5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation
At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.
See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we fucked up that handoff pretty badly.
This is not a sarcastic apology, I'm not a big enough dick to write all of this as a backhanded insult about how lazy and entitled you are. Because you're not.
I'm honestly apologizing for ...
#5. Making You Ashamed to Take Manual Labor Jobs
During one "Occupy Wall Street" protest, somebody from the Chicago Board of Trade dumped McDonald's applications on the protesters. This made me think of a viral Facebook post that David Wong showed me the other day:
Via Weknowmemes.com
If you know who that came from, we'd love to give him/her credit for the post. And a high five or something.
Because yes, you guys are getting hammered for being too lazy or "entitled" to take on a low-paying job, and for standing up and demanding help paying for college, etc., instead of just being happy "flipping burgers." People my age and older will go on and on about how in our day we weren't too good to get our hands dirty when the good jobs dried up.
But I'm pretty sure we taught you the opposite of that. And the Baby Boomers taught us.
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"Lesson 12: When you have brown people over, always smile. They can sense your fear."
See, we were raised on 1980s movies and sitcoms, and the "cold, unfeeling grownup who works too hard" was the villain in half of them. The whole point of these "body switching" comedies -- where a kid winds up in the body of a grownup -- was that the career-driven workaholic dad learned what life was really all about. The message was clear: If you work too hard, you'll lose your soul.
The characters who worked their asses off were shown to be stiff prudes who come down on the lighthearted main character with an iron fist. Or maybe that person is the main character, but by the end they realize that the only way to truly enjoy life is to lighten up and embrace their inner child. They finally stand up and quit their grindstone job in a hail of applause, and live a life of stress free bliss. As a side note, at some point, those people had to urinate ... so the little kid trapped in the dad's body was physically handling his dad's cock. That image is on the house -- you're welcome.
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By the time the Grunge Era came around, the "slacker" and "loser" characters were heroes, the guys who knew that life was really all about having fun. We were a self-depreciating group of people who proudly declared that we were what our parents always wanted to be: laid back and carefree. "Loser" and "slacker" were terms of endearment. We knew that the whole suit-and-tie job was a one way ticket to becoming Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club. So many of us ended up slacking our way into fast food jobs. We were the guys from Clerks.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now parents. We've since found out that there's not much market for making a really good honey bear bong or winning a contest for having the dirtiest flannel shirt (first place four years running, thank you very much). We've cut our hair, bought some decent work clothes and moved on -- lesson learned. But that fast food job stuck with us. It became a scare tactic to use on our own kids. We want them to have something better.
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"When we smile, it means that something that was recently inside of us ... is now inside your pizza."
But here's the thing: Those Baby Boomers who started this "you don't want to flip burgers" bullshit did flip burgers. Or roof houses, or mine coal, or wax porn stars' assholes. And that wasn't something to be ashamed of back then -- that was the era before you needed a bachelor's degree to get a job waiting tables (but more on that in a moment). But at some point between my grandfather's time and now, getting your hands dirty became something to be ashamed of. My generation perpetuated that. We made it socially unacceptable to:
A) Do any job that requires sweat and/or a uniform.
B) Work 70-hour weeks to get ahead.
So if you don't do either of those things, what's left? Getting an education and waiting for a good job in your field. But now, when we catch you doing that, we mock you and tell you to go flip burgers. And that's bullshit. We told you your whole lives that those jobs were for idiots and failures. You think you're too good for those jobs because that's what we've been fucking telling you since birth.
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"Give me shit all you want -- my car has gas and my fridge is full of stolen chicken."
#4. Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job
Last month, I overheard a conversation between a steakhouse waiter and an older couple he was serving. He knew the couple, but not intimately. They politely asked how his classes were coming along, and he said that he had in fact graduated with a degree in architecture. For the next several minutes, the old couple awkwardly tried to reassure him that something would come along while he attempted to justify to them why he was serving steaks for a living.
It was painfully clear that he felt like a failure, and that he dreaded having this conversation with every older member of his family he encountered. Having to put a positive spin on his own life, trying to reassure them that he wasn't a failure, or lazy, or hadn't dropped out of society due to a drug problem. Yes, I did get my degree. No, they're not hiring.
