they're more inclined to do things "their way."
I also think entrepreneurs are a lot more threatening to the status quo than previous youth-culture archetypes. If you are a recording executive who would you fear most:
1) a drugged out punk rocker who is pissed at the world and letting everyone know it
2) a hacker entrepreneur like Sean Parker.
I think history shows us who the establishment should be more fearful of.
Pretty sure the Beatles had a pretty big effect on society and the status quo. The power of art and music tends to be a second order effect: it inspires people.
Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?
Yes, entrepreneurs may be threatening to large companies, but they are not at all threatening to political leaders. Entrepreneurs are not youth culture, they're businessmen, they work within the capitalist system, not opposed to it or trying to change it, like previous youth cultures
2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re-contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.)
3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty).
Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously.
Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion.
Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.
I don't think it's only the fear of putting things out there that might reflect negatively, but also the temptation of putting things out there that might reflect positively. I actively try not to do it, but I do find myself participating in even online discussion groups with one eye towards potential "personal brand" building. Am I just posting at HN for the discussion, or to build a platform?
Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc.
I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were really doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.
The author describes youth culture's social form by calling it "post-emotional," "entrepreneurial," and eventually "generation sell." As underwhelming as this is, I think it's incredibly generous, as I would call its social form simply "nothing."
The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social narrative, it's just another part of the aesthetic. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing for a reason. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy.
The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.
First of all, beatniks, hippies, and punks were never the majority of their generations. We use them as shorthand for certain eras because they were innovative. But that's another way of saying that they weren't like everybody else.
The truth is, there was never a generation as socially conscious and globally aware as this one. It's not because they are more virtuous, it's because this is just the world they live in now. How dare you suggest that this generation has no "narrative" when we have a global protest movement ongoing right now, that's fixating the attention of the whole world?
Like the best of the punks, they're not just talking about it; they're doing it. And unlike 1968, they have more than slogans and attitude; they have technological and social skills and they're setting to build an alternative vision of society.
And there isn't even a need for everyone to have exactly the same goals before we move forward. A libertarian and a hippie can have different visions of society, but still agree on how to make a communication protocol robust.
Perhaps that is the main difference; this new generation seeks practical agreement rather than ideological unanimity. That's a lot of what OWS is about as well; developing a practice that can afford many different views. These practices don't exclude anyone, or even have one single agenda. On the contrary, they thrive on diversity.
Forget the hopelessly naive 1960s concept of "speaking truth to power". The new ideal is to create a self-sustaining practice that brings about change. To me, that's the internet; that's Burning Man; that's Tor, Mozilla, Wikipedia, and even Google on their best days; and that's Occupy Wall Street.
> The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The narrative of today's youth culture is passion. The passion to pursue your craft and the freedom to do it your way. To satisfy your curiosity without harming the world around you. It is unbelievably positive and optimistic. Liberty is the narrative of today and it's a narrative that has far more substance than those prior to it.
If you seriously think that the passion of running a taco stand is more substantial and more liberating than the narrative which led to the events of Paris in May 1968, then I'm sorry for you.
What, you prefer tossing bricks and overturning vehicles, in some spastic orgy of revolutionary zeal that fails to bring about any measurable change? At least tacos are tasty.
I pretty much hate May 1968. Not so much for the event itself; there was a lot to admire in what workers did to advance their rights. But for what it meant to the progressive ideal. There was much conflation between the starry-eyed ideals of the students, and the real effects that the strikes had on government. The academic left thought that one caused the other. Hence the glorification of dippy slogans like "I declare a permanent state of happiness". It seems to be the watershed when leftism stopped being about education and material welfare, and started being some kind of conceptual art project.
I don't judge a narrative based on its ephemeral qualities or its capacity to be memorable. I judge it based on its moral quality and its capacity to affect positive change. On both of those counts, what came before is clearly inferior.
Spot on the "post-emotional” generation : no anger, no edge, no ego.
Is the entrepreneurial model so attractive that everything that may set you apart has to be shaved, to avoid displeasing anyone?
To me, hating something is at least as important as loving something else.
I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)
> I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)
And "hating" organic food (really?) is not signalling? There are plenty of things wrong with the world, things that are worth hating, but organic food does not really strike me as one of them.
Whether organic food is scalable or not depends entirely on what kind of food is being grown and what sort of land it is being grown on. If you read Seeing Like a State, you'll note that "modern" Western farming techniques actually produce worse yields than traditional "organic" farming techniques. Lots of soils simply can't sustain the extremely intensive monocropping that the western farming tradition requires.
If we want to really have a second green revolution, we're going to have to start looking at organic farming techniques to make marginal lands agriculturally viable.
