Last night, 60 Minutes ran a story about the "Millenials", which refers to the new generation of workers born between 1980 and 1995. In the peice, they discuss how the "new" workers are very technologically savy, but lack the traditional work loyalty and drive that previous generations have had.
While we all have dealt with the slacker-20-something in the workplace, it isn't really a new thing. If you go back to the boomer generation, you had the hippie set who weren't really that motivated or ambitious. Before that you had the beatnicks, bums and village idiots. The fact is that every generation looks like lazy little bastards to those who are older.
I don't want to defend the little jerks who walk around with ipods, text message constantly, spend thier days on MySpace, YouTube or whatever else they are doing. However, they are just young and don't have the responsibilities that a 42 year old guy with an ex-wife, current wife, combined 5 kids spread over 3 states and credit card debt up to his double chin has. If we just give the 20-somethings time, they will eventually get themselves into crappy life circumstances where loyalty to the company and the job will override their selfish desires to be happy.
The media has to come up with some way to segment people to make broad generalizations about generations since they can no longer generalize according to race, ethinicity, sex or any of the previous groupings.
Am I concerned that the fat little kids who are self involved are going to run our country into the ground? No, not at all. By the time these guys are in charge and in a position to screw up our economy, we should have the GDP of Paraguay thanks to the current crop of morons running our macro economy.
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