Chas Andres' Blog

No one knows what to make of our generation.

I read an article yesterday that Time magazine published back in 2005 about how the path from adolescence to adulthood had changed in recent years. The general thesis seemed to be that kids these days don’t want to grow up. While people in their twenties a few decades ago were settling down, getting jobs, and getting married, our generation has decided to eschew formality in favor of frivolity. We’d rather whimsically frolic in our hip, urban surroundings, sleeping with whomever we please, and trying out dozens of jobs until we find the one that perfectly expresses us. Oh, what a joyous, carefree life!

In this entry, I am going to attempt to explain the forces that have shaped our generation, and why I think we are so misunderstood by those who came before us. I have no qualifications for speaking on behalf of Suburban-American twenty-somethings beyond the fact that I was born in 1985 and want to write about it. Please note that all of this is taken from my experience and observation as a white, privileged kid who grew up on the East Coast and moved to the West Coast. Your own experience may differ wildly from what I say below.

We Were Conditioned to Expect Easy Answers and Happy Endings

 

 

More than any other generation, we were raised by media.

In the fifties and sixties, kids went to the cinema on weekends and watched Walter Cronkite with their parents. Then they went out and played, or got a summer job.

In the seventies, TV was still more or less a family activity. Folks crowded around the ‘set at dinnertime, and then went off and experienced the rest of their lives away from the tyranny of the  networks.

Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s? We had whole CHANNELS marketed right at us. We had cartoons all morning on Saturday and all afternoon on weekdays. Due to the fact that the majority of households switched from one-income families to two-income families, a whole lot more of us came home to an empty house after school. And what was waiting for us? TV.

Most of the shows and movies we watched for hours on end had similar messages: Things tend to work out. The good guys win. If you deserve something, you will get it. Underdogs will prevail. Anything can be accomplished in a five-minute training montage.

There’s a great article by Cracked’s David Wong called “How The Karate Kid Ruined the Modern World” that I gets at the crux of the problem. The author brings up a problem he has deemed “effort shock,” which is the gap between the actual effort it takes to complete or master a task, and the amount of effort that you think it will take. Wong argues that years of “very special episodes” and training montages has instilled our entire generation with the belief that it doesn’t take too much effort to become good at something. After all, if Daniel-San can become the best karate kid in the valley in a few months, you can become the best at whatever you want just as easily!

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. Life is hard, and everything that’s worth doing is next to impossible. I want to be a writer, but I will often get discouraged the minute I open up a new document and see that flashing cursor. The 80′s New Wave track doesn’t come on, spurning me on to write world-changing dialog in a matter of seconds, so I often put the task off until some nebulous “later” that never actually happens.

The same thing happens to me whenever I try to make a concerted effort to lose weight and eat healthier. I go to bed at night thinking through the montage of what it would be like to run on the treadmill every day after work and limit my fat consumption, but the next day I invariably have a tough morning at work, so I want a really good lunch to compensate, and then before I know it I’ve just eaten a giant sandwich and some chips.

The idea that self-discipline is the most important thing one can possess is an art that was never passed down to us. Instead, we were told that we were all special, unique, and smart.

We Were Told we Were Smart, Damn It!

 

 

We are the children of the baby boom generation. These guys, by the way, are the biggest sell-outs in the history of selling out. In the late sixties, they were on the cusp of changing the world. They started a revolution that was supposed to tear down the establishment, bringing about a new age of peace, harmony, and equality. They marched to bring equal rights to all of humankind, regardless of gender or color. They started imminent nuclear annihilation in the face, and tried to find an end to war and hatred in the face while we were teetering on the brink of destruction.

Then something happened. I don’t know what. Maybe the drugs went bad. Maybe shit got too real. All I know is that these people went on to elect Regan twice, destroy small town America, elect Bush, elect Bush’s stupider son, elect his stupider son again, and create our current culture of fear. Next time you think about how the world is going to be a better place when all the old fear-mongers die and we get to take over, remember that today’s fear-mongers were yesterday’s indignant youth.

