Blowing the Pop Stand
I'd like to draw everyone's attention to two things. First off, Mme. Flamingo now has a blog of her own, which you might find interesting to check out. She calls it The Flock Report, and, if you're confused about text linking, you can hit the link over to the right. Good stuff.
Secondly, I am in complete agreement with the sentiment expressed by G-Money yesterday evening, only in a less localized, more global sense. He's getting at this issue of feeling uncomfortable in your working environment because there's nobody around to relate to. Us Young Guns are, for some reason, scattered all over the place; even though we are statistically the largest demographic to hit the work force since the Boomers rolled up in the late Seventies, there don't seem to be any of us around. Where are we? The more people I talk to about this issue, the more people I find are experiencing this issue, and I don't mind saying that this is a prime motivating factor -- all economic concerns aside, for once -- for our relocation to the Mojave Desert. It's not like any of us suffer from having small social networks... it's just that those networks exist solely outside work. G-Money's remark about not wanting to engage these people on an out-of-work basis really rings true, and I think most of us twenty-somethings would agree.
So what's the problem? Is it that we went from being in school for seventeen years, all the while being in a large group of same-aged, like-minded, easily-relateable people to the workforce? Is it that we have unreasonable expectations for the relationships we should form at work? Or is it something deeper, somehow a function of some kind of generational gap? I don't know.
I do know that for me, it goes beyond not being able to really meaningfully converse with my co-workers because they have kids and I don't, or they're cheating on their wives and I'm not, or they're painting their house and I live in an apartment. There's an unwillingness to accept those of us Fine Young Turks who do our work well as equals. To find validation, then, some of us turn to outside pursuits while others of us do what we have always done in situations like these: operate outside the rules governing the environment. In these ways, we are able to make these environments our own, and while it may result in us being branded "aloof" or "loners," it is our way of coming to terms with something we find deeply unsatisfactory.
The end result of all this -- for myself, for Mme. Flamingo, for G-Money, and even for far more stable people like El Zinga the Mexican Outlaw -- is for us to move. To the Mojave. To New Zealand. To Chicago. Systems that remain stagnant like those in this metro area are doomed to lose their best young people to places where those people can be more comfortable. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but it's one that every young person I know can relate to.
Secondly, I am in complete agreement with the sentiment expressed by G-Money yesterday evening, only in a less localized, more global sense. He's getting at this issue of feeling uncomfortable in your working environment because there's nobody around to relate to. Us Young Guns are, for some reason, scattered all over the place; even though we are statistically the largest demographic to hit the work force since the Boomers rolled up in the late Seventies, there don't seem to be any of us around. Where are we? The more people I talk to about this issue, the more people I find are experiencing this issue, and I don't mind saying that this is a prime motivating factor -- all economic concerns aside, for once -- for our relocation to the Mojave Desert. It's not like any of us suffer from having small social networks... it's just that those networks exist solely outside work. G-Money's remark about not wanting to engage these people on an out-of-work basis really rings true, and I think most of us twenty-somethings would agree.
So what's the problem? Is it that we went from being in school for seventeen years, all the while being in a large group of same-aged, like-minded, easily-relateable people to the workforce? Is it that we have unreasonable expectations for the relationships we should form at work? Or is it something deeper, somehow a function of some kind of generational gap? I don't know.
I do know that for me, it goes beyond not being able to really meaningfully converse with my co-workers because they have kids and I don't, or they're cheating on their wives and I'm not, or they're painting their house and I live in an apartment. There's an unwillingness to accept those of us Fine Young Turks who do our work well as equals. To find validation, then, some of us turn to outside pursuits while others of us do what we have always done in situations like these: operate outside the rules governing the environment. In these ways, we are able to make these environments our own, and while it may result in us being branded "aloof" or "loners," it is our way of coming to terms with something we find deeply unsatisfactory.
The end result of all this -- for myself, for Mme. Flamingo, for G-Money, and even for far more stable people like El Zinga the Mexican Outlaw -- is for us to move. To the Mojave. To New Zealand. To Chicago. Systems that remain stagnant like those in this metro area are doomed to lose their best young people to places where those people can be more comfortable. It's a frustrating state of affairs, but it's one that every young person I know can relate to.
posted by Buckwalter at 6:29 AM
1 Comments:
Hear, hear. And when the final die is cast, old people will lose. I think you've hit on a big problem here, especially with the issue of equality between newbies and old-bies. It also seems to be something that most old-bies have no knowledge of, or are unwilling to notice, which confuses me, becuase this very thing is usually what makes my day here in this haystack unbearable. Kudos to you for a thoughtful and well-articulated stand on this matter.
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