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After spending a solid hour or so immersed in Thesis Land, I’m feeling pretty satisfied with the intro paragraph for Gen Y itself. After over a year of research, it feels pretty ridiculous to be putting this sort of an introduciton together. It’s sort of like a nuclear physicist mapping the chemical bonds for baking soda and vinegar.
Okay, you’re right: this makes me sound pretentious and bitchy, and being a self-proclaimed expert is one of the single
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Comments
04.20.09
Hm...I must be Gen Y then, birth certificate be damned! I don't agree that resistance to the command-and-control workplace or desertion of the attitude that "work" (any work, with or without a purpose or meaningful result) is "good for you."
I don't think these are "Gen Y" attitudes. I think the culture in general has changed, and the younger generation is just going with the flow. Many Boomers and Xers are, too; the people lodging complaints sound scared and stuck.
04.20.09
Earlier generations before Gen Y had the same "So what?" mentality - they just expressed it in different avenues, particularly in society. The major changes that took place in the United States have been a resistance against the norm. Gen Y just happens to be taking that mentality to the workplace, eliminating the archaic procedures which hinder progress toward the ultimate goal.
I never thought that asking why was a negative and the more I read about the generational gaps, there seems to be this mentality. Do all generations feel this way? Is it even a generational thing?
04.20.09
“This generation known as Gen Y may be smarter but they do not know how to work in a business atmosphere. I truly believe that unless they are given a syllabus or specific instructions, this generation would not know to wipe their butts."
And this is why a mentor is vital. 95% of the conventional wisdom, accumulated knowledge, and methods of business are not written down, and perhaps never will be.
04.20.09
I would be curious as to the time frame of questions asked by Somola and Sutton to Gen X and the Boomers in regards to their attitudes of work. They may not represent as much generational differences as attitudinal differences based on where they happen to be in life. People looking at retirement, those with families, mortgages, ect. may have different perspectives. The young generations of their times all want to change the world, and many make marvelous strides in doing so, but each generation goes through it's own varied stages of growth and development and the gen y of today will not be the gen y of 20 years from now or 40 years from now.
04.20.09
"Boomer," "Gen X," and "Gen Y" are just marketing terms created by salespeople who would like their statements to be meaningful. They claim that they are based on statistics, a branch of mathematics that is greatly abused. Movie stars and idols have been around since the fifties, and I don't see the current ones as being much different. I've seen the work attitudes described as belonging to Gen Y in boomers too. Solomon saw some of what is going on here thousands of years ago when he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. Many nations have risen and fallen. Nixon took us off the gold standard, and our population have more increasingly turned toward socialism to make us a better society. It is not generations that divide us but attitudes toward work that come from fewer farms, more welfare households, and government programs that encourage people to not work. A favorite saying of mine is that it is not what you get by working, but what you become by it that matters.
But what do I know? Back to my TV I go.
04.20.09
I agree with most of what you had to say but your main point about how someone turned down a very solid job offer because “Work isn’t worth doing unless it will make the world a better place” is a very scary thought. I actually wrote about this in my last blog post about how saying that you want "to change the world" and "make the world a better place" are worthless words unless you do something about it. And the problem is that most gen yers don't, or at least haven't, done anything about it. Thoughts like changing the world, being a celebrity, making millions quickly, etc, have seemed to inflate our egos to the point that great opportunities (i.e. a good job) are overlooked. If we're able to overlook those opportunities for better ones, than great, but if there's no tangible solution to "change the world", then overlooking those opportunities is just irrational and will come back to hurt our society greatly.
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