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"I cannot only tell you the year, but I can break down its exact molecular composition."
So, here's the thing. You have to go to college. Your parents told you that, I'm telling my kids that. Every high school teacher you have or had told you that. ("You don't want to wind up flipping burgers, do you?")
And they're not wrong; if I'm an employer looking at 200 applications to fill one job, and 50 of them have bachelor's degrees, those are going to be the ones I move to the top of the pile, even if the job is that poor bastard who shakes a sign outside of Little Caesars.
The problem is that we've sort of set you up to think that after high school, the next step is college, and after that you just jump in and start working at the job you went to college for. We kind of implied that this "college to job" transition is as natural and orderly as "high school to college." That is, if you get the right grades, you "graduate" to it. That's not true, and it's our fault that so many of you think that.
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"A master's in psychology? Pretty impressive. How would you say that qualifies you to answer the phone?"
See, our parents told us that because they didn't actually know. As a generalized whole, they didn't go to college. You have to realize how recent the whole "everybody goes to college" thing really is. It was only two generations ago that college educations were rare -- in 1950, less than 10 percent of adults had bachelor's degrees (hell, only half even graduated high school). People back then were less mobile and more likely to stay in the town where they were born. That meant that their options were limited; men joined the military, or went to work at the local factory/warehouse/whatever was hiring. Women got busy having babies and being waitresses/secretaries/whatever was hiring. College was something that smart kids and people with money did. And they probably thought those college kids had a free ticket to a nice job in an air-conditioned office.
So when they worked hard and gave their kids the opportunity to get a degree, they thought they were giving us what those fancy smart kids got: an automatic job with a hotass secretary to feel up. Sexual harassment wasn't a thing yet.
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It was considered more of a perk than assault.
Now everybody has a degree. It's the baseline minimum. So when you finally take those first steps out of university life and enter the work field, it's an absolute system shock to find out your $30,000 to $100,000+ bachelor's degree doesn't guarantee you a position in your field of study ... possibly ever. At least 40 percent of you who get degrees will wind up in jobs that don't require a degree at all. And the rest will wind up in jobs outside the field they studied.
Again, it's not that you shouldn't get a degree. Far from it. It's that the system we've declared to be the default also happens to be fucked. And not in the good way ... in the "chick breaks a porn record" way. You're not going to use 90 percent of what you learn.
I have dozens of examples of this in my inbox right now. People who have been where I've been -- poor and struggling, willing to do whatever it takes to get out of that soul-crushing hole. After years of it, they finally have enough and decide to go back to college. So I ask, "OK, that's a good idea -- then what?" And they don't know. They hadn't considered that even after graduation, they might be in exactly the same position as they are right now ... plus another $50,000 worth of debt. Nobody told them, or at least didn't tell them loud enough.
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"BRING LUBE!"
So, yes, you're frustrated and angry about that. You have a right to be.
#3. Adding Seven More Years to Being a Teenager
In my parents' day, it was always just sort of assumed that at age 18, you pack your shit and get the hell out of the house. Go back 40 years and you find everybody getting drafted into the military at that age (Vietnam and before that, Korea, and before that, World War II). When you got back, you started having babies. So if you were still living at home at age 25, they made you stay in the attic and told the neighbors you had died from tuberculosis.
Things started to change with the "everybody goes to college" era. Going to college means you're probably not supporting yourself, you're living in temporary student housing and your parents keep your old bedroom in place for when you come back for the summer. So then if you don't get a job out of college, you're right back home at age 23, possibly still sleeping on a bed shaped like the Millennium Falcon.
Via Thechive.com
OK, so I actually would own that, even as a successful adult.
So now you guys are living in a world where kids don't move away from Mom and Dad until their mid 20s to lower 30s. And it's the same story with marriage -- today you tend to marry in your late 20s, as opposed to my parents' generation, who did so five years earlier.
