Entitled millennials?

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Gen-Y = Millennials

Here is something to consider: I announced about a year ago that I would retire before the end of 2022.  Since then, a string of college graduates have come through looking to take over my position.  Each one looked good on paper, and some of them even came from other offices in the same corporation.

All were younger than "boomers".

So far, none have been able to handle the practical, procedural, and theoretical aspects of the position, and most wanted accommodations, perks, and privileges that I had been awarded only after years of loyal service and that had nothing to do with any perceivable disabilities (or any that they admitted).

In a way, they wanted their gold medals before the race had even started.

I guess they had grown used to all those trophies post-boomer kids get for just showing up.

Yeah! Those sick people. They should have just chosen to be healthy! And generational poverty is just a myth created by those entitled millennials!

Which accommodations, perks and privileges?

Perhaps a trip back in time will elucidate the Millennial/Z world. Imagine, if you will, that it's 1975 again, everything is the same price-wise except instead of making $2.10 fresh out of school (min wage then apparently), the wage is more like $0.60 an hour, oh and every one of these jobs has many hundreds of applicants. STEM graduates, as you were, are fighting viciously for entry level jobs (that formerly required no degree) and provide a huge $0.80 an hour. Many of these graduates will give up after years of looking and settle for serving coffee - there just aren't enough graduate jobs to go around.
Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage for life - there's a glut of cheap labour, and many graduate salaries won't ever even hit the $2 or so that is the minimum wage back then. Remember graduates, younger versions of you are complaining (with some data to back it up) about their standard of living compared to non-graduates from your era.

These numbers sound crazy but they very roughly represent the purchasing power loss in real terms when you take into account general inflation and the rising cost of expensive items like housing, education, vehicles etc.

This is a system-wide crash in generational wealth and earning power and it's the tip of the iceberg.

I still don't know what a millenial is, or a generation x. I only have a vague idea what a baby boomer is - and I gather I qualify for that label and that I'm hated for it. Apparently I dominated American society during the 1980s and 90s (is this all some Amerocentric construct? I didn't even set foot in the USA till the late 2010s). And I've been buying tons of stuff I don't need (really?), failed to create jobs for the next generation (so I'm an employer now?). I'm also using up the social security that younger people are paying for (strange, I always thought I'd paid into pension schemes and am now drawing back what I was promised).

No, I think if this generation-stereotyped thing happened to anybody, it was somebody else, and if they want to throw s**t at each other about it, I can't stop them. But it sounds like it will all play into the hands of the elite, divide-and-rule and all that. No wonder the rich are getting richer and everybody else is carrying the can for it.

I think most millennials could be considered entitled because they could be millionaires if they would invest a lot of their hard earned dollars in the stock market but they dont they do bitcon and NFTs instead or put all their money in the bank.I also think they are entitled for expecting their student loans to be forgiven.I think they are entitled if they are not willing to work 100 hours a week for 40 years in the oil and gas industry are not ever willing to consider living in Midland-Odessa, Texas because Midland-Odessa and Texas is one of the last places where the American Dream is alive and well.The Baby Boomers lied to us when they said your life would turn out great if you work hard study hard make a 4.0 in college and you dont need to work until after college and borrowed all those student loans.

Last edited by Texasmoneyman300 on 13 Dec 2021, 12:05 am, edited 10 times in total.

Whoa -- what?!

I'm sorry Fnord. I must have misread this.

Did you just malign an entire generation of human beings as self-defeating criminals, failures, drop outs, addicts, and losers?

Brilliant. ^

Edit: Oh wait. Did you just blame their parents, too?

Young Millennials and Zoomers have a different relationship with work than previous generations, there's a real "I'm not going to bust my ass for you and hope you treat me well" attitude shift that frankly I approve of. I'm an old Millennial myself, and I've gone from being that good employee that went the extra mile and would go out of my way to help out to doing the minimum I can get away with over the years as I've gotten shafted over and over by employers who don't reciprocate my loyalty and extra efforts, and I've actually owned a business and seen what it's like from the other side of the paycheck.

I will fire them if they dont bust their butts at all times for me and those who dont go the extra mile will be fired since its my company.That kind of attitude does not work in the oilfield.

