Sean: 餓鬼

[Email subscription to blog articles]

Posted by Sean:
餓鬼
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1179806801.shtml


   At Reason.com, Steve Chapman [1]gives a very Reason-like rebuttal to
   claims that Generation Y is so coddled, lazy, and fatuously
   self-loving as to spell doom for America:

     Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego
     State University, reports that college students increasingly agree
     with statements indicating oversized egos, such as "I am an
     important person." Marian Salzman, a senior vice president at the
     advertising agency JWT, told The Christian Science Monitor, "Gen-Y
     is the most difficult workforce I've ever encountered," because
     they "are so self-indulgent."
     But before Gen Y-ers start to feel bad about themselves, they
     should know that worse things were said about their parents. Back
     in the 1960s and '70s, it was universal wisdom that the kids of
     that era suffered from too much coddling. Vice President Spiro
     Agnew blamed student unrest and other problems on "spoiled brats
     who never had a good spanking." Best-selling author Norman Vincent
     Peale, author of "The Power of Positive Thinking," complained about
     youngsters whose parents felt a duty to "satisfy their every
     desire."

   The indicators Chapman cites--lower rates of teen smoking, drinking,
   and pregnancy; tightened acceptance rates at top colleges--make sense
   as evidence that These Kids Today aren't irredeemably screwed up,
   although there are useful qualifiers to add. Chapman doesn't cite
   anything to disprove the allegation that those arriving at their first
   jobs have unrealistic expectations. Also, while the acceptance rates
   for individual colleges have gone down, the number of colleges to
   which the average student gunning for the hoity-toity schools applies
   has gone way up. It's not really certain how much harder it is for a
   given student to get into top-tier schools in general than it would
   have been for a student with the same qualifications a decade or two
   ago.
   The stuff about pressure to perform in Chapman's article was
   interesting because, looking for a DVD to play in the background while
   I did stuff around the apartment, I idly picked out a copy of
   [2]Shattered Glass. Because my mind was on kitchen equipment and
   grocery orders, I didn't fully register the title; I thought someone
   had made a movie version of Arthur Miller's [3]Broken Glass, which I'd
   seen performed a dozen years ago and been unimpressed by. Maybe I'll
   feel differently this time around.
   When I got home and actually looked at the cover, I realized I'd made
   a mistake: Shattered Glass was a dramatization of the Stephen Glass
   story-fabrication scandal at TNR nine years ago. It turned out to be
   pretty well done, and it did a good job of avoiding the specific
   annoying pitfall I feared it would fall right into.
   There's a point early on when one of Glass's colleagues confronts him
   about applying to law school. He whines that he's under tremendous
   pressure from his parents in Lake Forest to become a lawyer, not a
   journalist. I was afraid that, as the movie developed, that pressure
   would be presented as a possible sympathetic explanation for his
   motivations: chilly phone conversations in which his mother pointedly
   informs him that the boy he grew up with down the street is doing his
   residency at Massachusetts General, or his father casts aspersions on
   his income potential as a political commentator.
   It turned out that no such scenes were forthcoming, and I was
   pleasantly surprised. Glass was, after all, one of thousands of
   graduates of Penn and comparable schools with pushy, demanding
   parents. To the extent that one wants a more specific explanation for
   his behavior than sheer amorality (which is enough for me, frankly),
   his problem seems to be less that he was under pressure than that he
   couldn't stand the idea of not always being the golden boy. Miss
   Manners once wrote something to the effect of, "Anyone who expects to
   be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral is in
   for a difficult life." There are few things more salutary--when you're
   in your 20s and everyone is constantly going on about how smart and
   sharp-witted and charming and capable you are--than to be assigned a
   load of scut work you disdain, do a half-assed job of it, and later
   discover that you overlooked something important that comes back
   around and bites you. (Yes, this is experience talking.) Glass only
   wanted to do the glam stuff, so when the right subject matter didn't
   come his way organically, he invented it. Buckling down and making the
   best of a boring story or lackluster quotations would have been
   beneath him.
   No one is accusing Generation Y en masse of such extremes, of course.
   I was more thinking in terms of pressures in the workplace and how
   people can be expected to respond to them. Self-esteem is notoriously
   difficult to quantify, so I'm not sure that an increase in the number
   of students who agree with such squishy propositions as "I am an
   important person" says much. And my sense is that, even if Ms. Salzman
   is right about college grads who've just been hired, most of them will
   adjust pretty quickly to reality and learn to perform.

References

   1. http://reason.com/news/show/120293.html
   2. http://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Glass-Hayden-Christensen/dp/B0001907AI/ref=sr_1_1/103-7946141-8040629?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1179805866&sr=1-1
   3. http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Glass-Penguin-Arthur-Miller/dp/0140249389