Organic food is potentially scalable, maybe not right now. It fits right into the beyond mass production era, when capital costs have fallen, productivity has risen, we can apply different new technologies and we can mass customize products. It is mostly not retro, not like biodynamics say.
I would direct anger at the notion of "authenticity" in commerce, which repackages modern, progressive themes and topics like organic food into a romanticized form.
I think his "selling ourselves" argument is overstated. Judging from me, we keep down emotions because we are more rational than previous generations, we believe in science and reason vs pointless sentimentalism. Organic-foods are just that: trying to emotionally engage people to buy products for reasons never explained.
Science, reason and rationalism are not incompatible with an ego. If you believe in some right and wrong, there should also be an emotion, and eventually an action.
I don't think selling ourselves is an overstatement here. And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant.
Also, while trying to protect everyone feelings, all opinions are considered as equally valid - even when some proved wrong. If that is not selling ourselves, how do you call that?
I only took organic food as an example of what one must love to be "in", trendy, hipster. A dissending opinion, even based on scientific facts, seems to be frowned upon by hipsters, and by extension the new moral order. In the organic food example, we want to believe in something other than facts. This is not science.
Let's follow that example, see http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-... - with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. Internal consistence for organic food proponents would require suggesting china-like one child policy or genocides.
Here, the "selling generation" is using emotional engagement as a sale tactic, for "feel good" stuff.
Personally, I boycott organic food. I usually ask if the food I'm about to order is organic. If it is organic, I ask for something else. If I can not be served food that is not organic, I explain that I boycot organic food, and that I have to place my order somewhere else.
Regardless of your analysis of the organic food, you can say that's is very bold, and unfashionable, in today's culture.
So I guess I won't be a social media icon. Never mind :-)
> with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops.
And if everyone had a car and lived like Americans then the world would be in a tough spot as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up my good life. I eat organic because I don't trust non-organic food, because I don't want to eat animals that lived their lives in feces, themselves consuming ground up animals that were too sick to survive. Is organic scalable? It'd be great if were, and I encourage industry to try, but I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself.
The one big flaw with that interview is that it doesn't compare organic farming with western agriculture in terms of long-term viability. Yes, the carrying capacity of the Earth is only 4 billion with organic farming. But I don't know that mechanized farming can do much better over the long haul.
If we look at the third world, organic agricultural techniques actually do much better than mechanized production methods, even when measured in yields alone. The reason for this is that not everyone has forty feet of topsoil, like we do in Kansas. In a lot of places, the soil is marginal, and simply cannot hold up to intensive agriculture for more than couple of years. Mechanized agriculture on land like that is disastrous and leads to crop failure and famine within a decade (for example, Ethiopia). The only way to make these lands agriculturally viable is with organic farming techniques. [1]
That said, I do agree with the point you're trying to make, even if I disagree with the specific example. We should support or oppose things not because it is fashionable to support or oppose them, but because of reasons that we've worked out for ourselves.
[1] Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Measures to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. 1999. Print.
>And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant.
Jersey Shore aside, I have to disagree with this. We have a media culture that celebrates ignorance, but I don't think you can really trust media to represent actual culture anymore. We have an over-achieving culture that misses the point in a lot of ways, and I'm certainly not saying that this generation values scientific endeavor more than e.g. the WWII generation, but it certainly does not value ignorance.
The thing I see coming up so much is arrogance. E.g. assuming "our" generation is so "sciency" and rational and previous generations were so superstitious and stupid.
This misses two key motivators (and ignores the fact that Portland is an extreme example). One is an ambivalence about the products and marketing of large corporations and a corresponding search for authenticity through DIY. Why buy Heinz when you can make preservative-free ketchup from heirloom tomato varieties unavailable in any grocery store? And selling the product mainly sustains the enterprise, offering the potential for work with a degree of autonomy. Put up a web storefront and your niche local business has global reach.
As to “self-branding” and innocuous politeness: to Deresiewicz, these identify a salesman. More probably, they result from a generational awareness that one’s words and actions are immortalized online. One cultivates a persona or risks letting others do so for you.
Maybe the author just needs to surround himself with some different people? The things I see in my social circles certainly aren't the sort of feel-good, homogenized things he's describing.
And is this really new? Haven't people (and I'm half tempted to apply the term pseudo-intellectual here) been complaining about life being a bit passionless "lately" since...ever?
The longing for the "old days" of the wild west is such a common complaint that its just a cliche now.
If this article feels like it has any sort of merit to you (and you agree with the implication that this is bad), I suggest surrounding yourself with a different group of people.