But this has created a very annoying, ugly side effect in the culture: the phenomenon of the immature Man-Child. The twenty-something dude with his collection of anime action figures, the guy pushing 30 who's still sticking it out with his garage band and spends his nights getting in screaming matches with teenagers on XBox Live, the hipster who spends 80 percent of his income on wacky ironic clothes and mustache growth supplements.
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This man gets no apology. He brought that upon himself.
In other words, we've extended the awkward teenage years into the mid to late 20s. Now, I would not be apologizing for this if it was just the result of social and economic factors outside our control. But the problem is that we made a hero of that person. Think Kelso in That '70s Show, or Joey from Friends. My generation aspired to be that guy, the kid in a grownup body with simple, childish appetites and aspirations. I was that guy for years -- a dude can get very popular doing that.
But let me tell you from experience, the longer you put off adulthood, the harder the transition is.
And staying home longer does delay it -- a huge part of becoming an adult is living on your own and finding out through trial and error what works, living through seemingly simple things like balancing your budget, cooking your own meals and learning how to get blood stains out of your ceiling without repainting.
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Long story.
And what's going to happen is you're going to run into a whole lot of people who still judge you according to the age scale set by my parents' generation -- that you should have your shit together by 23.
So you grow up in a culture that tells you maturity is for boring assholes, and then suddenly you get dumped into a world that expects maturity.
Excellent Article. I read the s**t out of every word. Bravo, John Cheese, bravo.
Reply"A master's in psychology? Pretty impressive. How would you say that qualifies you to answer the phone?" -I know its just a joke caption, but if you think about it, a Masters in Pyschology would be pertinent to the job. You could size up a person's mood and mental state, and further manipulate that mood to your benefit. Hell, a Masters in pysch should be mandatory for Suicide Hotline.
ReplyNot to mention, getting yourself a degree means you've mastered the art of wasting hundreds of hours listening to people talk, and then remembering the important stuff.
"Can I take a message."
I'm still not sure why this gives them the right to destroy parks, hold riots, and disobey cops
ReplyOlder generations did that too, just for better reasons.
On the last bit, yeah, I blame the people in positions of power in the city I grew up in for the weight I gained over the summers during 5th grade and beyond. At about that time in my life, they started doing budget cuts and stopped opening the pool at my local park as well as many other parks around town. Considering the city I lived in got pretty darn hot in the summer I don't see where their logic was in cutting out nearly every pool that was open to the youth of the city. Instead they kept a couple open, both of which were far away from where I lived and required not only a more than one transfer on the bus, but they cost money just to get in and it was for a limited time. My Mother did not have that kind of money to allow me to take the buses and swim every day during the summer, which is what I normally did in Summers past. So instead I would go to my Sister's house for long durations where there was a Computer, a Playstation with a good variety of games, Cable TV, Internet, and types of food I normally wouldn't eat (Microwave burritos, Corn Dogs, etc). So I began to gain a lot of weight, especially once I wound up without a working bike for whatever reason. Now it's difficult losing the weight. Wish I'd grown up rich. I'd have had a giant pool all to myself.
Replyboring - mark these words and see what you think 30 years from now (the time will pass very quickly).
ReplyI will mark these words, for they are the words I live by: mankind has always been amoral and prone to weakness at the expense of their fellow man. Read any history book and see the terrible things we've done to each other from colonialism to segregation and apartheid to the problems that existed from 1950s until now. We have always favored expediency and comfort over "virtue," this generation has the internet which old people associate with laziness. Look back on your own days, when hippies and yuppies traded in their "virtue" for drugs and salary increases and tell me again how everything is getting worse and we are worshipping the almighty dollar.
Over the past few months I've taken the time to read this article twice and to read every single post and reply.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThe reason I've done this is because as an older person with no children, it's fascinating to read what's going on inside the minds of the younger generation.
The more I read, the more grateful I am to have been born in the Fifties.
It becomes more and more apparent that my generation was very fortunate to be raised and live during a golden time of happiness and opportunity and through no fault of your own, your generation has turned out to be a disaster.
The old-fashioned, time-honored virtues that my generation was raised with have all but been abandoned and cast aside.
