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JCC The Milennial generation and unrealistic expectations about life.

Discussion in 'Community' started by KING_KENOBI, Feb 3, 2016.

  1. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    I am an early millennial,born in the mid 80s,grew up in the 90s/00's,growing up it was always hammered into me and my peers the mantra of self esteem and the concept that everybody could do anything .

    These concepts in various iterations and variations were constantly encouraged ( remember "everybody gets a price?!"),we were proverbially brainwashed with unrealistic optimism along with a good dose individualism which is understandable while not maybe the best of combinations.

    Along the way things happened in history which changed the world a lot.
    9/11 really was a big traumatic event not only in the US but globally,after that I personally put my life on hold very much and enlisted in the military a few years later..
    While humping around the strange lands of the theaters of the GWOT, I got a healthy dose of reality myself,what hit me coming back to civvie street around 08/09 was how seemingly disconnected a big portion of people my age was from the reality of life in general.

    I were back end type of work paying for college, in media companies for a little while,and worked for an adult film company (mind out of the gutter),they were starting doing films with a lot of newly 18 year old teens and suddenly these girls were everywhere

    I got to know a lot of the girls as much as you can get to know someone in a couple of months before they were gone back to where they came from and the turnover rate was incredible.
    What struck me about these girls was overwhelmingly the main motivation was "I wanna be famous",and they believed this was the way to go..the reality of it was they did shoots for a couple of months then reality hit and they were gone.

    I actually managed to talk a few out of it before they even did one shoot,for these it was obvious they didn't really want to do adult shoots but believed it was a powerful stepping stone to becoming recognized and famous..a little dose of reality in verbal form snapped them out of it,they procrastinated for a few weeks and took off again.
    (as an aside one of these was the reason why I left and started working finance,she became my fiancee for a while and we lived together almost 4 years,but it didnt last,we are still fast friends)

    What I am trying to convey is that there is a overwhelming amount of young people,many uneducated with vastly unrealistic ambitions and expectations of what life
    is like ,a study done recently indicated 58% of current high school seniors have aspirations of fame .
     
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  2. JoinTheSchwarz

    JoinTheSchwarz Former Head Admin star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 21, 2002
    I was born in 1980, when my home country had just left a terrible dictatorship before and were embracing the sweet song of liberal democracy and the welfare state.

    They said exactly the same about my mother's generation.

    They say the same of every generation lucky enough to have higher living standards than the previous ones.
     
  3. Darth Punk

    Darth Punk JCC Manager star 7 Staff Member Manager

    Registered:
    Nov 25, 2013
    ++anal
     
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  4. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    Yes, I recognize that,and its an easy generalization to make wich was what I was thinking,that being a said,there is a lot in the zeitgeist today that do suggest our generation have a rather large portion of indivduals falling outside society.because of

    unrealistic expectations conditioned into us from childhood with the paradigm shift caused by the self esteem movement.

    Many coming of age in a period
    characterized by great fear of terrorism and the worst economic conditions since the great depression.

    In the example I gave from my own life about the adult film industry,where yes there used to be mostly a lot of girls from broken homes but now there has been a massive influx of ,its not girls with illusions and aspirations of fame and glamorous lifestyles then to hit the brick wall of hard reality.

    People that refuses to let go of their childhood when dealing with reality and rather chose to move into the realm of fantasy e.g. furries ,otherkin etc etc

    Society has changed in this regard very much,its not catastrophic ,more of an observation..most adapts save from the ones on the far side of the spectrum,depression and suicides have been rising exponentially in the last 10 or so years globally.
     
  5. poor yorick

    poor yorick Ex-Mod star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Jun 25, 2002
    I was born in 1972, and once upon a time my generation was the most ignorant, shiftless, entitled generation there ever was. They called us "Generation X," and predicted that we would begin the decline of Western civilization. This did not happen. The Boomers' parents cried and wrung their hands over them, and so has every generation of parents before them.

    There's nothing wrong with the Millennial generation. Don't let anyone tell you that there is.
     
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  6. Adam of Nuchtern

    Adam of Nuchtern Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
  7. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    that wasnt supposed to come i quotes,and something is wrong with the edit function..fixing it
     
  8. darth_gersh

    darth_gersh Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2005
    The world is over populated, we should skip the next generation.
     
  9. Darth Guy

    Darth Guy Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Aug 16, 2002
    The oldest "millennials" are 34/35 and we're still being lumped in with high schoolers? What a meaningless label. I blame the youngest generation for this.
     
  10. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    Thats not what I am saying,I am making an observation that a larger subset of the generation I am a part of have a tendency towards unrealistic expectations then previous generations thus prone to depression etc..ca a mod please remove the quote tags in my second post ,I get a blank screen when entering the edit function.
     
  11. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    I agree its a bit silly and arbitrary and Im not personally a big fan of this label,but the title was long enough as it was and its not mentioned anywhere else,so try to look past the wording of the title.
     
