I recently read something interesting on Salon.com (I know. But for every ten articles they publish about orgasms, they have one or two thoughtful pieces, too); an excerpt from a book written by Simon Sinek called “Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t.” The article focuses on Millennials (or Generation Yers, as he calls us) and our work ethic, our parents and the world in general. One of the salient points that he makes is that the stigmatizing of Millennials as “lazy” may be unfair, and that our laziness is actually veiled impatience and is at least partly the fault of our parents. I consider this is all true. I wanted to put my oar in the water and explore this idea a bit.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (I’m not really sure which), my parents are Baby Boomers or, as Sinek describes them, the “Me Generation.” This generation, for better or worse, was raised in a period of unprecedented abundance and growth and in turn wanted to provide their own children with absolutely everything. My parents were in their forties when they had me and I was preceded by three siblings. As such, my parents were pretty much worn out by the time I (or the gamete of me) snaked past the IUD to be conceived and eventually born in 1986. From childhood onward, I was granted most anything I desired and then praised for even the most meager of accomplishments. I do believe this effort by my parents was good-natured in spirit, but I also believe that quite a bit of it was used to supplant actually having to, y’know, parent. Now, don’t get me wrong, my parents did the best that they possibly could while also tending to the needs of three other children (two of whom were in high school at the time), their own needs and the demanding requirements of a full-time job. But I cannot recall many occasions from my upbringing in which I had been taught how to do something practical like fix a faucet or build a shelf, which may or may not have been informed by my vehement protestation at any suggestion thereof.
I remember walking home in the fourth grade to an empty house (a latchkey kid) to eat Chips Ahoy (with the rainbow chips) and watch television or play Nintendo 64 until my parents got home. I was granted autonomy before I wanted or needed it. I retreated into an internal world and developed obsessive tendencies which, in hindsight, was my effort to protect myself against a world that I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t understand it because it was rarely explained to me properly; I was neither informed by experience nor explanation, so much of my understanding came from television and was colored with shades of fear and misconceptions. It was a world of absolutes. I grew up with D.A.R.E., in which a fear was instilled in me that great swaths of the population were waiting in the wings to coerce me into drug addiction and crime. My small animal brain was inundated with marketing that implanted within me an intense but unknowable desire to accumulate and consume something, anything. To always scratch the itch. I was told by a neighbor kid that you could contract AIDS by not washing your hands before eating. For years onward my hands were cracked and raw from over-washing and I would walk to the dinner table like a surgeon prepped for operation.
What this translated to as I approached adulthood was a pronounced anxiety, though I didn’t have that name for it then. I was anxious about my identity and my inability to fit in (hey, what kid isn’t?) and found myself needlessly explaining myself to anyone that would listen. I was anxious about going to school every year on April 20th, positive that I would be killed in the next Columbine Massacre. I was anxious that I was a late bloomer, a born loser, a virgin and a philistine. I was lost in the wilderness of Great White Suburbia in which very specific narratives were established for me to follow. To stray outside of those narratives lead to alienation and disenfranchisement. You're effectively left behind. I graduated high school with next to no skills (aside from pwning n00bs in Halo). Granted, this is my fault. I am by no means discounting personal responsibility with any of this. I could have actively accumulated skills through action and participation but the bounty of video games (and other media), weed and disposable income— indeed, the entire spectrum of White Privilege— allowed me to develop in just the way I wanted: through an emphasis on instant gratification and little else. It was what I had been taught; it was all I knew.
Because of this, I found myself bouncing around from job to job every couple of years or so. Furthermore, any job I occupied operated on the criteria that it only provided enough for the most basic needs of life like rent, weed, drink and entertainment. No savings. No benefits. No planning. I had found a niche within the restaurant industry but, after a few years of drunken, drama-soaked iniquity, the hollowness of it all set in and I sought something else. My move upset a lot of the friends I had made, friends of affinity (read: fellow drunks), themselves probably made to uneasily question their own path after my departure. I went to work at the family business, a plumbing and heating supply company, and gradually began to weave together some of the disparate threads of the malformed tapestry that had become my life. I finally began to understand some of how the world works; mysterious appliances and fixtures became things I could easily diagnose and fix. I gained a better understanding of the value in learning a trade, the personal satisfaction of repair and the self-worth that comes from skilled labor.
But my impatience, as Sinek describes it, emerged once more and I again found myself in the throes of the service industry. This time was different, however, because I had formed a band and found some personal expression (I still partied my ass off, tho). But the band I eventually quit too. This is partly because I had met the woman that would become my wife (and I figured out that’s pretty much the whole reason I was in a band in the first place), but also because we hadn’t experienced any success and I was fed up with trying to impress people for which I had little regard and of whom had little regard for me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll quit writing in a few years, too. I hope not. This is the most comfortable I’ve felt doing anything and it doesn’t feel at all like work to me.
But my impatience is an established fact. It cannot be denied. It has also undeniably worked to my detriment for the majority of my life, breathing dissatisfaction into nearly every dusty corner of my heart and brain. After more than a decade of agonizing introspection, I've become aware of some of these machinations within my psyche and am actively working on tempering it. Time will tell.
So—
within these thousand-some words I have yet to address most of the external influences that have contributed to my experiences. Things like technology, world events, American culture and politics, the Great Recession, higher education etc. I guess I’m just going to have to do this in a few parts. Consider this Part One: Why I’m Such A Shithead. Look for part two next week. Until then, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
