MILLENNIALS, NATTERING AS WE GO, WHY IMPORTANT, WHY A CONCERN!

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 14, 2013

 

COMMENT:

A number of readers have been disappointed that I did not elaborate on the references made to my other works that bear on the subject at hand.  As one reader put it, "I read these pieces and didn't need a rehash.  But the reason I'm writing is that a lot of the ideas expressed here have been expressed in your books going back to Work Without Managers, right?"  Actually, I have never written about millennials, per se, but have written about social, cultural and economic trends vis-à-vis workers and managers.  With that in mind, I've expanded on the premises expressed here.

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Claire McNeill, about to graduate from university, has written an interesting Op Ed piece (Tampa Bay Times, 6/14/13) titled “My digital generation adapts and pushes on.”  She writes:

“I’m a millennial according to the label that pegs us for those of us born from the 1980s to the late ‘90’s. My reputation precedes me, apocalyptic tales of my attention generation abound.  We’re narcissistic and disaffected, reeking of entitlements.  A legion of Peter Pans, we’re complacent in our dead-end temp jobs, squatting in our parents’ basements.  We’ve been spoiled by our helicopter parents and coddled with trophies received for every tiny achievement – or just for showing up.  We’re Pavlov’s dog, raised on instant gratification or social media.  We don’t know what bootstraps are, all 80 million of us.” 

She goes on to say these criticisms ring hollow from where she stands, but as I hope to show this is not necessarily so.  She goes on to say her generation is optimistic --- what American generation hasn’t been despite dire circumstances?  Optimism is both a blessing and a curse to Americans.  It is one reason our leaders lead from behind.  They hope for the best with the emphasis on hope and have little courage or inclination to take risks to upset that fixation on optimism, that is, until events come crashing in and make it impossible to do otherwise.  In a way, the Digital Generation is the personification of this optimism and engagement style.

Then she argues quite lucidly the fact that “we are true digital natives."  That cannot be disputed but she says it as if it implies that being a "digital native" is an uncontested good thing.  Truth being known we don't know and therefore cannot argue the point with any credible confidence.

 

“The Internet is something we live alongside,” which again I think is true.   While she sees the cost benefits quite clearly, I confess to being wearier.  Obviously, her generation has left the baby boomers television generation behind as her reality and reality television are intertwined.

Ms. McNeill’s generation Is Tom Friedman’s “the world is flat” with global markets, blurring demographic, cultural and national boundaries, indeed, nationalism itself.  “My generation will be the most racially and ethnically integrated of all time.”  If this alone proves true, it could become the greatest generation in the history of man as we, at last, would be by definition a human and hopefully humane race.  But does she believe civil society will truly become civilized, and that war and terror will perish while social justice will pervade the planet?  I don't think so. 

Evidence that this young lady has her head screwed on properly is that she sees her generation intuitively engaged in incessant change with no inclination to retreat from it.  On the other hand, she sees the same anxiety-driven questions with which to grapple and a similar sense of an identity crisis.  When being authentic is more a matter of what others think of you than what you think of yourself, identity and anxiety are always challenging (see Meet Your New Best Friend 2013).

 She also admits several college trained friends are treading water, some waiting instead of doing something to change the momentum.  She correctly calls these individuals “slackers.”  But she sees most engaged while gritting their teeth, volunteering, networking, adapting to the reality of the situation, taking the initiative and “pushing on.”  If ten percent of the millennials are like her, Pitrim Sorokin’s “Ideational Culture” will surely materialized, but before calling for a parade, let us look at this a little more in depth.

Time’s columnist Joel Stein, 41, misses being a member of this generation by about a decade.  But it is clear that he wears their colors (“The New Greatest Generation: Why Millennials Will Save Us All, Time,” 5/20/13).  What is interesting about Stein’s complementary and complimentary piece to Ms. McNeill’s is that his waltzes through data expressed elsewhere (see “An Open Letter to Young Professionals,” The Peripatetic Philosopher, 6/12/13) while doing a good job of outlining the possible challenges ahead:

(1)         Millennials aren’t trying to take over the Establishment; they’re growing up without one.  IF this is true, and there is little doubt that it is, at 80 million strong, they are still only a quarter of the American population.

 

(2)         Millennials, while lacking face-to-face empathy, know how to turn themselves into a brand.  They self-advertise on some social media with scores sometimes hundreds of “friends” and “followers.”  This inclination is seen by University of Georgia psychologists as the equivalent of inflating their balloon on such social networks as Facebook.

