Kids These Days
January 14th, 2013 - 7:44 am
They don’t have it like we did — “we” being anyone who entered the working world in the 20th Century, instead of the 21st.
That’s taken from a column by Bryan Goldberg (hat tip, Glenn) explaining to the Millennials exactly how screwed they are — and what to do it about.
You’ll want to read the whole thing.
How screwed? So screwed I’m toying with the idea of flushing my engineering degrees and driving a tractor.
And it’s not going to get better. Y
While aimed at younger children, the advice on this demotivational poster may be our only hope:
Mercy
Teach every child you meet the importance of forgiveness. It’s our only hope of surviving their wrath once they realize just how badly we’ve screwed things up for them.
Our grandchildren will curse all our names.
Actually reading that column puzzled H*LL out of me, because the reader appears to be younger than I — but the experience Dan (computers) and I (fiction) have had of the workplace perfectly matches his “forecast” for our kids. We’ve had to reinvent ourselves every five/ten years, more or less make our own job, while industries that used to be safe — telecom for Dan! — collapsed under us, never with any security or retirement, etc. As far as I can tell that has been the job experience of all but a lucky few entering the workforce since, oh, the mid eighties. It is what it is.
And I have a college degree because it made my mom happy… For all the good it’s been. Oh, wait, it’s also good when I find myself on panels with “deeply academic people” — usually professors of speculative fiction — because when I start undermining them and snarking them and they ask what my credentials are, I have them. But in terms of employment and money, meh. I’d have done better to start submitting stories and attending conventions at fourteen.
The WRITER not the reader. Sorry. Profoundly uncaffeinated.
Coffee, stat!
As Frank Zappa most famously said during the “Dummy Up” routine: “…you get nothing with your college-degree.”