I have bad news, fellow college students: We are a bunch of whiny, immature slackers. Please take a break from your midterms, internships, part-time jobs and tutoring of underprivileged children to hear me out.
According to a report that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” this Sunday, “millennials” (old-person speak for those of us born between 1980 and 1995) are entering the workforce and shocking our employers with our surprising desire to lead fulfilling lives.
This has caused our parents’ generation, the baby boomers, to feel outraged that we are smart enough to avoid the suffering they had to endure.
The episode featured “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer referring to our generation as “narcissistic praise hounds” who aren’t prepared for the working world, as well as various other boomers lamenting the fact that companies are relaxing the office environment and providing more perks to recruit young people.
Marian Salzman, an ad agency executive at J. Walter Thompson, pointedly summed up the litany of complaints about millennials by sighing, “You can’t really ask them to live and breathe the company.”
And we’re being accused of whining?
I feel sympathy for the boomers themselves, if not for the source of their moaning and groaning.
They grew up in a time when it was important to “pay your dues,” as Safer mentions, which translated into working long hours so that they could be promoted and required to work longer hours.
But after observing such painful existences and mocking them with movies such as “Office Space,” our generation is demanding something more.
As a result, companies like
Zappos.com have begun meeting our demands by providing nap rooms, parades and happy hours in order to recruit and keep employees.
Knowing that other, younger people are having fun and making progressive changes in the workforce really gets to boomers. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, for example, actually blamed Mr. Rogers, from the once-popular children’s television show, for making our generation too self-centered.
What was Mr. Rogers’ crime?
According to Zaslow, “telling preschoolers, “˜you’re special.'”
Yes, the supposed follies of an entire generation stem from a deceased man who liked to play with puppets while giving toddlers compliments.
Another source of boomer resentment is that more than half of college students move back home after graduation.
Perhaps the reason for this may be that, according to The New York Times, college costs are currently rising at double the rate of inflation.
Or that in order to buy a house in today’s economy within a decade of graduating, we would need to sell our vital organs on the black market.
Of course, that’s our fault too. Zaslow baselessly speculated that our nation may be “getting behind as an economy” because our generation is “playing computer games at work.”
Hint to Zaslow’s employers at the Journal: I think someone may be in need of some nap-room time.
This report serves as evidence not for the laziness of millennials, but of the regrets of boomers. When they complain that our childhoods were too pleasant and that we have too much power when selecting jobs, they’re really saying that they resent a work-life spent sucking up to bosses and typing in cubicles.
But what the boomers have to realize ““ whether they’re the CBS executives who aired such a shameful piece of journalism or managers who wish their employees would act a little bit more like trained dogs ““ is that the millennial stereotypes they have created are completely ridiculous.
I, as well as the majority of my peers, greatly respect the knowledge and wisdom of my professors, mentors and employers, many of them boomers.
Additionally, our supposedly lazy generation is, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the most civically engaged yet.
So please, show us some respect, and we’ll return the favor. We might even teach you how to use that new program you installed on the company computers.
If the Wall Street Journal would like an employee who will not embarrass herself on national television, they can contact Strickland at kstrickland@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.