[LJ Idol 8: Week 4] You think every generation doesn't go through this?
So, there's this set of "rules" - often (erroneously) attributed to Bill Gates - that some people I otherwise respect a whole lot think is the cleverest and most right-on thing ever.
I disagree, to put it mildly. I think that there is nothing particularly different about "this generation" that wasn't said about prior generations of teens by the adults around THEM. I also think that crap like this is a lot of why the Adults Are Useless trope is so damned popular.
Anyway, onto the Rules, and my commentary.
Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!
I work with programs that serve mentally ill teenagers. I am also doing a social work internship that often involves working with the teenagers themselves. They're fully aware that life isn't fair, and most of them are sick of parents and teachers and service providers telling them variants of this in response to their disclosure of something that was incredibly painful for them or their request for some form of assistance that falls well within the boundaries of "reasonable accommodations".
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
See above. Also, I don't support the failure to differentiate between "feel good about yourself" in the sense of being puffed up and arrogant and "feel good about yourself" in the sense of not experiencing disabling levels of clinical depression. This is how you end up with the bit in the recent Hyperbole and a Half about Allie yelling at herself for being sad when people have DEAD PETS and TUMORS.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
I actually agree with the first sentence. Most people will not make that kind of money right out of high school. Or college. Or (frequently) grad school. If I were working my full-time schedule, I'd be making just short of it five and a half years after getting my first Masters degree. In my experience, the only ways someone ends up making that kind of money directly out of undergrad are: a) the combination of privilege and sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time, or b) pursuing the accumulation of money at the expense of other aspects of the human experience, often with a good bit of luck and privilege thrown in as well.
It's the second sentence that's the problem, because the entire concept of "earning" is so incredibly complex. When "earned" means "inherited the position from a relative without accomplishing anything other than managing not to piss off said relative" in some cases and "hobbled for miles with broken feet uphill both ways in the snow" in others, the concept of earning one's position in society ceases to have whatever utility it might once have enjoyed. Neither extreme is what earning something should involve!
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
I've had a lot of teachers, and a lot of bosses. Some are "tough but fair", some are easy to please, and some are so demanding that pleasing them is not possible. There is very little difference between a teacher and a boss in this regard.
I'm combining a job and school right now, as a matter of fact. There are ways in which my job is more flexible. There are ways in which my school is more flexible. There are understanding people and rigid overbearing pains in the ass in both settings.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.
Oh for $DEITY's sake, can we NOT...? For every "over-entitled brat" I've heard actually say anything remotely resembling this, there are many more who either have some legitimate reason that "flipping burgers" is not a workable option for them - anything from physical conditions that contraindicate working in that environment to life circumstances that make inconsistent work schedules unacceptable - or who have applied for the burger-flipping jobs only to be told that they are overqualified. (Been there, done that.)
I suppose I could also get into the whole issue of things like abusive sheltered workshops being given a free pass because hey, people have jobs, and jobs auto-magically mean DIGNITY! But this is long enough as it is, so read the link if you're interested in the topic.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Right. Because nobody ever finds themselves unable to function as well as they'd like because of PTSD directly caused by chronic and severe childhood abuse, believing what they went through was simply their so-called caregivers practicing "strict old-fashioned parenting", and ends up blaming themselves for being "losers" and thinking that if their parents had abused them even more severely maybe THEN they'd have their proverbial shit together. For definitions of "nobody" that happen to include the person to whom I am married. This "rule" makes me so damn angry I'm surprised I can coherently address it at all.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Nah. Most of us got that way from being too tired, plain and simple, to be "interesting" by the standards of the young and able-bodied. And while some of that has to do with caring for our kids, a lot of it has to do with eventually hitting some wall of our bodies demanding that we not abuse them as strenuously as we did when we were younger.
Also, if the closet actually needs "de-lousing", there's usually something else going on besides simply a kid being obnoxious. Maybe the problem is a boy who has been taught that cleaning is women's work. Maybe the problem is that the parents have household hygiene issues of their own that the kid has inherited. Etc.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Actually, high-stakes closed-book testing as currently practiced bears far less resemblance to most things in real life than re-trials of the same activity being allowed until you get it right. If you burn dinner on Monday, does that mean that you won't be allowed in the kitchen on Tuesday? (And if that is the case, isn't that its own problem?)
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Part of FINDING YOURSELF, I always thought, is finding a good fit career-wise. So while the employers might not be directly interested, the good (read: not abusive) ones are interested in encouraging people who have a knack for the work they've been hired to do to continue to improve at that work and find satisfaction in it, and sometimes in gently encouraging people who aren't well suited to their work to try something else somewhere else.
As far as "getting summers off" is concerned, I don't know very many high school or college students whose "summer off" is not occupied with some form of effort different from the academic year routine, but at least as intense and often more so. Summer jobs, counselor-in-training positions at summer camps, even intensive summer practice for sports all take effort - generally effort of a more direct and physical sort than butt-in-chair academic coursework.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
OK, I'm not a big fan of television in general, but I can't think of any shows I watched where people of employable age didn't go to work on a consistent basis. Even when the central action of the show happened outside of working hours, the Job and the time it took up was always part of the plot. So I just don't get what the hell this is about.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what definition of "nerd" you're using and what field you go into. This is not to say that I disapprove of being nice to "nerds" or to anyone else who isn't actively harming you at the moment.
In addition to my problems with the individual rules, I also have a serious problem with the list AS a list, as a thing. The whole idea that this is somehow what Every Teenager Ever thinks and feels and believes and acts like is so asinine that it shouldn't even require mentioning. And yet, most of these items are so prescriptive that only one so much as bothers with "If you think..." The assumption is right there: this is what "kids" DO think. Full stop.
