(For the record, I'm a former Taurus/current Aries and Dog in the respective systems. The personality change from Taurus to Aries was painful. I woke up one day a lot less loyal and stubborn, which was replaced with a hyper-competitiveness and tendency to tell it like it is. Kidding aside, and despite my skepticism, I have to admit that all three personality archetypes can be combined to describe me in broad strokes pretty well.)
If the nurture part of nature-vs-nurture is ignored in these systems, then what am I to make of labeling generations? We may want to believe that the terms Baby Boomers and Generation X have more authority because this is the purview of sociologists and not palm readers. But the scope is so much grander. The labels imply there is a tendency for people born - not in the same month or year but the same quarter-century (roughly) - to have the same general traits.
The danger of applying labels in this way popped into my mind when I recently went to a workshop on generational differences in the workplace, focusing on Millennials (defined in the workshop as being born in 1980 - 2010). This was of particular interest to me, being a Millennial (albeit born toward the beginning of the timeframe) that works almost exclusively with people older than me. What struck me is some of the traits used to describe Millennials:
- sheltered - parents of Millennials often accompany their children on job interviews or argue grades with professors.
- pressured - Millennials are raised to always be achieving something: get into the right preschool and do well so they can go to the right grammar school and do well, and on and on.
- structured - as kids, Millennials are often shipped from one activity to another often in the same day (e.g. school to soccer practice to piano lessons)
There is a common factor in the traits I listed above: they are all enabled by middle class, white-collar, suburban life. And with that statement, I run the danger of being overly general myself, but allow me to explain. Structuring children's schedules with music and sports involves time and money commitments that aren't always possible with parents punching the clock. In many areas, the quality of education is not generally a choice in a child's early schooling, unless the parents have means to reside in a good school district or are willing to pay for private school.
Generalizing attributes of the well-off to an entire generation may be justified by the workshop's assertion that Millennials are part of the richest generation that the world has ever seen. The workshop essentially implied that the Millennials consist of rich kids, whose parents organize their lives and do much of the legwork for them. It's no wonder that the workshop also stated that Millennials are perceived as having feelings of entitlement.
But let's not forget that income disparity between the highest and lowest earners has been growing for the entire time Millennials were being born. The United States is also becoming more racially diverse, and minorities traditionally have less income. At the same time, college enrollment is at an all-time high, meaning it's likely that many Millennials are the first in their families to go beyond high school. These statistics point a very different picture: many Millennials are overcoming disadvantages to increase their and their children's standard of living.
Do the Millennials who were able to break free of their given situation feel a sense of entitlement? I don't think so. If anything, it always feels like a continuous uphill battle. When you're the first, there is little frame of reference to look to: no one to guide the way and make sense of experiences. Also, when someone goes from a blue-collar background to a white-collar lifestyle, the perception is lots of schooling followed by a cushy desk job and that somehow this work isn't as real as a factory job. But it is possible to take the blue-collar work ethic (nose to the grindstone; do whatever it takes to get the job done) and apply it to white-collar work.
Millennials represent some of the most diverse walks of life that the United States has seen: some are privileged; others are severely disadvantaged; the rest are somewhere in between; some work extremely hard to move up in life; others expect things handed to them. We should expect to see a wide ranging set of personalities, making it extremely difficult to generalize all of these people into a few common traits. Yet, that's exactly what was done. We might as well start publishing horoscopes based on generations.
Generalizing attributes of the well-off to an entire generation may be justified by the workshop's assertion that Millennials are part of the richest generation that the world has ever seen. The workshop essentially implied that the Millennials consist of rich kids, whose parents organize their lives and do much of the legwork for them. It's no wonder that the workshop also stated that Millennials are perceived as having feelings of entitlement.
But let's not forget that income disparity between the highest and lowest earners has been growing for the entire time Millennials were being born. The United States is also becoming more racially diverse, and minorities traditionally have less income. At the same time, college enrollment is at an all-time high, meaning it's likely that many Millennials are the first in their families to go beyond high school. These statistics point a very different picture: many Millennials are overcoming disadvantages to increase their and their children's standard of living.
Do the Millennials who were able to break free of their given situation feel a sense of entitlement? I don't think so. If anything, it always feels like a continuous uphill battle. When you're the first, there is little frame of reference to look to: no one to guide the way and make sense of experiences. Also, when someone goes from a blue-collar background to a white-collar lifestyle, the perception is lots of schooling followed by a cushy desk job and that somehow this work isn't as real as a factory job. But it is possible to take the blue-collar work ethic (nose to the grindstone; do whatever it takes to get the job done) and apply it to white-collar work.
Millennials represent some of the most diverse walks of life that the United States has seen: some are privileged; others are severely disadvantaged; the rest are somewhere in between; some work extremely hard to move up in life; others expect things handed to them. We should expect to see a wide ranging set of personalities, making it extremely difficult to generalize all of these people into a few common traits. Yet, that's exactly what was done. We might as well start publishing horoscopes based on generations.
No comments:
Post a Comment