I think in some ways the feeling of this piece embodies the phenomenon, real or not, it attempts to describe. The writer clearly harbors some negative feelings about hipster culture and his perception of its salesman roots, but he won't come out and explicitly rip it--similar to the attitudes of the hipsters he finds so enigmatic.
(Hopefully very slight) tangent: The article describes the Millenial Generation as "born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s." Yikes.
I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five.
My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.
At the risk that it might degenerate into too much meta-level academic theorizing, I'd actually be interested in an analysis of generation-analysis itself. The way generations are segmented seems pretty strange, and shifts depending on who's writing, what/why they're writing, and when they're writing it. It'd be fascinating to get some sort of overview of how that process works.
As someone born in 1981, I've ended up in all sorts of buckets. Sometimes '81 is considered the tail end of Generation X. When I was younger, I thought of myself as solidly Gen-X, because "my" culture all seemed to be quintessentially Gen-X culture: Nirvana, MTV, skate-punk, the microcomputer revolution, cynicism about both staid corporate life and the hippie alternative to it, etc. Later I realized that many people considered '81 a bit late for Gen-X, but I had considered myself in it because as a teenager I identified with culture-drivers who were actually 5-15 years older (e.g. Kurt Cobain somehow seemed in my generation at the time, but was in fact born in '67). This article, and some others, by contrast would group me as a Millennial, but many of the other descriptions I've found of Millennials seem aimed at people younger than me, mainly people born in the late-80s/early-90s.
I was born in 83, and I agree. I was homeschooled, so growing up I was never part of a group of children my own age. I was smart at the time, and so I tended to spend most of my social time hanging out with folks who were 5-10 years older and absorbed a lot of culture from them. I've always identified more with the "ideals" of Generation X than with those of the Millenial generation or Generation Y. I'm cynical almost to a fault. I have extreme problems accepting un-earned authority, such that my wife said "you just aren't meant to have a boss" the other day. I really just want to be left alone to live my life in peace, like a less violent Daniel Plainview.
To get meta, I think that it's probably easiest to envision generations as phases of an ideological sine wave. At any given time, one set of ideas and culture - one phase - will be dominant and will contain most of the population. However, no phase ever dies out completely - there's always a few oddballs who will find medieval chivalry, for instance, appealing. I think that you and I were just born in between the peaks of Generation X and the Millenial generation, so our values are somewhat harder to predict.
Generational theory is interesting on the surface, but often I take these meta-analyses with a grain of salt. They seem to be grandiose astrological interpretations that would be applicable to any generation.
I'm part of the "Nomad" generation type. Nomadic definitely describes my life fairly well for the past 10 years. I've lived in 2 countries and 5 states. The post office should just start OCRing my mail and sending it via email.
He missed mods. Watch Antonioni's "Blowup" (1966) and tell me how Thomas (mod) differs from today's hipster startup founder. He doesn't -- except perhaps that he is a bit less polite and drives a vintage Rolls-Royce.
When I think about branding a generation, which is always done by a member of a previous generation and with not a little whiff of "kids these days' syndrome, it occurs to me that there might be a feedback loop involved.
If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z.
I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year-spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.
I liked the article, though I do think he over-generalizes a diverse subculture full of both crusading, idealistic boys and girls as well as truly despicable characters. Regardless it does put into words ideas and feelings we have all had for awhile, or at least he tried.
Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?
>According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.
Sounds like Prozac has really had an impact. These kids, when they get the rare moment of depression or rage now, should savor it, like tasting a dish that one only eats once or twice a year.
Let me counter with: Two land wars in Asia, thirty (!) years of cancerous deregulation of the private sector leading to an economic implosion, 9/11, OWS protests, raging unemployment...
Having said all of this, I would agree that PORTLAND, OR is a fundamentally agreeable society...it is difficult to communicate this in writing, you really have to visit the place to understand.
Of these, I would say that the only one the Millennials have any hand in is the OWS protests, largely because many of them are unemployed now with nothing else to do. Western society has apparently forgotten the grave danger that comes from leaving vast swaths of your young population without work and riddled with debt. The reteaching of that lesson is going to define the coming decade, I think.
But the wars? Neo-liberal baby boomers cooked that up. Deregulation? GenX loves that shit.
I've seen that statistic as well, and wondered if someone would point it out when I wrote that. Apparently it's more than the Tea Party, for all the media bullshit about the two.
At any rate that's still a large portion of it unemployed, being around a quarter, compared to the population-wide unemployment rate of 9%. And surely you would find overrepresented among the movement folks who are underemployed or otherwise frustrated by the lack of mobility in the current market. So (I think) my point stands.
Having a large number of much younger cousins who are, oddly enough, from the Portland area, I think the author is painting an entire generation on the basis of a few highly visible examples.
- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone
- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional
- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.