 

(3)         Millennials define who they are as personality types by the age of 14, whereas earlier generations were unsure who they were until in their 30s.  Growing up on reality television, which is basically documentaries of personality types, is credited for this development.

 

(4)          Millennials, rich or poor, think and behave the way rich kids have always behaved.  That is why they are the first generation of teenagers that is not into rebelling.  They are not even sullen.  As one person of this generation confesses, “I grew up watching Peanuts.  MTV was a parent free zone.  MTV president Stephen Friedman says of his reality shows, “My audience outsources its superego to their parents.”

 

(5)         Millennials love the business culture and all that it represents and celebrities as well.  Previous generations were suspect of business and kept celebrity at arm’s length. 

 

(6)         Millennials are not cowed by power.  They see themselves as part of the power curve and embrace celebrity with all its connotations.  Institutional authority is leveraged without hesitation to negotiate better contracts.  Position power is neither intimidating nor mesmerizing but only something to engage.   

 

(7)         Millennials are not true believers or into counterculture because for them there is no culture. There is no “us versus them” mentality.  This is yet another reason why millennials don’t think in terms of rebellion.

 

(8)         Millennials have experienced President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Great Recession of 2008, and the Arab Spring.  They look to winter of their lives optimistically on a personal and professional level.

 

(9)         Millennials have no interest in aborting “the system,” but choose instead to embrace it.  They are pragmatic idealists instead of causal idealists.  They are tinkerers rather than dreamers; life hackers rather than life strategists.  What you see is not only what you get, from their point of view, that is all there is.

 

(10)         Millennials are comfortable in a world without leaders or leadership.  They don’t consider them relevant or necessary; the same is true of managers.  From their perspective, the world is flat and to be engaged without installing interferences.  The focus is on their interests, only, with leaders and managers treated as if poster board intrusions.  That explains why the “Occupy Wall Street” and Arab Spring in Tahir Square in Egypt fizzled out.  They are not into rebellion or a cohesive attack on their frustrations.  They are only interested in giving notice as to what they are, which is a new phenomenon.  They are not planners or activists.  They are the ultimate conclusion to Pacifier Nation.   

 

(11)         Millennials need constant approval.  They post pictures on their mobiles while trying on clothes; they have massive fears of missing out or not being included; they are more interested in themselves than in anyone else, but need the approval of others so they can in turn approve of themselves (re: see Meet Your New Best Friend, 2013).

 

(12)         Millennials are celebrity obsessed, but don’t idolize celebrities.  They see celebrities “just like us!”  As with celebrities, everything with them is context not content.  Content is a running theme without a beginning, middle or end, or necessarily a plot.

 

(13)         Millennials are not likely to be churchgoers, even though they believe in God, because they don’t identify with big institutions, religious or otherwise.  Earlier generations with such a mindset would want to change the religious, educational, governmental or political system to better reflect their ideas and ideals.  This is not so with millennials.  They have no trouble with them being as they are as long as they don’t take their mobiles away.  

 

(14)         Millennials could best be described as being cool about everything, but not passionate about anything.  They are informed but not palpably transactional or transformational in the sense of being interested in changing or even disturbing the status quo, again, as long as it doesn’t disturb their modus operandi. 

 

(15)         Millennials are pro-business and financially responsible.  They have less credit card debt than any other previous generation since the era of credit cards.  This is in part because they may live at home and use their parents’ credit cards.  That said they do have $1.1 trillion in school loan debt.

 

(16)         Millennials are not shy; they are comfortable in front of a camera; they can talk intelligently in sound bites, but perception in a personal sense is still everything.  Proof of this is that the average 17-year-old has more images on Facebook than a 17^th century French king had of himself in his lifetime

Joel Stein’s piece in the Time’s, to his credit, lays out some of the factors with which observers over the past thirty plus years have registered concern.  The late Christopher Lasch wrote a series of book on the subject commencing with “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) and “The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984), among them. 

Should you read these books, studies written before the Information Age took hold, you would find that Lasch anticipated that what I call “the Pacifier Generation,” would in time materialize.  It is with us now.  The mobile has become the replacement for the plastic nipple that so much earlier had registered contentment, while freeze framing millennials as if the center of their own universe in narcissistic delight irrespective of the perturbations clamoring for their attention and resolution.  Studies indicate that:

(1)         The incident of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that is now 65 years of age or older.

(2)         58 percent of college students scored higher on a narcissistic scale in 2009 than in 1982 (National Institute of Health).

(3)         Millennials got so many participation trophies while growing up that a recent study showed that 40 percent believe they should be promoted every two years regardless of performance.

