Is generational behavior a natural phenomenon or is it a product of societal pressure in a particular time period? Or are the two not mutually exclusive?

At my age, my parents were married with two young kids (a third would arrive only a few years later), no money, very defined career paths, and daily schedules booked with work and not much else.

I want to ask them all the time, “what the hell were you thinking?”

I’m 28 and unmarried. I don’t have an interest in starting a family any time soon and I’m only just beginning to discover a career path I’m really passionate about. I don’t have much money to my name and my daily schedule dedicates at least some period of time to daydreaming about world travel, adventure, and new experiences.

I’m sure my parents would love to ask me, “what the hell are you thinking?”

But they never do.

My parents have always been fantastic supporters. They have never questioned a single decision of mine: not when I committed to an expensive education in Miami (though I don’t think cheap is an educational option anywhere anymore), or when I decided to leave a job tailored to my educational background to join the Peace Corps, or when I decided to delay my “professional career” another year by extending my Peace Corps service. In fact, if I remember correctly, when I found out I would be serving in Madagascar my mom’s first reaction was something along the lines of:

Oh, how cool that you’ll be so close to Mauritius!! (where my dad’s family is from)

and not:

Wow, you should definitely bail before this nightmare becomes reality and destroys your future.

My parents are the two greatest people on this planet, but this blog post isn’t exactly a toast to their unconditional love. Actually, my dad seems to think most of his younger coworkers have a pretty poor work ethic.

Dad, I hope it’s cool that I went public with that. I feel confident that few people, and definitely not any of your younger coworkers, will read it.

He says these young people will leave at the end of their shift, even if there is more work to do, or that they’ll work as few hours as possible in a given week. For the record, I don’t agree with the behavior, but I feel the need to defend the younger generation. I’ve tried to explain to him that work/life balance seems to be more of a priority now that it was back in his heyday. I’ve also tried to persuade him that work ethic is not a generational issue, it’s a person-to-person issue. Unfortunately, he is still pretty frustrated by the young folk. There’s no way he’ll leave until the job is done, so if someone else doesn’t do the work, he will. How is that fair?

I think if you ask most people I’ve worked with, they would tell you that I have a pretty good work ethic. If you give me a project or a task, I will get it done and it will be my best work. But a good work ethic doesn’t necessarily mean I want to spend the next 40 years of my life at a desk in a room with a few windows and 5-10 vacation days per year. Out of 260 (based on a 5-day work week).

In case that didn’t sink in — that’s 5-10 days of vacation. Out of 260. Even if you get lucky and end up with 10 days you’ll still be at work almost 97% of the time.

How did that happen? Who decided it would be the norm to work that much and be rewarded that little? And why does American culture still go along with it? By the time the weekends or precious vacation days come along, most of us are probably too mentally or physically exhausted to enjoy them the way we’d like to. And I’m sure everyone knows the feeling of having to go back to work after a great vacation – that anxiety and sleepless night. It stinks.

I’m going to generalize here for a second and say that a baby boomer would probably tell me that if you work hard enough and stay loyal, the promotions, vacation, and pay increases will come. For some, that is probably true. But when I reach the top of the ladder in 25 years, I’m worried I will have missed out on some great opportunities. No doubt, this is an incredibly selfish outlook, but I don’t think it’s entitled, a particularly unflattering adjective that has now become synonymous with “millennial.”

I have a great deal of respect for what my parents did – raising my two brothers and I with little money and working from dusk ’til dawn so we could go to good schools and have a (comparatively) comfortable childhood. I guess I’m afraid to do the same and there’s some guilt because of it.