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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I want to ask them all the time, \u201cwhat the hell were you thinking?\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m 28 and unmarried. I don’t have an interest\u00a0in starting a family any time soon and I\u2019m only just beginning to discover a career path I\u2019m really\u00a0passionate about. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure my parents would love to ask me, \u201cwhat the hell are you<\/em> thinking?\u201d<\/p>\n But they never do.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s first reaction was something along the lines of:<\/p>\n Oh, how cool that you\u2019ll be so close to Mauritius!!<\/em> (where my dad\u2019s family is from)<\/p>\n and not:<\/p>\n Wow, you should definitely bail before this nightmare becomes reality and destroys your future.<\/em><\/p>\n My parents are the two greatest people on this planet, but this blog post isn\u2019t exactly a toast to their unconditional love. Actually, my dad seems to think most of his younger coworkers have a pretty poor work ethic.<\/p>\n Dad, I hope it\u2019s cool that I went public with that. I feel confident that few people, and definitely\u00a0not any of your younger coworkers, will read it.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019t agree with the behavior, but I feel the need to defend the younger generation. I\u2019ve tried to explain to him that work\/life balance seems to be\u00a0more 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\u00a0frustrated by the young folk. There\u2019s no way he\u2019ll leave until the job is done, so if someone else doesn\u2019t do the work, he will. How is that fair?<\/p>\n I think if you ask most people I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n In case that didn\u2019t sink in — that\u2019s 5-10 days of vacation. Out of 260. Even if you get lucky and end up with 10 days you\u2019ll still be at work almost 97% of the time.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0still 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n I’m going to generalize here for a second and say that a baby boomer would probably tell me\u00a0that if you work\u00a0hard 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.”<\/span><\/p>\n I have a great deal of respect for what my parents did \u2013 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\u00a0of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}