It’s often said that a definitive experience of Generation Y is getting mugged by reality. They came of age as the post-WWII economic boom and post-Cold War optimism faded. In an era when every day was Christmas, Baby Boomers’ promise that getting a liberal arts degree would guarantee a place in the middle class made sense.
Another defining Gen Y trait is their transactional worldview. After all, their formative experience reinforced that if you get five gold stars on the reading chart, you get a pizza. If you clean your plate, say no to drugs, and do your homework, you’ll be issued a McMansion in the exurbs.
But no one had reason to think otherwise until 9/11, the 2008 mortgage crisis, and immivasion brought reality crashing down on Ys’ heads.
A generation who’d been brought up to think of anyone without a white collar job as a loser traded the glorified theme park of college for the open-air prison of Clown World. The ensuing cognitive dissonance broke a generation.
Different Ys break in different ways, but each signals a retreat from harsh reality.
Here are some typical case studies.
Josh grew up in a notionally Christian home shattered by divorce when he started junior high. He majored in computer science in college but couldn’t get one of the unpaid internships needed to break into the industry. He took a job at Geek Squad and had to rent a rundown house with two roommates. On the morning commute to work, he would daydream about swerving into a guardrail at speed to end it all. Instead he bought The God Delusion and spent the aughts lecturing his dwindling social circle about flying spaghetti monsters.
Growing up without a dad was tough on Kyle. With their mom always working, he and his three sisters raised themselves. Crippling anxiety meant he kept to himself at school and never made but one or two friends. Studying communications in college yoked him with high five-figure in debt. He didn’t mind, since it got him out of his mother’s house. Hearing frequent lectures on critical race theory and feminism also taught Kyle why his mostly female teachers, bosses, and family had seemed to hate him. He joined a campus activist group, where for the first time, he felt like he belonged. And women his age tolerated him as an ally. After college, one of his professors got him a job writing for Vice.
When he had custody twice a month, Tim’s father would tell him that finding the right woman would level up his game. Since both of his parents, all of his teachers, and the TV bombarded him with the message that all women were perfect, he was sure that success in love meant just being himself. Despite lavishing time, money, and praise on every prospect, Tim was plagued with relationship troubles. Even when he found out his girlfriend was cheating on him with her felon ex-husband, Tim absolved her and doubled his commitment to being a better man. Yet the harder he strove for the goal, the farther into the distance it receded. Tim’s 20s sped by without bringing him the loving family he’d been promised. At 34, he settled down with a classy gal and her three kids – all with different fathers; none of them him. Better yet, she was a tradwife who stayed home to raise her kids, leaving Tim free to work eighty-hour weeks. Sure, he had to drop all his hobbies and cut all his friends. But as his dad showed him, that’s what being an adult means.
Now, these stories may not share many similarities on the surface. But they’re all attempts to escape reality by embracing idolatry. The Reddit atheist tries in vain to fill the void of meaning with vanity. The Witch responds to having his identity stripped away by tearing down tradition. The Beta worships other fallen creatures instead of God.
Pay attention to what’s missing in each case, and you have the answer to the nihilism epidemic. For no life can be rightly ordered unless man fist sets his sights on his origin and true final end: Jesus Christ.
Happy, hopeful, and practical
The Gen Y rabbit hole has been an enlighteningly fun one for me to head down as of late. It’s helped a lot of things ‘click’ for me as a Millennial (1991) whose upbringing resembles Gen Y more than it does my Millennial peers.
It’s a continuum, not a graduated scale.
There but for the grace of God go I …
Amen!
Amen
It’s remarkable to me just how strongly these attitudes persist even in people like me, who was fortunate to grow up in a Christian household with parents who loved each other (and their children) and a stay-at-home mom, I still view(ed) everything transactionally and thought if I ticked the right boxes I’d have a comfy, easy life. I still have the typical Gen Y fixation on toys and materialism and my parents still, to some extent and largely unintentionally on their part, “bought” our affection with toys and raised us in front of the TV: even though this wasn’t done to compensate for them not being around. I think this mindset was just deeply ingrained in my Gen Jones parents and their peers.
The media conditioning gets 80% of people.
This is another of the dividing lines between Gen Y and Millennials:
When faced with hardship Gen Y will basically quote D-FENS’s rant: I did everything they told me to. You should be rewarded for that. They lied to me!
And so (absent the grace of God) the Gen Y-er will either look for another way to “do what you’re supposed to” or give up completely.
The millennial will instead talk about the unfairness of life in general. There’s not a transaction involved. That is, the Gen Y-er will talk about things in terms of “I did this now I deserve that” while the millennial will talk about “I deserve this” without a justification in works. So the millennial (absent the grace of God) tends to default to only the SJW crusader mode or give up mode, since there isn’t the view that they can earn their way to the good life.
Solid observation