Generation Y…Why??
For all of my fellow Generation Y-ers, why us?? We’ve suffered a double economic whammy thrown in with a side of entitlement. Okay, maybe more than a side, but we’ll address our deeply embedded feelings of entitlement later. We’ve endured the dot.com boom and bust cycle in the 90s, and some of us are still smarting from the effects of that. Now, less than a decade later, we are witnessing jobs pull a David Copperfield disappearing act, struggling home-owners displaced into the growing communities of tent-cities, riddled with debt, and not an iota of sense of where to safely invest our money. Our generation will be the first who will not ‘do better’ than our parents, as a collective whole. Yes, my generation hosts the largest number of individuals to get really prestigious, interesting-and-impressive-sounding Masters Degrees, who are extremely worldly wise and well traveled, studying Far East art in Beijing or ancient Bacchanalian rituals in Stonehenge, Rome. But currently, there’s a mass exodus that’s taking them from their world travels straight back to Mom and Dad’s house, because they can’t find a job/or can’t afford to pay the bills.
We are a strange combination of smart and stupid. Unlike our parents’ generation, world-travel and knowing about other cultures is becoming more and more mainstream, we are very tech-savvy, and rather fearless. Yet, as a collective whole, we’ve been kinda screwed, and we made decisions to take us where we are. Yes the housing market crash does take some of the blame, but ours is a consumer-greedy generation– the expenses of our shiny gadgets from Apple I-Pods, to Amazon Kindle to multiple stamps on passports. So, here’s where I address the sense of entitlement–we all grew up with a sense of fearlessness which stemmed from a sense of entitlement. This is America. This is the 21st century. If we work smart (different from working hard), we get our college degree, we can achieve anything we can put our minds to.
So now, we’ve acquired our degrees, assuaged our wanderlust through globe trotting experiences, collected shiny gadgets, and along with this- a multitude of debt. What we didn’t count on, is our own lack of relevancy in this economy.
