There's only the sun that gives shape to the moon

[sovay]

Either I never shook the cold that began in November or I caught some other opportunistic bug in the process of recovering, but I am definitely sick. I made it to yesterday's rehearsal and then I came home, made dinner with spatch, and fell asleep on the couch. I had just finished reading one of my holiday presents from rushthatspeaks, the Strugatskys' thoroughly delightful Monday Starts on Saturday (1965). Awake later in the evening, I re-read three out of the first four books of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) and unhappily I think it was weird for my mood. I slept badly. Today I have done nothing except work for a couple of hours and feed the cats. I don't even seem able to think about or watch movies.

I am feeling alienated by, of all things, an extremely well-written article on millennial burnout. Despite thinking that I belonged to the generation just above millennials, I fall within the age limits delineated by the article; I recognize many of the attitudes, expectations, and pressures detailed therein. I don't argue that I am drowning in no time, no money, no security, no respite, and that it makes me feel like a failure on deep existential levels when honestly I don't think even someone with my problems should have to worry so much and so constantly about just not going broke month after month after month. But I looked at the article's generalizations of the key features of millennial life and aside from the crushing economic horror and accompanying self-despair they were all about as familiar to me as an Instagram filter (I didn't go to grad school because it was expected of me in the American cursus honorum, I went to grad school because I loved what I was studying and was shocked to receive grief from my department for not being more business-minded about it; I have no emotional attachment to a cool job or a job that fits my self-image, just to a job that makes enough for me to live on and doesn't make my life miserable; I don't have a close relationship with my phone or with mainstream forms of social media and I am allergic to the concept of all-hours availability; I really don't worry about curating my life) and it left me instantly feeling that this article was not written to include or to aid me; it envisions a different kind of person drowning; I won't be seen. Probably all this means is that I should not have clicked on the article in my current mental state, but here we are. The bit about the cognitive load of being poor was new to me, plausible, and upsetting.

I concluded a couple of years ago that a pulp style was definitely one of the things that ended up in my own writing before I even thought about such things; it was the similes. There is a lovely note in this annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939) that Rob got me, about the American vernacular "tall talk" that Chandler alternately condensed or elaborated into the colorful comparisons he's known for. I'm still not sure what to do with this example from The Little Sister (1949): "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."

Comments

[kore]

Xers have not been blamed for avocado toast/similar

I was there for articles in the 1990s that blamed Exers, and there was absolutely that kind of victim-blaming going on. If anything it was a lot more vicious, because we were called slackers and apathetic and not caring anything about politics and just that we wanted to work convenience store jobs and get high all day long, and were completely passive and disengaged from everything. I see a LOT more sympathy for millennials nowadays than there were for the Exers back in the nineties and even the 00s. There's also a LOT more pushback now on the internet by and for millennials, mostly because when I graduated in 1992 there wasn't an online alternative to the mainstream hard copy news services that were full of articles mostly written by the Boomer generation about how very terrible the Exers were. Seriously.

https://rolfpotts.com/time-twentysomething-1990/

the infamous Time article about Exers

Most of all, young people want constant feedback from supervisors. In contrast with the baby boomers, who disdained evaluations as somehow undemocratic, people in their 20s crave grades, performance evaluations and reviews. They want a quantification of their achievement. After all, these were the children who prepped diligently for college-aptitude exams and learned how to master Rubik’s Cube and Space Invaders. They are consummate game players and grade grubbers. “Unlike yuppies, younger people are not driven from within, they need reinforcement,” says Penny Erikson, 40, a senior vice president at the Young & Rubicam ad agency, which has hired many recent college graduates. “They prefer short-term tasks with observable results.”

I have seen absolutely the same kind of thing written about millennials, except now the millennials can push back about that bullshit on Twitter. We didn't have that and nobody listened to us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/08/a-politics-for-generation-x/306666/

Financially most frightening, however, are the nation's skyrocketing levels of personal debt and international debt. With all the focus on balancing the federal budget, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that American families, and Xers in particular, are increasingly unable to balance their own books. Xers carry more personal debt than did any other generation at their age in our nation's history; in fact, a full 60 percent of Xers carry credit-card balances from month to month. In addition, those who attend college face the dual burden of soaring tuition bills and shrinking federal education grants. From 1977 to 1997 the median student-loan debt has climbed from $2,000 to $15,000.

But like I said, nobody cared that in the late nineties people in their twenties were graduating with more debt than ever and no real way to pay it off. There were certainly no clickbait articles about it that got discussed and passed around on the internet the way this burnout article did. I remember an actual WaPo article titled "Grow Up, Crybabies, You’re America’s Luckiest Generation." That was in 1993.

[sovay]

After all, these were the children who prepped diligently for college-aptitude exams and learned how to master Rubik's Cube and Space Invaders. They are consummate game players and grade grubbers. "Unlike yuppies, younger people are not driven from within, they need reinforcement," says Penny Erikson, 40, a senior vice president at the Young & Rubicam ad agency, which has hired many recent college graduates. "They prefer short-term tasks with observable results."

So the first thing that strikes me about this excerpt you cite—apart from the deep peculiarity of seeing "yuppies" employed as a positive—is how closely it matches Petersen's description of the younger millennials she taught at college, except that she identifies the behaviors as the product not of directionless slackerdom but fear:

"There were still obnoxious frat boys and fancy sorority girls, but they were far more studious than my peers had been. They skipped fewer classes. They religiously attended office hours. They emailed at all hours. But they were also anxious grade grubbers, paralyzed at the thought of graduating, and regularly stymied by assignments that called for creativity. They'd been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, scared . . . 'The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being.'"

And the second is that someone in these comments must have a link to the previous generation's sweeping assessment of the boomers, because I am confident it will also conclude that the kids these days have no attention span, no work ethic, and just want to turn on, tune in, and drop out. This complaint is as old as Livy.

[pameladean]

I think most generational theories are so much hooey, but it's remarkable how much they can sting just the same, and I am sorry you got lured with honey and then stung extra hard. (Analogy for distant viewing only, do not closely examine, sorry.)

P.

[thistleingrey]

I hear you. I was there, too. It's not the same.