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Regarding distraction, may I posit that the author has the causality reversed? What if many people are seeking dopamine, et al, because they're already unhappy? There was a piece on procrastination which suggested that some procrastination is an attempt to treat one's unhappy mood, and it seems to me there are plenty of reasons why Gen Yers might be unhappy. The economic outlook for many Gen Yers is quite bleak. Despite having attended college, many people end up working retail or otherwise low-wage jobs. After hearing that you're supposed to "follow your dreams" and that all you really need to do is "believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything," it's not unreasonable to imagine why this generation feels left behind or alienated. I know people who blame themselves even though, in one case, their job (environmental ecology) was vaporized by the housing bust. So they're[0] "entitled" because they want what the consumer-driven economy tells them they deserve, what they've been told to demand from life, and what their parents had. But they ought to be happy with less than the previous generation had because, well, them's the breaks. I'm sure I'm not the first, I predict Gen Y will become something akin to a lost generation. Sometimes you need to take a shit job to survive, but if you're interested in upward mobility, nobody wants to see shit jobs on your resume, esp not among the professional class. It's ironic because retail jobs, for instance, are often hard work! However there's little prospect for long-term gain. What's the point in thinking long-term when you're working a job deliberately engineered to make workers replaceable? There's nothing inherently wrong with such a job, but maybe it's not so mysterious wonder why kids seem more mercenary or prefer to live in the moment. If I had to guess, I'd say this offers some explanation both for popularity of tech and finance. If you can afford a degree & can hack it in those industries, you'll probably do well. If you can't, your prospects (depending on where you live) are considerably more variable. --- [0]: I say "they" because I'm somewhere between X and Y. I remember a time before the Internet, ubiquitous digital media, and cellphones, but not before home computers. |