Menial tasks: I don't think people are rejecting menial work. We only reject making it the defining feature of our daily lives. We still understand that it's necessary. We don't have the resources to automate everything yet. I do think the realization is spreading that we could do much, much better. The company I work for could easily afford to hire triple the workforce working half the hours for twice the pay, and still rake in ridiculous profits. Then we'd actually have enough time in our days to do meaningful things with, instead of coming home every day angry and exhausted, and having just enough time to do chores/run errands and relax for an hour or two before bed... and we'd have less homeless starving people. It's a bullshit existence that might have arguably been necessary before, but most certainly isn't now. I know my generation is very pissed off that we're still living like this, but we don't feel like we have the power to do anything about it
yet.
Edit: It also doesn't help that a lot of the work we do is completely worthless, superfluous bullshit that is held up purely for the excuse of having work to do, because it's the only way to survive. Increasing amounts of work becoming obsolete -> growing population that needs work to justify its survival -> fluff everything with stupid frustrating beaurocracy and unnecessary procedures
Edit Edit: Ok this is what I started typing up yesterday. I didn't end up changing it too much. I could go forever. I'll just put this out there.
I was born in '83. My earliest memory is the first time I played a computer game, at 2 1/2 years old. I feel like the defining feature of my generation is that we have witnessed a great deal of social and technological change, often going hand in hand with each other. A lot of the following perspective deals exclusively with middle-class kids who were lucky enough to be early adopters of consumer technologies. I know a lot of it will probably be controversial and there will be lots of individuals with contradicting cases.
Technology:
Witnessing the infiltration of computers into every aspect of daily life, and the sophistication of mass communications/media. Those of us who had access to technology early on in our lives have a very intuitive feel for technological advancement, and aren't much phased by it. We've gone from rotary phones and commodore 64s to the smart phones and augmented reality of today without much trouble, while many of us have parents who need a 2-page step-by-step manual on hand just to log into their e-mail, no matter how many times they do it. On the flip side, younger generations are used to mature/intuitive interfacing and a general high quality of sleek polish to everything, and can have a lot of trouble coping with older or just unpolished stuff even if it has other good qualities.
Some of us remember what the internet was like in the mid-90's and are keenly aware of how it has evolved. Most people were afraid of the internet back then. Seriously. People thought I was crazy for visiting chat rooms online, and were convinced that some internet stalker was going to kill me in my sleep and that my parents were horrible for allowing me on there. So it was a very different community overall. It was a refuge for people who didn't fit in wherever they were in meatspace. In retrospect, I refer to it as The Ignorance Filter that made the "good old days" of the internet what they were. I met the best friends of my life on the internet in those times, and I remember the internet as a whole being as liberal and friendly as Bay12 is today.
We also witnessed the sophistication of advertising and PR. We were immersed in media from an early age. Helicopter parents didn't exist back then. Cable Guy wasn't joking when he said the tv was our babysitter, and I'll comment more on this later. We remember when advertising was still rough and campy in production value, and our resistance to it kept pace as it advanced. The weaker media of our youths sort of vaccinated us against the media we find as adults. We're now accutely aware of the nature and science of advertising and propaganda, and 25-35 is officially recognized as the most difficult age group to influence. We're highly cynical and filter manipulative media without even thinking about it. Most of the older generation didn't see it coming. Younger generations didn't get the same vaccination that we did, having been born into a more sophisticated media environment.
We also understand to an extent what life was like before technology took over. When we were little, our grandparents were still doing farm work the old-fashioned way, and told us stories about what it was like to survive a winter with nothing but sweat and firewood. We understand how that's changed, and we're concerned about stuff like where our food comes from. We tend to find that older generations value hardship too much and younger generations value it too little. I think we're also more concerned with preservation, as older generations are enamored with a future they don't understand, and younger generations seem completely disconnected from the past.
Social Change:
We've witnessed the utter collapse of the premises on which previous generations built their lives. Our parents and grandparents worked their asses off and gave themselves completely to their jobs. Most of our grandparents did alright, but most of our parents have seen all their work completely invalidated by economic cycles, while their bosses cut ties and run away with all the fruits of their labor.
