1. These are weirdly contrived generational categories...
2. You have no idea about student debt, underemployment, life-long renting. “Stop feeling special” is some shitty advice. I don’t feel special or entitled, just poor...
So basically, the post is about the Huff Post author being detached from reality. "You just want to feel special- get over it" is really shitty advice, he's right. They teach you not to say things like that at work. At least I hope they do.
I'm a bit above 35 (past the next "old" barrier that starts with 4), and although I fall more into the Huff Post author's vision of the sad yuppie close to the start of gen Y, it pisses me off that on Marketplace (PRI radio broadcast on NPR stations) today they were basically trying to convince everyone that no one knows what the middle class is and that we should just get used to the new normal and should even consider wealth redistribution as a way to deal with it (I'm not joking- this was really said and the Marketplace idiot went along with it- seriously L.A.- are these the people you want representing you?).
So, I'm with Adam Weinstein on this one saying, "Fk you".
I didn't sign up for the economic situation we're in, and I feel that our fiscally irresponsible government is to blame. Wealth redistribution? No, I don't think socialism or communism is a good idea. The only countries in which either are working having been abandoning them for capitalism, from what I see (specifically, India and China).
Can we stop threatening to bomb people, open borders again fully to allow all kinds of immigrants, hire ex-Israeli soldier elites to profile passengers and replace the TSA and no-fly lists in our airports/etc. (like Israel does), and have less government. Our government has better things to do than to try to tell us how to live and how we should manage our money. Did you notice how the Democrats were giving Yellen a hard time because she was female? Almost completely washed over in the liberal media. Shame! So much bullshit. I cannot wait to cast my vote next time to oust every single one of the losers currently in office.
Actually I did read it, several times actually trying to tease out the angst from the fiction.
The author, Adam, is angry, that much is clear. And he writes that he is angry at people who write pieces like the HuffPo one [1] which is "full of crap". That piece, basically labels people of a certain age (by calling them 'Gen Y') and then disparages them as being unrealistic in their expectations and their self image.
So what can we infer from that? Well first, if this was a single instance then it probably wouldn't be emotional for Adam; Second, if the complaints that the HuffPo piece was disparaging weren't complaints that Adam had been espousing he would have ignored it, and third he chose not to argue the merits, rather to argue the presentation and author.
Now, my opinion here is that the HuffPo article was a hit piece aimed right at Adam to generate rage views. And the HuffPo author tapped into that mid-life angst about how the world isn't what you imagined it would be, and twisted as hard as he dared to maximize the rage views. As for the 'weirdly contrived generational categories' every group of people gets exposed to the world (or made aware of it) around 15 - 25. And the 'big themes' in that time period become influential in their lives. These categories are self creating.
What I was trying to point out was that the anger over life not being what one hoped it isn't unique to any generation, the Economist article mentioned in this thread talks a bit about that.
So to address your second point, awareness about debt and underemployment and life-long renting. One can be aware, and care, and still have perspective.
And then you said, "I didn't sign up for the economic situation we're in, and I feel that our fiscally irresponsible government is to blame." This is where you have to choose. (And this is why, for me, 35 was pretty painful) You have to choose to either be a victim or to not be a victim. Do you look for 'blame' or do you look for 'fixes'. The Marketplace episode pissed you off because it was wrong, you can either show them how it was wrong or you can whine about it.
For me, when I hit 35 was when it sunk in that there wasn't any "they" anymore, there weren't grown-ups which were going to fix things. That was up to me, being one of the grown ups, I had to start fixing things. And I was irritated in the mess the previous generation had left behind.
>I feel that our fiscally irresponsible government is to blame. Wealth redistribution?
The irony is that (in my opinion) all of this was created because we wanted to redistribute wealth - but we did it by creating easy access to debt (dominantly, debt access for real estate and debt access to college, two signifiers of wealth that possessing them, as it turns out, does not make you wealthy), and because we wanted to grant everyone the luxury of illusory security that the rich "enjoy" without considering the upside cost of trying to cover everyone with no holes in the social service. So we got a whole bunch of bureaucratic overhead to make sure we are in compliance with artifical metrics and schemes to guarantee equitability, yet more people are falling through the holes. There's a greek word for this: ὕβρις,
Truly, our society in many ways is no better than the cargo cults.
Forcible wealth redistribution is a bad thing. Worse, when it has been done, it is done in a band-aid approach. Let's subsidize subsistence as a way to chain people to job searches. No thank you.
But having said that, I think it is reasonable for encouraging a sane wealth distribution to be a part of public policy. This doesn't have to be done through taxes just for owning something. It could be taxes on renting something for example, unless that is a rent to own agreement. The idea would be simply encouraging ownership to align with utilization rather than life-long renting as the norm.
I would recommend reading some conservative alternatives like Chesterton's "An Outline of Sanity" or Belloc's "The Servile State" for alternatives that are more historically grounded.
He said 2 things:
1. These are weirdly contrived generational categories...
2. You have no idea about student debt, underemployment, life-long renting. “Stop feeling special” is some shitty advice. I don’t feel special or entitled, just poor...
So basically, the post is about the Huff Post author being detached from reality. "You just want to feel special- get over it" is really shitty advice, he's right. They teach you not to say things like that at work. At least I hope they do.
I'm a bit above 35 (past the next "old" barrier that starts with 4), and although I fall more into the Huff Post author's vision of the sad yuppie close to the start of gen Y, it pisses me off that on Marketplace (PRI radio broadcast on NPR stations) today they were basically trying to convince everyone that no one knows what the middle class is and that we should just get used to the new normal and should even consider wealth redistribution as a way to deal with it (I'm not joking- this was really said and the Marketplace idiot went along with it- seriously L.A.- are these the people you want representing you?).
So, I'm with Adam Weinstein on this one saying, "Fk you".
I didn't sign up for the economic situation we're in, and I feel that our fiscally irresponsible government is to blame. Wealth redistribution? No, I don't think socialism or communism is a good idea. The only countries in which either are working having been abandoning them for capitalism, from what I see (specifically, India and China).
Can we stop threatening to bomb people, open borders again fully to allow all kinds of immigrants, hire ex-Israeli soldier elites to profile passengers and replace the TSA and no-fly lists in our airports/etc. (like Israel does), and have less government. Our government has better things to do than to try to tell us how to live and how we should manage our money. Did you notice how the Democrats were giving Yellen a hard time because she was female? Almost completely washed over in the liberal media. Shame! So much bullshit. I cannot wait to cast my vote next time to oust every single one of the losers currently in office.