(4)         Millennials are fame obsessed.  Three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be personal assistants to famous people as want to be a United States Senator.  This is the antithesis of delusions of grandeur for themselves, but rather an interest in being near glamour and power to benefit from the reflection.

 

(5)         According to a 2007 survey, four times as many would pick the assistant job to as celebrity  over CEO of a major corporation.

(6)         Millennials are so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60 percent would feel right without any guiding principles or outside authority.  This nullifies the role of the Church and organized religion as personal intercessor.

(7)         Millennials are stunted.  More of them live with their parents who are between the ages of 18 and 29 than live with a spouse outside their parent’s home (Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults).

(8)         Millennials are lazy.  In 1992, 80 percent of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with great responsibility; in 2002, only 60 percent did (Families and Work Institute).  They still want the perks and privileges that before were offered as incentives to performance.  This has been described elsewhere as leading to workers being suspended in terminal adolescence (see Work Without Managers 1991).  WWMs anticipated the decline and irrelevance of management in the conduct of business, but it didn’t anticipate the arrival of milennials as the Digital Generation.  Millennials have become an exclamation point to the premise of this study.

 

(9)         Millennials cannot do simple math (adding, subtracting, division, multiplication) in their heads; they need a calculator.  Nor can millennials spell or construct grammatical sentences without the Internet.  Their curiosity in both regards is skin deep as they rely on some software for grammar and spell check as well as the thesaurus for the word that they will use.  The vocabulary in their heads is limited, too, as they are not a reader generation. 

 

(10)         Millennials at 80 million strong (born between 1980 and 2000) are the largest generation in American history.  Baby boomers, who are now retiring, are not far behind at 78 million.  In an ironic way, due to the abandonment of parenting requirements of baby boomers, millennials have had the opportunity to be their own parents as well as the inclination to create a world that best reflected their orientation and mindset.  They were into games as children and now they are making life a game on another level.  They justify their toys – devices of the Information Age – as instruments of efficiency or tools, while showing little interest or inclination to reflect on what was lost never to be experienced again for what was gained.

 

(11)         Rich and poor are equally narcissistic, materialistic, and technology addicted.  There is little indication that millennials see this as delimiting.  The consequence of this paradox is that no generation has been so focused as millennials on the present or less focused on history or the past.

 

(12)         Self-esteem issues peak with each generation at some point, but with millennials it has accidentally boosts their narcissistic preoccupation.  Self and esteem have become an oxymoron as verification of individual worth has ceased to be from inner direction but almost entirely from outer verification.

 

(13)         Millennials believe hooking up or networking is as important if not more important than actually developing individual talent.  There is a sameness to postmodern existence which the Television Age with its monolithic architecture of hearth and home, dress and manners, and even layout of cities and towns has become even more so in the Information Age and the common denominator of millennials.

Millennials are most likely to have a high degree of unmet expectations which the late Christopher Lasch anticipated nearly forty years ago (see Culture of Narcissism) with them escaping into the electronic case of their own making.  Millennials don’t get angry, or make demands on the status quo, they simply lower their expectations and level of satisfaction and resigned themselves more or less to their fate.

(14)         Millennials have come of age in the era of the “quantified self,” that is, it is not the quality of anything, friends included, but the numbers, as they obsessively are recording and adding constantly to their data base with the number of hits, etc.

(15)         Millennials are text crazy sending and receiving a minimum of 88 per day.  They are constantly waiting, wherever they are, for the buzz to tell them they have a message.  It is the silence that is most threatening and the buzz that is most consoling.

(16)         Millennials live under the constant pressure and influence of friends.  “Peer pressure is anti-intellectual, anti-historical and anti-eloquent” says Professor Mark Bauerlein, Emory University.  But this is not new.  Peer pressure has always been a confounding phenomenon.  What makes it more so in this Digital Age is that anyone who does not have and is not slave to a mobile is non compus mentis, or completely irrelevant.  This mindset is more pervasive than racial, religious, educational, political or social bias.

(17)         Millennials constant texting and tweeting is according to Professor Larry Rosen of California State University, “doing a behavior to reduce anxiety.”  It is the Digital Age pacifier surpassing Valium or cigarettes, booze or dope to register contentment, so it isn’t all bad.

(18)         Millennials are not creative.  The constant search for a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my latest textual update!”) increases contentment and satisfaction but reduces creativity.  From 1966 to the mid-1980s, creativity scores in children increased.  They have been falling sharply since 1998 according to the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.  Millennials argue look at all the advancement made practically every day in electronics and their applications.  Technology is grounded in application, and application technology has been vigorous and impressive.  But the science, which is the foundation and source of technology is old, very old in some instances harkening back scores of years and beyond.  Look at art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy and psychology, and you will see evidence that perfection has taken precedence over perspicacity. 

