Rolling on with this week’s trend of going through what each segment has taught me (I’ll stop short of recapping what “Mom Jokes” taught me but not until then), it’s “Now What?’s” turn to act a little wiser. But since part of being young is not learning from your mistakes, I didn’t really learn much but can fake it anyway. [In a related side note, writing everything in top 5 lists might be an easier way to run this site.]
Lesson 5: Occupy Wall Street DOES Have a Reason to Be Raising Hell. Young people today will be the first American generation in history to make less money than the one before it (despite what you’ve seen on American Idol). We earn less than people starting a job after college did forty years ago. We are growing up to not know what the word “pension” means. And social security and medicare almost certainly won’t exist when we’re of age to use it. At this rate, people in their twenties will be lucky if they ever own a home.
Lesson 4: Facebook Is Just Another Company. For all the over-heated rhetoric about how Facebook is either ruining America or saving it, I’m going the road less traveled in saying it’s doing neither one. Facebook isn’t this Website of Evil controlling the globe nor is it used for any purpose grander than making some people a ton of money. It is just another greedy, soulless corporation in a landscape full of them; that is until Zuckerberg goes full James Bond villain and gets a white cat, an eye patch, a maniacal laugh, and a scar down his cheekbone. I still think young people could do literally anything more valuable with their time than spending it on Facebook, but it’s not drugs, fascism, or (gasp!) texting while driving either.
Lesson 3: This Generation is Screwed. Maybe not “screwed” per se, but…uhhh…okay, yeah, screwed just about covers it. This will apparently be the first American generation to be less prosperous than their parents (see Lesson 5 for all the ways how), less literate than their parents, have fewer job opportunities than their parents, and live less than them. I don’t mean “live less” in terms of abstract notions of living well, I mean “Live” literally, as this generation’s sky high obesity rate and polluted environment means it won’t have as long a life span as our parents.
Lesson 2: But Don’t Expect Baby Boomers to Accept Responsibility For Any of It. If you’re young and looking for a great way to get infuriated, just talk about all the problems facing young people to anyone over the age of 45. Not only will there be zero empathy from a sixty year old, but they will tell you that THEY’VE got it worse than anyone. That’s right, somehow the people who will get a retirement, social security, medicare, and ruined the American standard of living by trying to squeeze every dime out of the system in the first place are worse off in their own heads. Once again proving that there is no story that “America’s Largest Generation” can’t make about themselves.
Lesson 1: If Generation Next Drops the Distractions, It’s a Force to be Reckoned With. Our generation (Generation Y or Now or Next or whatever the hell it’s called this week) can do great, big things when it drops the American Idol auditions and reality shows starring a Kardashian and actually sets about getting angry. We can topple decades long dictators anywhere from Tunisia to Egypt, or change the entire conversation in America thanks to a few protests of the 1 percent. We can do almost anything once we stop using Facebook to post what we had for lunch and start using it to tell where the next rally will be. And that’s a great promise for a better future…if we’ll only stop believing that Simon Cowell will discover us first.