Honesty, integrity, strong character, religion, patriotism and sacrifice for a greater good have been replaced by lying, greed, selfishness, laziness, immature childish behavior and the intense desire for instant gratification.
Our new god is the Almighty Dollar.
With each passing generation, our society drifts further and further from the positive virtues that made us great in the first place.
The further we drift, the more miserable and pathetic we become.
The poisonous effects of political correctness have damaged our society severely and your generation in particular.
Your generation is getting a powerful dose of what it means to live without the old-fashioned virtues.
What's truly unfortunate is that the next generation will be worse off than you are because we continue to drift away from the self-giving qualities of greatness and there's no sign of change.
The saddest thing of all is that we've had the key to happiness and success all along but have thrown it away with both hands.
Pointing the finger of blame at the baby boomers may feel good will do nothing to help your generation.
Realize that the baby boomers are as dismayed as you are because not only have they lost the retirement that they worked all their lives for, their children and grandchildren are you.
It appears very doubtful that your generation will be able to curb the downward spiral because the most outraged and committed among you are busy playing in the park.
Good luck to each and every one of you - you're going to need it.
...AHAHAHAHAHA, I'm sorry, the moment you described the 50s as being more wholesome, your argument became invalid. Your rose-tinted glasses are noted, as those "values" that you speak of exited only in the glorified memories you had of your generation, not in actuality.
The wealth and prosperity you experienced while growing up had absolutely nothing to do with your perceived notion of "old-fashioned virtues". It mostly had to do with the favorable economic climate of the time, brought about by a war we profited greatly from... not to mention there was a far smaller pool of potential employees to pick from, considering that most of the people who were able to go to college and get a white-collar job were white males.
But hey, times sure were good when minorities and women had few rights and remained at the bottom run of the economic ladder, right?
If our generation suffers from laziness and a lack of values, yours suffers from a severe case of rose-tinted glasses and a pathetic lack of understanding of what it means to be a young adult in this day and age. Perhaps if you stepped off of the pedestal you stand on and opened your mind to what is currently going on economically, politically and socially, you would actually have a modicum of understanding of what you are ignorantly talking about.
More wholesome? Virtuous? How can the human race be something that it is not, we by our very existence are discrimination and selfishness incarnate.
Love this article. I'm not gonna lie, my generation is shit. It's ironic the the best generation is responsible for it
ReplyI am 45 years old and much of this is true. Great commentary. I was told about working at a gas station, not flipping burgers when I was a kid. Um... nobody actually pumps gas anymore because everyone does it themselves (stigma gone). By the way, flipping burgers was a job that I actually enjoyed when I was younger. There is a lot to learn about work in general when working at a burger flipping job. To all of you who are struggling out there, I am truly sorry. Hang in there and no matter what you do, never be too proud. There is much to learn in this world by serving others. We often find that when we tackle the tasks that are least wanted, there are great rewards that don't always translate into monetary or status gains.
ReplyWe still can't pump our own gas here in Oregon. The only thing a burger-flipping job teaches is that selling your labor for wages is a losing proposition.
Alot of these are "no s**t sherlock" But I fail to realize that perhaps there a people who never sat down and thought long enough to think about these things.
ReplyMakes me wonder how the next big youth revolt vs old timey folks will play out, and the negative consequences of them.
"I'm talking about kids, on their own, getting in trouble and setting things on fire."
f**k I laughed harder than I should have.
All Hail John Cheese! The Guru of Cracked.
ReplyI am older and my parents beat #4 and #5 into my head repeatedly. And now I am a cubicle jockey at a job that is tedious , and that I really do not enjoy. I had a job moving furniture to truck trailers in a warehouse when I was in college. Over an 18 month period my pay rose 9 bucks. They moved to ohio but I did not think to move with them. Met an old coworker recentlyand they make double the money now doing the same thing. Which means I could have left school, moved and been doing way better. If I went there now I'd have to start at the bottom again.