(19)         In the era of social networking, largely through an unnecessary face-to-face engagement, empathy scores have dropped and narcissism scores have climbed.  Millennials have trouble intellectually understanding other’s with differing points of view.  It is outside their normal orientation.  Before they were called the Digital Generation, they were referred to as the “spoiled brat generation” by some writers (see Six Silent Killers, 2013).

On the heels of the Time report, we learn that in California students with perfect attendance records at some inner city schools are eligible for cars or iPads as rewards for perfect school attendance but not necessarily with any requirement for improvement in school performance.  This policy differs from school district to school district, and the financing for these incentives is said to be completely privately funded. 

Nattering as we go, the interest here is to engage the reader to see the possible impact in terms of transactional or transformational benefit to society for the period.  We have had several generations named in the last century and a half.  Transactional leadership pursues economic and psychological contracts that meet the material and psychic needs of society.  Transformational leadership recognizes the material and psychic transactional needs, but goes further to transform the system to more effectively and efficiently meet those needs.  Here are my most subjective designations::

(1)         Missionary Generation (1860 – 1882) – transformational with Franklin Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryant

(2)         The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900) – transactional with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scot Fitzgerald and James Joyce

(3)         The Greatest Generation (1901 – 1924) – transformational with Betty Friedman, Ronald Reagan and WWII veterans

(4)         The Silent Generation (1925 – 1942) – transactional with the Silent Majority and children of the Great Depression

(5)         Baby Boomer Generation (1942 – 1960) – transactional with Oprah Winfrey and the Culture of Narcissism

(6)         Generation X (1961 – 1980) – transactional with Jon Stewart and children who became their own parents

(7)         The Millennials (1980 – 2000) – transformational with Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga

It is perhaps hard for millennials to understand why we give them so much attention, but so little credence.  This is not new.  We do this with for every new generations.  The only difference with millennials, and this may prove significant, is that they don’t seem to take the rest of us seriously, as they have had to be their own parents, and now on their own, don’t feel they need us.  For Joel Stein, “That’s why we’re scared of them.”

 

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AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS

 

 

 AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 11, 2013

[1]     REFERENCE:

 

This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." (1995)(2013)  The book when first published anticipated the rise of the professional in the workforce without a passion for the role demands or recognition of what that role would require.  These professionals were interested in perks more than performance.  It was not totally their fault.  They had been managed, motivated, manipulated and monitored in a way to make them passive and reactive rather than responsive and responsible.  As this second editions is being released, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture doesn't look too different, and thus the reason for this inclusion in the book.  

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If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you are the newest generation. If you have just graduated from university, or about to graduate, and cannot find a job, don’t blame your parents, the government, in fact, don’t waste your time with blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side is up.

The sharp division between values, natural and moral, even the assumptions of values may not only be different in principle but incompatible with the past for there is a contradiction between what people expect and experience today versus what tradition dictates. 

Tradition is not open or malleable to change as the times demand.  This is illustrated by its obdurate maintenance of the common good when the shift is now clearly to personhood.     

Through no fault of young people a dagger has separated the world before and after 1968 as the American Century ended a little early in that year.  Young people are the inheritors of that development.

Since 1968, we have had the Vietnam War, the first war we ever lost, the exodus of young males to Canada to avoid the draft,  Woodstock and the Hippie, and Yuppie generations, followed by the X, Y and Me generations, the OPEC embargo, double dip inflation and unemployment, the Contract with America of the Republican Party in Congress, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, two Iraq Wars and a War in Afghanistan, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, two attacks on the Twin Towers of New York City, ultimately demolishing the towers killing nearly 3,000, the War on Terror, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, the HIV epidemic, Enron debacle, the ambivalence on 11 million illegals and immigrant policy, the economic crash on Wall Street and the real estate meltdown in 2008 nearly leading to the Second Great Depression, the bailout of Wall Street, and the automotive industry, the election of the first African American President, the economic tilt from the United States to China the Pacific Rim Countries and Brazil, the Information Revolution and Information Age with the creation of the Internet and handheld devices to allow instant communications, the Arab Spring, the collapse of the management paradigm, the rise of the professional worker, the decline of the blue-collar working middle class, the self-estrangement of institutional society from family, school, workplace, church and state at all levels of interface, and these are  only a few of the highlights of the cataclysmic change since 1968.  It appears as if no one is in charge as the country revolves around business as usual practices with infallible authority with no one willing or able to lead as everything seemingly stays the same, misses the changes and the future is left up for grabs.  