Generations before us grew up with drastically cheaper education and far less economic inequality to crush their opportunities, and those opportunities were many. While my generation was only old enough to witness the drastic changes of the last 30 years, our parents were old enough to take advantage of them. Using my dad as an example: He grew up as a poor farmer, but was able to afford a college education up to Masters level on a McDonalds income
while raising me. When he finished his degree, he didn't even have to job hunt. Employers contacted him, and quickly landed a great career as a pharmacokineticist. He was also an early techie and did core maintenance and IT work for his very large corporate employer before they had official positions handling those things, and he enjoyed great benefits just for being basically computer literate before most people. Obviously, things don't work anything like that today.
Thus we've seen how the balance between luck and hard work really plays out. Growing up, we were fed all these promises by our parents and teachers that the changes that were happening all pointed to a bright future, and all we had to do was work hard, go to college, and follow our dreams to be successful. We saw how things worked out for our parents and it was easy to believe. The majority of us who honestly believed and acted on that advice are back to living at home now, competing with recent middle-age layoffs for minimum wage jobs that used to be for high school kids. Some of us are keeping our recently laid-off parents fed and sheltered now with those jobs.
Meanwhile, our grandparents think we're the laziest, most entitled generation the world has ever seen. We're also expected to see a drop in our life expectancy compared to the several generations before us, that saw steady increases.
We've also seen the consequences of social progress and compromise. I see my parent's generation as being very socially progressive compared to my grandparents. My parents ended normalization of the nuclear family, brought us our first gay celebrities, and the sexual revolution of the 80s. At the same time, they came from deeply religious backgrounds (their parents were the generation that added "under god" to the pledge of allegiance) and wanted to reconcile these changes with tradition.
I think religion is falling out of favor with my generation, because we've seen that these things just cannot work together. The mixed messages we received resulted in large amounts of confusion, alienation, and outright rejection. Consequently, We also saw the rates of divorce and working moms simultaneously skyrocket and are recognized as the generation with the largest amount of "latchkey kids". When not in school, we raised ourselves on tv, video games, and internets while both parents worked. We were the last generation where it was widely accepted for kids to play outside alone for long periods unsupervised. So we alternated between vegetation and adventure. By the late 90's fear culture and urban sprawl made this risky, as it's now really easy to get accused of negligence. So we ended up stuck in vegetate mode more often than not. We weren't able to do much.
We're much more likely to see expansion of civil rights, especially to include gay rights, and sexual liberation as positive things, but we've also seen the religious right retreat further and further into insane depths of reactionary fundemantalism as a result, so we're highly critical of religious lifestyles and militant about religion being something that doesn't belong in the public sphere. We basically saw our parent's attempts at holding religious beliefs while pushing social progress as complete failure, and don't put the same kind of effort into reconciling the two.
We're stuck in a rough spot and other generations, younger or older, don't seem to sympathize with us very much. It's easy for me to understand why, despite many of us being really very passionate, we're seen as such an apathetic generation.
We also have a unique perspective on the evolution of modern conflict. We were young enough to hear stories from people who fought in wars that still took place on battlefields, while the war we see today is nothing but assassination and terror campaigns carried out by machines against people with no hope of escape once the crosshairs find them, much less retaliation. We're acutely aware of how the world has shifted from warfare of blood, sweat, and tears to pure information, and the implications of that shift (it's less about defense and democracy and more about enforcing compliance with ideological purity and established powers). I've never looked at statistics on it, but I remember there being a recruitment crisis in the military around the same time that I was of prime age. When a recruiter called me, I just repeated "Not interested" about 20 times until they hung up. Information warfare spreads across all spectrums, from media to economics to politics and activism. We saw the rise of file sharing/piracy on the internet and thought it was the glorious future, then suffered as the established order made it clear that it's not the future they want, and fed us a ton of easily debunked falsities to justify the excessive crackdown. The Patriot Act was passed when we were young adults, and we saw it used to crush dissent (and file sharing) across the country instead of fighting terrorism. As a result, I think we're the most passionate about information freedom, and net neutrality/privacy are the issues we're most willing to throw down on... or that might just be the most blatant personal projection in this post
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Topic: How's your generation doing? (Read 45564 times)