Anyway, the one place our parents did decide to hold on to their flower-child roots was in how they raised us. Most parenting philosophies of the 80′s and 90′s were centered around how important it was to tell your children how great and smart they are. The theory seems to hold water: self-esteem is important, so if you tell your child they are smart than ipso facto they will become smart.

This only served to cement the image of self that TV constantly reinforced: You are unique. You are smart. You are destined for great things.

The problem is that, uh, it did way more harm than good.

A 2007 study detailed in the article “The Inverse Power of Praise” shows how harmful it is to constantly reinforce the idea of “smartness” into a kid. What happens is that the kid does, indeed, think they’re smart. So smart, in fact, that when a problem comes up that they can’t solve they start to panic. “How come I can’t solve this?” they think. “I’m smart! I should be able to figure it out! What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with me?”

On the other hand, if you praise your child for being a hard worker, they will be much more likely to attempt to solve a puzzle, no matter how hard. And this translates to a much higher success rate in facing the problems that come up in day-to-day life.

I know that I have my own issues with failure, and while I will never blame my parents for mistakes in raising me, (I believe they did an excellent job) I still have a hard time dealing with my own mistakes. I am far to willing to blame luck, or timing, or someone else for things that are my own fault. And, of course, this means that often times I am unable to fully learn from my mistakes because I am often so unwilling to take responsibility for them.

I still find myself internalizing the same old message, “I should be smart enough to do this right the first time!”

We Weren’t Raised to be Reliant

 

 

When you were a kid, how much did you hear about “stranger danger”? If you were in my generation, it was probably a whole hell of a lot.

Like most things, our current dilemma grew from very innocent roots. The bond between parent and child is the strongest in the world, and most parents will do anything in the world to protect their babies. The idea of a strange person with a heart full of malice taking your kid is the worst, most horrifying thing in the world. For mothers, it is a fate worse than death.

Does that sound dramatic to you? It does to a hell of a lot of TV writers, too.

If there is one thing that America still produces well, it’s TV. And most of what’s on TV are shows about crime. Killers-as-entertainment got so pervasive in the 80′s that thousands of (mostly) women banded together and demanded tougher broadcast standards to protect their children from be exposed to so much violence on television.

They should have been equally worried about the affect that it had on them.

One of the most powerful ideas in the art of TV drama is getting your viewer to think, “this could happen to me!” This allows the viewer to forge an emotional connection with the protagonist and become further invested in the show. And since the idea of criminals snatching kids is such a powerful one, a propensity of crime shows started hitting that note pretty hard.

This had a major affect on our society. While previous generations of kids were given free range of the neighborhood, we were limited to heavily supervised “play dates”. Our parents told us how prowlers were waiting behind every bush, kidnappers hid in every unmarked van, and to never, ever talk to someone you don’t know.

Despite the fact that no child has ever been killed by candy on Halloween, we were forced by our parents to not accept or throw away anything we received while trick-or-treating that wasn’t pre-wrapped. And now, trick-or-treating has almost completely disappeared. Kids either trick-or-treat in their local mall during the day or not at all. So much for Halloween.

The cost of keeping a generation of kids slightly safer from non-existent serial child abductors? We grew up relying on our parents for everything. Instead of walking or biking to and from school, we were driving in a carpool. After school was either TV by yourself at home alone (if you were poor), or an endless parade of extracurricular activities (if you were rich). We didn’t learn how to take the subway by ourselves. We didn’t get to explore the beauty of nature with a herd of friends and some sticks. We weren’t allowed to go to the park alone.

And somehow I would guess that the few child abductors that there actually were didn’t just give up and go home.

For further information about this phenomenon, check out the excellent blog “Free Range Kids”. We shouldn’t subject our own kids to the same culture of fear that we were brought up in.

We Were Never Allowed to Develop Our Own Culture

 

 

Earlier generations had a unifying culture that bound together everyone of a certain age. Sometimes, everyone banded around musicians of incredible talent, like Jimi Hendrix or Elvis Presley. Sometimes, they banded around musicians that had no talent, like Sid Vicious. Regardless, each generation had their own secrets – a set of things that were uniquely theirs, that no one else understood or even really cared about.

