[michaelochurch]

This is terrible analysis.

“Don’t let people get things from you if they aren’t willing to compensate you for it,” goes the thinking.

What the fuck is wrong with that? Why should anyone give their all (in the workplace) to someone who doesn't value them? Yes, for practical reasons, you should probably obey laws and basic courtesy without expecting compensation-- not littering is just what you're supposed to do, a part of the implicit social contract is using public spaces. But if someone's asking for you to commit serious energy or favor, you better make sure you're doing it for someone who values you. Otherwise, you're wasting your energy, and that's quite finite.

Gen X, growing up before the Internet, interpreted that lesson as putting your head down and getting to work.

Really? 20 years ago, the reputation (undeserved) of Gen X was that it was a lazy, shiftless, loser generation. Now that they're older and have proven themselves, their reputation has improved somewhat. Oh, and every generation for the past 50 years (maybe longer?) has been called a "Me, Me, Me Generation" when it was young.

First is a gross misunderstanding that things like success, money or happiness come instantly.

I blame that on the age discrimination culture in most careers (if you're not at level X by age Y, you're a perma-loser) and, in tech, we see that the get-big-or-die insanity comes from the VCs, not founders. Most Gen-Y's/Millennials would be happy to tread water and thrilled to get rich slowly by, say, starting from a solid base, working hard, and improving their pay at 10-20% per year.

The impatience comes from the shitty time pressure imposed by age discrimination, volatile housing costs, and the fact that it's almost irresponsible to have children given the increasing importance of connections and the (directly related) obscene expense and competitiveness in educational positioning-- that now begins before grad school.

So if we take the life and death part away, why would we think that we can do our work, check our phones, write a paragraph, send a text, write another paragraph, send another text, without the same damage to our ability to concentrate? Generation Y thinks that, because they have grown up with all these technologies, they are better at multitasking. I would venture to argue they are not better at multitasking.

First of all, I know that I (and most people) am generally terrible at multitasking. There are specific kinds of multitasking at which people can perform (coming up with creative ideas while walking and listening to music) but, in general, context switches are damaging. I think this issue is environmental: open-plan offices, constant interruptions, and a social climate that just expects high availability. It's not one generation's fault; it's just the way people are becoming.

Cigarettes are out. Social media is in. It’s the drug of the twenty-first century. (At least people who smoke stand outside together.)

Silly. When smoking was at its peak it was socially acceptable to do it indoors. What, you think fucking Don Draper is going to stand out in the fucking cold of a Manhattan wind-tunnel January?

Where alcohol replaced trusting relationships as a coping mechanism for teenagers who grew up to be alcoholics, so too are the positive affirmations we get from social media and the virtual relationships we maintain replacing real trusting relationships as coping mechanisms.

Alcohol was (and is) used as a low-grade anxiolytic, which it is in low doses for people without a tolerance, that helps people overcome the social anxiety produced cognitive dissonance of a hypercompetitive culture. (Modern medicine offers superior anxiolytics, but those don't target social anxiety nearly as well, and physicians frown, for good reason, on recreational use of them. The most powerful non-Rx anxiolytic is probably kava, which makes you sleepy more than sociable. Anyway...)

I kept meeting amazing, wonderful, smart, driven and optimistic Gen Yers who were either disillusioned with their entry-level jobs or quitting to find a new job that will “allow me to make an impact in the world,” discounting the time and energy that is required to do it.

Or they were getting fired/laid-off for reasons that weren't their fault and (well taught by their Boomer parents) spinning it to sound like it was by their choice, since young people are better to appear flighty (it's expected of them) than to suffer the status hit of an involuntary termination. There's more than meets the eye in this sort of thing.

What they seem to fail to notice, however, is the mountain.

Alternative theory: there are plenty of Gen-Yers scaling that mountain. However, since the eldest in that generation are only in their early 30s, none of those have had any prominence because they're still working their way up. Instead, it's the lifted pieces of shit like Evan Spiegel and Lucas Duplan getting the attention. Generations always put an unrepresentative foot forward first, because the "successes" are (with very few exceptions) manufactured by their elders.

According to a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease Control, suicide rates among Baby Boomers rose nearly 30 percent during the past decade, making suicide one of the leading causes of death in that age group, behind only cancer and heart disease. The biggest jump in suicides was among men in their fifties — this age group experienced a whopping 50 percent increase. With the increase of suicides among Boomers, more people now die of suicide than from car accidents.

Cars and roads are becoming safer (so the "car accident" comparison is not all bad news). Age discrimination is hitting single-income older (50-65) men the hardest right now, so that explains a bit of it. That and health problems explain most of the suicides, I'd bet. Also, while teenage girls may have the highest suicide attempt rate, men over 50 have always had the highest suicide completion rate.

The problem is that in twenty to thirty years, when our youngest generation grows up and takes charge of government and business, its members will have grown up using Facebook, prescription drugs or online support groups as their primary coping mechanisms rather than relying on real support groups: biological bonds of friendship and loving relationships.

Give me a break. This is ludicrous junk science. Most people using "prescription drugs" need them, and people get tired of Facebook fake friendship after, I don't know, two or three years. (And there are people for whom Facebook provides a real benefit; by age 60, most of your friends live far away from you, and online contact is better than what was common before the Internet-- dropping off completely.)

In 1960, the number of notable school shootings was one. In the 1980s there were 27. The 1990s saw 58 school shootings, and from 2000 until 2012 there were 102 school shootings.

First, those events are getting more coverage now. It's worldwide. If something fucked-up happens in Colorado or Connecticut or Norway or Japan, the world will know about it. It seems like violence is becoming more common, but all evidence suggests the reverse. (Also, the worst school massacres aren't perpetrated by school students-- see: Bath, Beslan, Newtown-- but by older people.) School shootings are horrible, but in the late 1960s, Americans started worrying about the fucking draft as the Vietnam War ramped up. Does anyone really think that Facebook is going to cause more "antisocial behavior" than an illegal and demoralizing war in Vietnam, into which people were sent involuntarily? I really doubt that.