  12. poor yorick

    poor yorick Ex-Mod star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Jun 25, 2002
    Young people are inexperienced, and therefore often don't have accurate expectations about the world. I suppose it's possible that teen- and twentysomethings do err more often on the optimistic side with their inaccurate expectations, but why is that bad? If you're going to be wrong 50% of the time anyway, why not be optimistically wrong?
     
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  13. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    I was born in Londonderry. I was born in Derry city too. Oh, what a special child, to see such things and still to smile.
     
  14. vin

    vin Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 1999
    You're all winners! Everybody gets a participation trophy!
     
  15. anakinfansince1983

    anakinfansince1983 Skywalker Saga/LFL/YJCC Manager star 10 Staff Member Manager

    Registered:
    Mar 4, 2011
    I took care of the quote tags.

    Not adding much to what anyone else said. My parents are in their mid-60s, part of the generation that protested Vietnam, a generation that was called "entitled" because how DARE they not want to be drafted to fight a war they disagreed with, a war that was none of our business anyway.

    I'm 44, I grew up in the materialistic 80s, and my generation got yelled at for wanting Guess jeans and Polo shirts and spending too many quarters at the arcade.

    In the "adult film" or any film industry, you will find girls who hope to be famous. That's a marker of success in that industry. If you worked in a college engineering school, you would find students who hope to make an engineering breakthrough one day. Nothing wrong with that.

    One sign of being old? Complaining about how much the younger generation sucks.

    I really like millennials and post-millennials and I'm glad they have both optimism and more opportunities due to technology advances.
     
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  16. Chancellor_Ewok

    Chancellor_Ewok Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Nov 8, 2004

    I don't buy the "young people are inexperienced" argument. Albert Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity when he was 26. Yuri Gagarin became the person to go into space at the age of 27. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at the age of 33.
     
  17. dp4m

    dp4m Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Nov 8, 2001
    To be fair, Tracy, the younger generation does suck. Being our age is awesome and they just wish they could be us!
     
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  18. Ramza

    Ramza Administrator Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jul 13, 2008
    Well, gee whiz, some of the most exceptional individuals of all time violated an example, it must not work as a rule of thumb!
     
  19. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    Absolutely nothing,I think it can be a strength for many people and it is,mostly is because the larger part of us tend to fall in and around the middle of the spectrum,it is when these are taken to an extreme, I believe many factors play into this,one of them may be the self esteem movement which the mantra from around when I were growing up forward ,the end of the cold war affecting the zeitgeist of the 90's which were crushed by the traumatic events of 9/11.

    To take another example from my own life,after I quit the previously mentioned job I got a job in finance..at a point in this career I were responsible of taking interviews for a time since I were roughly in the same age class I mostly had to do with my own age class,what was very striking to me in many of these interviews (I dont
     
  20. Chancellor_Ewok

    Chancellor_Ewok Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Nov 8, 2004


    To be fair obviously, not everyone is going to be Einstein or Jefferson, but to write off an entire generation on the basis of "come back when you're 45 and no longer young and naive," is a BS argument.
     
  21. poor yorick

    poor yorick Ex-Mod star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Jun 25, 2002

    Being the first to do something (invent a theory, go to space) doesn't require life experience since by definition no one has experience in doing something that has never been done before. It's not that uncommon for major breakthroughs to be made by young people, since they're less invested in the status quo.

    I'm not saying that young people have nothing to contribute to society. The issue was whether inexperience leads to inaccurate expectations about the world, and I think it does.
     
  22. Diggy

    Diggy Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Feb 27, 2013
    Millennials are fine by me.
     
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  23. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    Absolutely nothing,I think it can be a strength for many people and it is,mostly is because the larger part of us tend to fall in and around the middle of the spectrum,it is when these are taken to an extreme it may become an issue, I believe many factors play into this,one of them may be the self esteem movement which the mantra from around when I were growing up forward ,the end of the cold war affecting the zeitgeist of the 90's which were crushed by the traumatic events of 9/11.

    To take another example from my own life,after I quit the previously mentioned job I got a job in finance..at a point in this career I were responsible of taking interviews for a time since I were roughly in the same age class I mostly had to do with my own age class, (I dont use a very formal style even in situations that warrants it,something I think I picked up in the army )

    what was very striking to me in many of these interviews is that when asked about their previous place of employment and many answered variations of" they didn't appreciate me enough" or " I felt I did not get enough attention".
     
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  24. anakinfansince1983

    anakinfansince1983 Skywalker Saga/LFL/YJCC Manager star 10 Staff Member Manager

    Registered:
    Mar 4, 2011
    There are older people with that attitude as well. Many of them.
     
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  25. KING_KENOBI

    KING_KENOBI Jedi Master star 2

    Registered:
    Oct 19, 2004
    please stop replying to the title only,if you want to be that simplistic ok,
    I like us too.
    That is all.