Check out this episode of Frontline from 2001 called “The Merchants of Cool”. It is about people hired by nearly every company to go around the country and speak to teenagers in order to find out what is cool and what is not. They then take this information back to the folks that market things at teens in order to make sure that their company is at the cutting edge of what today’s youth is interested in buying.

What this meant, ostensibly, is that our culture was co-opted and marketed back at us before we had a chance to make it our own.

Luckily, this process started around the same time that the internet took over all of our lives. While we weren’t able to have a collective culture that spanned our whole generation, we each got to split off into our own subcultures and explore the best pieces of culture from all eras of modern human history. You didn’t have too many kids in 1970 who thought that Frank Sinatra was actually pretty rad, but in our generation you can be in to 50′s classic country, late 60′s psychedelic rock, American disco,  British punk, or Peruvian flute music. I can press a few buttons on my computer, and watch an episode of TV that was produced and aired in 1989, 1998, or several hours ago. If I want to, I can go on a message board and only speak with those people who have seen the same kinds of shows as me and have generally similar political beliefs. And I can yell at them anonymously if they say something I don’t like.

If you’re angry about hipsters, well, this is their origin story. When we lack a common bond, we devolve into one-upsmanship of who can find the next, coolest, most obscure “thing” that gives you an edge over someone else. Since nothing is actually cool anymore, we must constantly seek to find something that seems cool. Then, once it has entered the zeitgeist, it can no longer be cool and you have to move on to the next thing. Coolness has become an elusive, moving barrier that can never be reached.

Our culture has become a fractured amalgamation of whatever we want. There are people who were born in the same year as me, perhaps several towns over, with whom I have almost nothing in common. Thus, our generation’s ideas of friendship and companionship are far different than even a decade ago. I am more likely to have a friend who has a ton in common with me 3,000 miles away than become friends with the guy who works in the cubicle 5 feet from me. It is important that you understand this fact to understand who we are.

This is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. It does mean that we are simultaneously far less lonely and far lonelier than those who came before us. We are drowning in friends, yet friendship no longer carries the same bond that it once did. While I have a few choice friends with whom I am close, I feel that I am the exception.

We Got Schooled

 

 

What is the purpose of school?

In an ideal world, school is designed to prepare the next generation of kids for a stable, happy, intelligent adulthood. The first few years are designed to teach you the fundamental building blocks that all humans need to know: how to read, write, add, subtract, and multiply. Then you are supposed to learn skills that will help you make informed adult decisions; History, rhetoric, strategy, and so forth. Some are then tasked to learn the entirety of current human knowledge of on specific subject so that they can teach or make discoveries, while most learn a trade that they are interested in so that they can become productive members of a working society.

This, of course, is not at all what happens.

From an early age, school is merely about memorizing facts and repeating them back to your teacher. Sometimes you have to repeat facts back on a test, or a quiz, or on a paper, or in a presentation, but that is really about as far as the variety goes.

Unless you have a truly excellent teacher, very little context is given for most of these facts that will relate them to your actual experience of life. Math’s “word problems” can usually be solved in about seventeen seconds if you are smart enough to keep a calculator (or, now, a calculator app) nearby. History is rarely related to modern day. Even science often becomes an endless parade of meaningless facts without context. How much of what you learned in seventh grade do you still remember or use? Eighth grade? Ninth?

School – the place where we spent nearly all of our time growing up – has become something like a cross between a prison and a chaotic day care center. The truly scary thing is that our generation had it much better than the one currently slaving away in our nation’s public schools. No Child Left Behind mandated that schools must teach to a series of standardized tests or risk losing funding. This has made already failing public schools fail completely, while ‘successful’ schools have only stayed that way by eliminating the last vestiges of original thought in favor of teaching to the test.

And you know what we didn’t learn in school? Anything that actually helped us become healthy, functional adults. We didn’t learn how to balance our checkbooks. We didn’t learn how to buy cars. We didn’t learn how to get (or keep) jobs. We didn’t learn how to properly speak to superiors or subordinates. We didn’t learn how to clean. We didn’t learn how to cook. We didn’t learn how to buy a car. We didn’t learn the positive and negatives of buying a house vs. renting a house. Out of all of those hundreds of thousands of hours we spent staring at the clock, not once did any class teach us what the world outside is actually like.