I can relate to that. When I started my first job there were bone idle people there who were just ripping the place off (though most weren't like that), but over the years employers tightened their stranglehold and staff were being pushed into working harder and longer for less. I've never felt any anger about most of the people who somehow manage to drop out and survive on benefits. It's no different to being a successful business owner, who might work fairly hard at times but gets paid far more than what he's really worth. In a way, anybody who accepts a job that rips them off becomes part of the problem. Having too much of a work ethic makes no sense because ethics have nothing to do with the game they're playing.

Exactly, too many employees give more than what they're paid for on the naive assumption that they'll be recognized and rewarded for it, when that's not really how it works these days.

I struggle with this, too, as a Gen-Xer. It’s not that you or I are entitled. Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the issue here. I was told that you graduate high school, go to college, and you WILL get a good job and nice house. You just have to work hard. But I think about all those teachers who encouraged me to chase my dreams, be myself, work hard, and so many valedictorian speeches, motivational speeches, and everything else.

We grew up being lied to, because the world in which that advice worked doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, education is good. Sure, hard work is good. Sure, it’s important to have strong values. But these good things are only foundational for having nice things. You won’t have all the things without them. Having an education and being a hard worker are never any guarantee that you’ll have nice things.

I also think we were sold the ILLUSION that we would enjoy the same lifestyle we did as children in the homes we grew up in. My mother grew up on a farm picking cotton by hand and milking cows every morning. My father grew up in a similar kind of way, joined the Air Force, worked for a couple different businesses after before starting his own. Mom got a job working for a bank, never even finished community college. They commuted for some 20 years and built a house towards the end of that and worked closer to home. That was about the time I was born, and I had a brother about 10 years older than me. Mom worked for more than 30 years AFTER that. In their world, getting fired from a job was the worst tragedy you could experience because it meant something was wrong with you. And you didn’t leave a job, either, because loyalty was a thing and leaving meant you were a quitter that nobody in their right mind would hire.

So what happened was a shift in values where these companies that were barely startups back in their day had already hired too many employees. People my mom’s age and younger rose through the ranks and promptly forgot what it took for them to get there. They led from the shadows of their predecessors and fed off past successes. So when staff was underperforming, it was THEIR fault, not leadership. So there must be something wrong with these people, and people started getting fired ALL THE TIME. It’s perfectly normal to lose your job now. Loyalty, security, hard work, and ingenuity are no longer defining characteristics cultivated in the workplace. You “either got it or you don’t.” That’s why if you are an Xer or a Millennial, if you really want what your parents had, your mantra has to be “Move up or move out.” I guarantee your employers are already thinking that about you. You have to understand that position in companies doesn’t hold the same value it used to. Employers have already established their teams and you WON’T be on that team ever. The way you get those jobs is when someone quits or dies, and they NEVER promote insiders into those jobs. They always bring in people from the outside. So if you’re the front-runner for a job and someone quits or dies, you don’t get the job, then you want to punch up your resumé and plan your exit strategy. Put your house up for sale and get ready to move. And don’t forget to express genuine gratitude for the experience.

Your parents and teachers will never tell you this. They just say go to school, get a good job, follow all the rules, keep your head down and your mouth shut. Or they say that the rich people break all the rules. If you are a rule follower, then you are mediocre, a slacker, and they fire you for lack of imagination. Or if you break rules, you are defiant and disrespectful and they fire you. The middle ground is staying in a job you hate that doesn’t pay enough and makes you miserable.

Been there. I ended up taking a high-paying church job, got bonuses and raises almost every year after a certain point. I got all sorts of decent solo piano gigs, played in bands. I got fired from two schools, quit the other out of frustration with administrators. My family was briefly homeless after both of us had been fired from different jobs. Eventually I took a part time gig starting a band in a school that didn’t have one. In the year leading up to COVID, my wife lost a baby. We decided to try again, which meant 4 kids in a tiny, 3 bedroom, rodent and roach infested trailer with leaky pipes and mold and a completely wrecked septic system. So, ok…time for repairs, and let’s renegotiate my school contract for full-time pay and more classes and students, maybe get some kids playing drums at football games. Instead, they decided to equally distribute my budget among 5 arts teachers.

