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When someone tells me I can’t do something, it usually just makes me want to do it even more. I’m contrarian to a fault. Whether it’s a buddy of mine at the bar telling me that I should mix in a water or a stranger telling me I that suck at getting dressed, I’ll do the opposite of what someone tells me to do just to watch them squirm.
An article in The New York Post was published yesterday morning detailing why millennials suck in three “action items.” It was written by one of our fellow Gen-Y-ers who seems to think that he was born thirty years too late. How original of him to say that he should have been born in the 70s because “everything was better then.”
Look, columns like this get written all the time. I knew after reading the headline that it was going to be about how entitled we are as a generation. And we are entitled. It’s for good reason, though. Our parents raised us in controlled environments. What the hell is wrong with that? I’d rather be coddled and loved as a child than ignored and left to my own devices.
We’re the most educated group of people of all time. We like having fun. We prioritize taking trips to see friends over going to work sometimes. We drink too much. We tweet too often. Whatever, man. Let me live my life how I want to live it.
People like this guy who complain about my lazy tendencies just make me want to be even more lazy and narcissistic than I already am. I love getting a reaction out of people. It’s funny to me— kind of like how taking a dump in the back of a movie theater is funny. Then just waiting until somebody sits in it. Hear it squish. I want to shake him and tell him that life after your twenties kind of sucks.
“People like me are called “old souls,” or “26-going-on-76.” We’re chided by our peers for silly things such as enjoying adulthood, commuting to a physical office and not being enamored with Brooklyn. Contentment has turned us into lepers. Or worse: functioning human beings… They want to work from their apartment. A US Chamber Foundation study said work-life balance drives the career choices of 75 percent of millennials. In my experience, however, the balance generally tilts toward wherever you can type pantsless.”
Seriously, what is this stigma with working from home? Working from the couch in your living room is the best. You can put Sportscenter on mute while you sip halfway decent coffee from your kitchen. Plus you don’t have a Brenda or Steve in accounting who wants to talk to you about your weekend.
And Brooklyn? I’ve never been to New York City, but all I ever hear about it is how great it is. Yeah, you’ve got to deal with overpopulation and exorbitant fees for every little thing, but I bet it’s pretty fun if you’re a 20-something.
You want to know why older people want to work from their office? Because they have families that they want to get away from for a few hours everyday. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a wife. If I can get my work assignments done from home, what the hell is the difference?
Working from home may be a generational thing, but I’d bet there are a shit load of older humans who would opt for working in their sweatpants over putting a suit on and hauling ass to work everyday. But fear not, because our author has solutions to get all of us millennials out of this rut that we didn’t even know we were in.
Action item one: Stop blaming everybody. Don’t blame the big banks, don’t blame your mom, don’t blame the baby boomers, don’t blame your employer, your landlord, the economy, the Apple store, the media, the airlines, the weatherman, or George R.R. Martin.
Why wouldn’t I blame everybody else? Complaining is one of my favorite things to do. My bad luck is caused by stuff out of my control. If I don’t have the job that I want it’s because I didn’t have ten years of experience and someone didn’t want to take a flyer on me. If my rent or my taxes get increased, guess what? That’s on Congress working for special interests instead of the common man. Complaining is a national pastime. It’s inherently American. Don’t tell me that bitching about trivial things is exclusively Millennial because it isn’t.
Action item two: Stop being so insular. Try empathy on for size. Befriend some dissenters. Grab a beer with them, listen to what they have to say. For once, don’t yell at them.
I’m 25 years old. I know who I like and who I don’t like. And the people I hate are not people that I want to grab a beer with. I have no patience for humans with no sense of humor and the author of this piece sounds like one of those people. I’m nitpicky about which bars I’ll frequent and who I’m frequenting them with. I like going to the bar, but only if it’s with people who I can tolerate for more than ten minutes. Don’t tell me to go get a drink with someone I hate, because that sounds miserable.
Action item three: Stop waiting around for something big to happen. Getting a job is hard. Filling out a million online forms isn’t enough. You need to leave your apartment, meet people, be assertive, interested, open. I’ve gotten full-time jobs by sitting at bars and dancing at wedding receptions.
But I don’t want to leave my apartment, remember? I’ve got everything I need at my fingertips. I want to work four days a week and “work from home” on Fridays so I can go out and get drunk on Thursday night. I want to watch television shows without commercial interruptions and I want food delivered to my doorstep. Getting a job is hard because employers make it so difficult. As it stands right now, applying for jobs online is a crap shoot. Your resume rarely gets looked at, and even when it does, the chances of you getting an in-person interview is miniscule. How come thirty years ago you could walk out of college and get a job that paid a respectable salary, but now you’re lucky to get 30K and an offer from your parents to stay on their health insurance?
Young people are obnoxious. It’s in their blood. Everyone in their mid-20s is an idiot. Let me be annoying while I still can. I can be miserable when I’m 30, okay? Allow us 20-somethings to live life how we want to live it. Generations after us will be doing the same obnoxious shit, just like generations before us did.
Take a Xanax and watch eight hours of some silly tv show. Get a little too drunk on some random Tuesday night. Blame your problems on someone else. That’s what Americans do best. We’ve only got so much time on this Earth, and if I want to complain then I’m going to complain. Life after your 20s is fucking bleak. Everyone is allotted some time to be a little selfish. Do it while you still can..
Respond
jduda@grandex.co
We need to rise up and start writing articles every other day about how Baby Boomers suck.
The guy who wrote this was definitely that kid that claimed to only listen to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones in middle school because he was “the only one who knew what real music sounds like.” Gimme a fucking break.
I hate this guy but I hate the way you dress equally as much, John.
This nerd acting like he’s a special flower for not wanting to work from home is some stereotypical millenial bull. The whole article is actually just all about what a special snowflake he is. He just doesn’t have any friends is all.
This author is so smug that he probably enjoys the smell of his own farts.
Something tells me there aren’t a lot of women who want a 26 year-old guy with the mannerisms of their grandpa.
Can confirm.
This guy got jobs “by sitting at bars and dancing at wedding receptions” doesn’t sound like they panned out to be that great. He sounds more entitled than his target.
Well, you know what they say, contentment breeds complacency so this guy is basically making fun of himself by being part of the exact same problem that he’s pretending to be fighting against. They should knock him out, place him in an isolated room with a computer and some spreadsheets and on the wall there will be a child’s crayon drawing of “outside” and then I’m the corner of the room there will be a running rat wheel that powers an analog TV hanging from the ceiling and it will flicker on with loud sounds of laughter and giggles and it will then depict a monkey sitting at the same desk in the same room as it slowly turns its head toward the camera and winks with a psychotic smile.
I like that he harps on millenials for being lazy yet writes an article using all of the laziest millenial stereotypes he can come up with. Furthermore, as someone on the older end of the generation y spectrum, I think most of this shit is made up of anecdotal evidence that one guy had, and then writers copied it to fill column inches. Between my old ass friends, my younger sister and her friends, and my cousins, I just spent a three day weekend around basically the entire age range of millenials, and none of these stereotypes hold up.
It’s not a “millennials suck” article without having no idea how a modern hiring process works! “Filling out forms online isn’t enough!” Let me just stroll into the Comcast Center and drop off my resume like it’s 1955, see if I get a call back.