We Got Colleged

 

 

And then we all went to college.

In previous generations, college was a ticket out of poverty. It may have been expensive, but it guaranteed you a leg up above everyone else in the job market. College men and (the very few, in those times) college women were destined for the upper class.

So everyone decided to go to college.

This bothered the previous generation, even if they didn’t admit it. Imagine, if you will, that you graduated from High School in 1950. You got a job at a newspaper working nights on the printing press, and after 25 years you worked your way up to middle management. You may not have had a fancy college degree, but you’ve had a lifetime of know-how and you can get the job done right.

Then your neighbor’s punk-ass kid graduates from Dartmouth and applies for the same job you’ve been angling for. “Hell no!” you think. “That punk should start at the bottom – same as me. Let him work his way up the damn ladder.”

So, in effect, college graduates in my generation have to start out in the exact same place as high school graduates in the previous generation had to start. Only we’re four years behind. And fifty thousand dollars in debt, because everyone goes to college now, so there aren’t many scholarships anymore. And if you don’t go to college, you can’t even get entry level jobs in most industries: you’re banned to retail hell forever.

This is also a result of America no longer being a manufacturing nation. In previous years, anyone with half a brain could get a reasonably-paid union gig. Now? It’s Wal-Mart if you’re lucky.

If you want to find the biggest reason for why our generation isn’t buying houses and starting families in our twenties, this is it. Not graduating from college has become a sentence to a lifetime of poverty unless you start your own business, and graduating from college leaves you in massive debt at the absolute bottom of the labor market. These are not ideal conditions for which to become a self-reliant adult.

Oh, and the skills you learn in college? Unless you go to a trade school or major in something tangible like computer science, the chances of you learning something that will actually help you in your chosen field are pretty much nil. You have to go to graduate school for that.

For more on this, check out the book My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Yes, it has a talking gorilla. It also has the most intelligent deconstruction of the American education system I’ve ever read.

We Are the Lost Generation of the Financial Crisis

 

 

The day I moved to Los Angeles to seek my fortune as an adult, the local NPR affiliate reported that several of the biggest financial firms in the country had declared bankruptcy, and the marketplace lay in ruin. Two years later, the country is at over 11% unemployment and LA county is almost twice that.

While the economy has been hard on everyone, I think most people are forgetting just what it means for those of us who graduated in the years between 2006 and 2010.

There are no jobs for us. Seriously. None. Not even crappy, horrible ones at places we would hate to work at.

Far from Time Magazine’s report of twenty-somethings trying on jobs like pairs of pants, the experience I’ve had is that most people I know are completely unable to hold down a job at all. There are fifty or sixty people applying for each position, and most are going to people who are significantly overqualified. It is impossible to build a resume when no one will give you a shot. I am very lucky to be in a great position right now, and I am one of the very, very few.

You want to know why people in their twenties are moving back in with their parents? It is because ten years ago, worst case you could move into a tiny apartment with a couple buddies and get a job working construction for a few years. That option is now gone.

Many have described the current economy as a game of musical chairs where everyone sat down in the jobs they were in and held on for dear life. Those of us who happened to be just entering the labor market when ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ stopped had nowhere to sit.

In Defense

So you Boomers and Xers want to lambaste our generation as a bunch of whiny, immature Peter Pans who don’t want to grow up because we were raised as Toys R Us kids? Fine, but remember: we are all a reflection of you. Just as society is a mirror of our collective hopes, fears, and attitudes, so are we a product of what you made us. You wanted us to believe that we could be anyone and do anything. You wanted us to think we were really smart and special. You wanted us to be afraid of dangers around every corner. You wanted to completely control our culture. You wanted us to go to school until we were 23 before entering the workforce. You wanted us to sit tight until the economy improved before getting a job.

So here we are.

- Chas R. Andres, a self-reliant adult despite everything thrown at me.