Meanwhile, my church fired my boss. Instead of letting me take over choir duties, they bring in a totally unqualified guy from the congregation who really just wanted to play rock star. I almost walked out right before worship service. THAT was the last time anyone went to church for months. Later on, once in-house meetings resumed, they brought in a guy I’d worked with before…which was fine, but then he started being difficult. And his sub when he had to be out was impossible to work with.

I quit my school gig, took a full time gig 3 hours away, and left. I kept the church gig on the weekends since we still owned a house there. But then I started getting calls from another church I’d played for on one Sunday and helped out during choir practice. They were putting a lot of pressure on me…basically, do you want this job or not? The kind of final straw at my church was the music committee brought in this organist who was totally out of touch with how we did things there. It wasn’t fun, she was unreasonable, and one Sunday she showed up and told me it was just organ playing, no piano. The problem with all this was she’d been told under NO circumstances was the pianist to be excluded from playing the service since a) I was still on staff and b) I was traveling nearly 200 miles to get there. It was her job to provide me with music, which she never did, and only a select group even really liked what she was doing. It was disappointing to everyone else. So she was promptly fired. I think maybe I played one more week after that since I’d already given them notice that I was leaving.

So…currently I have a full time day job AND a church gig, same as before, slightly lower pay than last time but with fewer expenses. My wife is now a stay-at-home mom. And our income is well above what we were making with 4 jobs and other side hustles between the two of us. Our house now is MUCH roomier than the last and easier to maintain. Our lifestyle isn’t that far removed from what it was like growing up at my parents’ house. But what I want to point out is how long we struggled and how hard we worked to get here. Even when things were tough in the early days of our marriage, we were very happy with the little we had and we sacrificed many things we wanted to make sure our kids had decent daycare and school and were safe and healthy. We spent some years in a house with no heat or air, which made us and our kids very tough. I took up running, which helped acclimate to extremes in temperature throughout the year.

Your parents won’t really help you understand that starting out can be as difficult or worse for you than it was for us. The big bad world doesn’t owe you anything. Your education doesn’t open up all the magical doors to make your life that awesome. Teachers and parents, even when they have the best intentions, even when they don’t know they do this—they LIE. You want what they gave you growing up, which is a good thing to want. You want to believe them. But that world is long gone. And even MY children will inherit a different world and face their own difficulties which will be different from mine. We have to teach them NOT to expect our successes, but rather to build on top of everything we gave them and move forward. Throughout all of history, that’s the one thing that’s remained consistent: the world owes you NOTHING, build on the lessons your parents and teachers taught you, make your own way in the world, and teach/mentor/inspire/motivate your own kids or other younger adults.

As for our next steps—I’ve been at my current full time for my second contract year and I’m seeing the same kinds of things that caused me to leave the last one, except with a severely less friendly administration and some absolutely horrid parents and students. I keep telling myself that these are just seniors that all teachers are complaining about and to just keep my focus on 5th and 6th grade beginners. But this also means shutting down the band and starting over fresh, and that’s not the job I signed up for. I’ve gotten some excellent experience in putting together a band staff, running a booster club board of directors, fundraising, organizing trips, etc. I couldn’t say that before. And if I campaign to keep this job, I run too great a risk of losing it, meaning 7 people, or 8 if we decide to have another baby, will end up on the street. We’ve been there before, too. Not going back to that life. And that means being willing to take risks on other jobs, willing to pack up and leave on a moment’s notice, and hanging on to the “For Sale” sign. It’s a cruel world we live in where bosses are @holes, people gossip at work, and kids act like they own the place. To which we say, meh, whatever. Your parents and teachers never prepared you for that. Now you get to clean up that mess. What will happen is that once you figure that out for yourself, you can begin putting that kind of life together for yourself on your own terms.

I’ve managed to avoid calling you “entitled” or blaming you for how your life turned out. I agree with you up to a point. Nobody is going to GIVE you anything you want. You either earn it or you make it. You’ll ultimately find that earning and creating are much more worthwhile than being handed everything. You feel the way you do because you were taught to feel that way—and boomers will deny this all the way to the grave. But knowing the truth, you can take greater ownership and control over your own life and circumstances.

No more so than anyone has maligned an entire generation of human beings (e.g., mine) as self-centered narcissists, slumlords, thieving profiteers, exploitative capitalists, and merely "lucky" bastards.

Last edited by Fnord on 13 Dec 2021, 9:34 am, edited 1 time in total.