I disagree, to put it mildly. I think that there is nothing particularly different about "this generation" that wasn't said about prior generations of teens by the adults around THEM. I also think that crap like this is a lot of why the Adults Are Useless trope is so damned popular.
Anyway, onto the Rules, and my commentary.
Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!
I work with programs that serve mentally ill teenagers. I am also doing a social work internship that often involves working with the teenagers themselves. They're fully aware that life isn't fair, and most of them are sick of parents and teachers and service providers telling them variants of this in response to their disclosure of something that was incredibly painful for them or their request for some form of assistance that falls well within the boundaries of "reasonable accommodations".
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
See above. Also, I don't support the failure to differentiate between "feel good about yourself" in the sense of being puffed up and arrogant and "feel good about yourself" in the sense of not experiencing disabling levels of clinical depression. This is how you end up with the bit in the recent Hyperbole and a Half about Allie yelling at herself for being sad when people have DEAD PETS and TUMORS.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
I actually agree with the first sentence. Most people will not make that kind of money right out of high school. Or college. Or (frequently) grad school. If I were working my full-time schedule, I'd be making just short of it five and a half years after getting my first Masters degree. In my experience, the only ways someone ends up making that kind of money directly out of undergrad are: a) the combination of privilege and sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time, or b) pursuing the accumulation of money at the expense of other aspects of the human experience, often with a good bit of luck and privilege thrown in as well.
It's the second sentence that's the problem, because the entire concept of "earning" is so incredibly complex. When "earned" means "inherited the position from a relative without accomplishing anything other than managing not to piss off said relative" in some cases and "hobbled for miles with broken feet uphill both ways in the snow" in others, the concept of earning one's position in society ceases to have whatever utility it might once have enjoyed. Neither extreme is what earning something should involve!
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
I've had a lot of teachers, and a lot of bosses. Some are "tough but fair", some are easy to please, and some are so demanding that pleasing them is not possible. There is very little difference between a teacher and a boss in this regard.
I'm combining a job and school right now, as a matter of fact. There are ways in which my job is more flexible. There are ways in which my school is more flexible. There are understanding people and rigid overbearing pains in the ass in both settings.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.
Oh for $DEITY's sake, can we NOT...? For every "over-entitled brat" I've heard actually say anything remotely resembling this, there are many more who either have some legitimate reason that "flipping burgers" is not a workable option for them - anything from physical conditions that contraindicate working in that environment to life circumstances that make inconsistent work schedules unacceptable - or who have applied for the burger-flipping jobs only to be told that they are overqualified. (Been there, done that.)
I suppose I could also get into the whole issue of things like abusive sheltered workshops being given a free pass because hey, people have jobs, and jobs auto-magically mean DIGNITY! But this is long enough as it is, so read the link if you're interested in the topic.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Right. Because nobody ever finds themselves unable to function as well as they'd like because of PTSD directly caused by chronic and severe childhood abuse, believing what they went through was simply their so-called caregivers practicing "strict old-fashioned parenting", and ends up blaming themselves for being "losers" and thinking that if their parents had abused them even more severely maybe THEN they'd have their proverbial shit together. For definitions of "nobody" that happen to include the person to whom I am married. This "rule" makes me so damn angry I'm surprised I can coherently address it at all.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Nah. Most of us got that way from being too tired, plain and simple, to be "interesting" by the standards of the young and able-bodied. And while some of that has to do with caring for our kids, a lot of it has to do with eventually hitting some wall of our bodies demanding that we not abuse them as strenuously as we did when we were younger.
Also, if the closet actually needs "de-lousing", there's usually something else going on besides simply a kid being obnoxious. Maybe the problem is a boy who has been taught that cleaning is women's work. Maybe the problem is that the parents have household hygiene issues of their own that the kid has inherited. Etc.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Actually, high-stakes closed-book testing as currently practiced bears far less resemblance to most things in real life than re-trials of the same activity being allowed until you get it right. If you burn dinner on Monday, does that mean that you won't be allowed in the kitchen on Tuesday? (And if that is the case, isn't that its own problem?)
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Part of FINDING YOURSELF, I always thought, is finding a good fit career-wise. So while the employers might not be directly interested, the good (read: not abusive) ones are interested in encouraging people who have a knack for the work they've been hired to do to continue to improve at that work and find satisfaction in it, and sometimes in gently encouraging people who aren't well suited to their work to try something else somewhere else.
As far as "getting summers off" is concerned, I don't know very many high school or college students whose "summer off" is not occupied with some form of effort different from the academic year routine, but at least as intense and often more so. Summer jobs, counselor-in-training positions at summer camps, even intensive summer practice for sports all take effort - generally effort of a more direct and physical sort than butt-in-chair academic coursework.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
OK, I'm not a big fan of television in general, but I can't think of any shows I watched where people of employable age didn't go to work on a consistent basis. Even when the central action of the show happened outside of working hours, the Job and the time it took up was always part of the plot. So I just don't get what the hell this is about.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what definition of "nerd" you're using and what field you go into. This is not to say that I disapprove of being nice to "nerds" or to anyone else who isn't actively harming you at the moment.
In addition to my problems with the individual rules, I also have a serious problem with the list AS a list, as a thing. The whole idea that this is somehow what Every Teenager Ever thinks and feels and believes and acts like is so asinine that it shouldn't even require mentioning. And yet, most of these items are so prescriptive that only one so much as bothers with "If you think..." The assumption is right there: this is what "kids" DO think. Full stop.