I wanted to pass along a particular passage in Matt Taibbi’s most recent offering:
Our biggest corporations spent decades steeping the public in weird Me Generation propaganda stressing the primacy of personal fulfillment, which fast became our real national faith as traditional religion lost influence. The result was a work-centric culture most of the rest of the world looked on as a kind of insanity. Alone among peoples who have a choice in such matters, Americans have long bragged about working themselves to death, feeling real pride in putting off distractions like marriage, kids, or “meaning†as they ran hamster wheels in pursuit of status and rock-hard abs, alone and at full speed toward the great beyond.
Americans in my age group, Gen-Xers, were poorly prepared for corporate jobs in that a lot of us were somehow surprised to learn our ethnomusicology or (in my case) creative writing degrees were fairly useless for finding paying work. In conjunction with the huge sums many people borrowed to get those educations, the whole thing was a bit of a scam, though of course we should have known better.
Millennials had it worse. They attended the same academic resort spas, and were handed the same oft-preposterous degrees, but were additionally indoctrinated in affirming ideological oat-baths stressing the righteousness of their lived experiences. If the big surprise my generation faced was that our educations were worth bupkes to employers, the next generation had to deal with the shock of corporate bosses being indifferent to their emotional needs.
Meaning, we’ve come full circle. After training generations of Americans to forego personal lives and work their brains to mush in service of bigger profits, corporate leaders are waking up to find their companies staffed by people so psychologically dependent upon validation from work that they’re a net minus from a production standpoint, forcing bosses to beg them to shut up, go home, and get lives.
Each cohort has its own cross to bear and, as my wife frequently says, quoting Honoré in the movie Gigi, I’m glad I’m not young anymore. Although Mr. Taibbi appears to understand his own cohort pretty well, I wonder if he understands the particular pain of being a member of the Silent Generation, those born from 1928 to 1945? They’re firmly in charge of the country and have been for many years. As just one measure of that the president and all of the Congressional leadership except Chuck Schumer are members of the Silent Generation. In my experience they tend to have deep-seated feelings of insecurity. They’re afraid to let go.
