"I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial."
Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.
I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely.
"I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..."
That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person.
Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.
This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.
Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability.
Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history.
Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.
> Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time [...] We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.
Millennials need to learn some history.
A 52-year-old graduated high school in 1980. They grew up, then worked their first decade, during the economically scariest 20 year period between the Depression and the Recession.
Millennials don't even know what a pension is, let alone having to worry about losing one, or fear the Japanese taking over the world, including both the high-end and low-end manufacturing jobs along with Rockefeller Center.
It was pretty terrifying back then for your rank-and-file blue collar worker, and it didn't let up until the mid 90s. Anyone born around and after 1970 doesn't know "normal."
When I heard people say how hard Millennials have it I think to myself "harder than the 17 and 18 year olds who went off to fight in WW2?" or "harder than my grandfather who jumped on a freight train at the age of 16 to find work during the depression?"
I agree, I didn't call him entitled either. Maybe he lacked training or maybe not, and maybe he saved well or maybe not (he did last for 18 months in SF after he was laid off, after all).
No, I wouldn't call him entitled. If anything, I think he was deceived: he bought in to a social contract and it turned out he was more invested in it than his employer was.
Just to clarify: I wasn't saying you'd called him entitled. I'd just felt the need to expand upon that point, because the words "entitle" or "entitled" appear about 12 times on this comments page already, and are bound to appear even more. I sort of picked that section of your comment as a segue into discussing the entitlement topic. Sincere apologies to you if I gave you the impression that I was accusing you of labeling the guy entitled.
Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.
I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely.
"I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..."
That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person.
Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.