ReplyWow. I... I just want to say, thank you. I'm 18, in college for a major that I decided on by way of a process BARELY better than throwing darts at a list, I have NO idea what the hell I'm gonna do with it, and lately I've been feeling this just general apathy that I think is my subconscious' pre-emptive strike against the soul-crushing and panic-inducing thoughts of how all I probably have to look forward to after it all is a future of flipping burgers or working retail well into my sixties (IF I'M LUCKY ENOUGH TO EVEN GET A JOB) before dying painfully of crushed dreams and terminal uselessness. I've griped to myself and my friends about #5 and 4, I've thought about #1, worried about #3, and #2 has occurred to me before, and I've connected partial adult blame to 5 and 4 and suspected it 2 as well. If I ever bring 5 or 4 up with my parents, my mom nags me about various permutations of "if you would just get off your lazy ass you'll never have a problem again, the state of your psyche isn't my fault, it's yours, just like every other goddamn problem even remotely related to you" and then my dad cracks a joke at my expen... no, actually he just outright insults me. Bastard. Anyway, I don't blame any of my failings on adults' teachings, just my high expectations and crushed soul, and it actually brought a tear to my eye to read one of the precursor masses own up to it. Thank you so much, I just can't thank you enough.
ReplyDear Mr. Cheese,
ReplyI'd like to thank you for such awesome articles. :)
Damn, this is completely true. Also it shows a potentially dystopian future ahead.
ReplyI guess we still have Adventure Time to distract us from this fact...
The media also must shoulder some blame in children not going outside. So, so many people ignorantly think the world has "become more dangerous" because of what they see on the news. No, that isn't it. In many places the world is becoming more safe, actually. Rather, the news realized *what sells* is gloom and crime news. There is never extended news coverage about the community working together for a common cause. Instead you get extended, 24-hour news coverage about a pedo who kidnapped a child. News flash: These things have been happening since the dawn of time, but you just didn't hear about it because the media had not figured out that it keeps you watching more commercials. Now parents are actually admitting they feel nervous and afraid when their children are out playing out of sight of them. When I was younger me and my cohorts ran all over our neighborhood, up to 4 or 5 miles from home, getting into trouble, getting exercise running from the mailman who's windshield we just broke, and learning how to interact with other people. Few parents would let their kids stray so far today because "the world isn't the way it used to be when I grew up".
ReplyYa my parents wouldn't let me or my siblings hang out with our neighbors because we had a semi-bad neighborhood that was only bad because a guy 2 blocks over was a one-time sex offender. It's annoying because you grow up not having any social experience outside your family. It gets worse if you were a nerd at school too.
Sometimes I just need to read this article again. I'm graduating in a month, desperately looking for work... If I don't find a job here, then I have to move back in with my parents on the other side of the country, because they moved while I was in college. And of course, my parents are almost as bad off financially as I am. It's just so wrong. My parents have had good paying jobs their whole lives, my father served overseas for two years and ended up getting completely fucked by the banks. I'm twenty-two and I'm almost $100 thousand in debt, and yeah, I'm not even getting calls back from cafés. What the hell next, man? Because I'm really just about ready to collapse.
ReplyDear Mr. Cheese, (Did you know that John Cleese's father changed their original name from Cheese to Cleese?)
ReplyYour articles always do at least two things for me. Make me weep, for the things I have lost or suffered through, and all of the things my nephews and nieces will lose and suffer through. They also make me grateful that I stuck with my conviction to never have children!
The children can interact with people while they are working at Micky Dees! Problem solved!
ReplyUmmm... it's not just the "occupy wall street generation" that looks down upon manual labor. So does nearly every employer. It shows by how little they pay you for the back-breaking work you do. (I've moved furniture and worked as a laborer for many many years)
ReplyDefinitely one of my all-time favorite articles on Cracked. All so, so true, like many of Cheese's articles. I'm 18 but I do get pissy at people my age who think they're too good for manual labor. Of course, I did go to a school full of rich, suburban kids whose parents were bank owners and lawyers and engineers and s**t, so a lot of them did have entitlement complexes.
ReplyAlso agree on the "extending of teenage years" thing, particularly that point Cheese made about the glorification of slackers and man-children. I had a lot of people in my middle and high schools who would brag about getting 20's on their report cards.