There appears a frantic search for anchors in dogmatic public and private policy from the pronouncements of think tanks, prophets, soothsayers, pundits, gurus or those in touch with unseen forces.  The rational and irrational have collided to produce an alchemy of contempt, conflict, cynicism, disgust, anxiety, depression and loss.  We are not happy campers.  We have lost our moral compass and our way.

In spite of this, the common mantra is, “Not to worry!  No reason for fury!”  National ineptitude, incompetence, inconsistency and failure ride on the optimistic hubris of the American psyche.  Rationalism not reason seems the order of the day.

Young people are coming of age in a barren period of American history.  Americans are exhausted and more importantly, so is the planet.  There is little point in looking for a priori truth for the past was built on a porous foundation of explanatory models that provide the rhetoric and rationale to explain away reality.  New values need to be created out of this wasteland. 

Nothing works anymore!  We continue to insist on two-dimensional strategies to solve three-dimensional problems, and wait for these strategies to work, which of course they never do.  We thought that science was guided by ethics and would discover the key to Mother Nature, that politics was science as it applied to groups, and that morality was a kind of geography of the mind.  Leadership, we find, is necessary but not sufficient to accomplish this task because everyone is a leader or no one is.  Missing is the will and the intelligence to recognized that one size never fits all if it fits anything.

We confuse means and ends and have ever since Machiavelli if not before. Following Plato, the belief has persisted that ends could be discovered only by specially trained experts, by sages, divinely inspired seers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, the intelligentsia, by people like you fresh with your college degrees in hand.  Virtue was perceived as knowledge, values as action, and who better than the knowledgeable to power that process to action than the most virtuous.

Through the ages we have seen this is not always true if, indeed, it ever was as among these ranks have often been the most shallow, pathetic, naïve, and self-deceiving.  They have plummeted the economy into collapse and the nation into unnecessary wars.

This destructive element persists under hyperboles that declare groups “the best and the brightest,” or someone “genius” or “brilliant” or “gifted.”  Intelligence is not what it “is.”  Intelligence is what it “does.” When sobriquets are surrogate to “is-isms” than deeds are reduced to furniture of the mind.

When we fail, and young people are entering a spirited world that knows much more about failure than success, group identity has a tendency to move from one fanatic movement to another.  This has exhausted people and the planet.  It is time for a new Age of Reason with fresh minds competing in the marketplace of ideas.  It is time to leave the redundant institutional programming of the 19^th century and the bellicose self-flagellation and hubris of the 20^th century 

It was the Age of Reason in the 17^th and 18^th that gave birth to the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution when pursuit of liberty, fraternity and equality were the battle cry.  But, alas, even then as remarkable as that age, it failed to provide happiness and freedom for everyone, and led to the American Civil War.  Likewise, as much as we might congratulate our times for the Information Age, much of the originality of design belongs to that period and not ours.  Modern thought, science and philosophy owe much to these pathfinders.  We have been too busy exploiting their work to ponder originality in our own. 

Let us consider for a moment a few new realities that those of twenty-one years and nine months might note. 

·         We once thought we were a Christian nation in which everyone had freedom of religion. Now we apologize for calling Christmas, “Christmas,” and Easter, “Easter,” and saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter.”

·         We once thought English was our native language and now we apologize for not being able to speak or read Spanish.

·         We once thought marriage was between a man and a woman, and now we are ashamed to insist on that definition, as our clerics, politicians and media cave into the societal cultural demands to see marriage as otherwise.

·         We once abhorred premarital sex as much on pragmatic as religious grounds as it led to unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases and disruptive emotional development of our sensibilities. Our bodies don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life.

·         We once thought it normal to restrain sexual activity but now we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we do.  Instead, we hook up with relative strangers as if married couples or share our virtues with no social stigma in high school or earlier, and lead sexually active lives seeing no guilt or shame, much less consequences to sexual congress. We see it as being “adult” and sophisticated when this couldn’t be further from the fact.

·         We once thought it cool to smoke cigarettes surreptitiously justifying it because our parents did even though we might not yet be in our teens. Once, it was equally cool to have a nip of a beer, wine or whiskey left after our parent’s party before we were of age.

·         We once thought only celebrities were into drugs.  Then all at once someone we knew not yet in their teens were using drugs, and then it seemed everyone was using drugs, although illegal.

·         We couldn’t wait until we were 18 or 21, depending on what the legal age was in our state to go gangbusters and drink alcohol legally.

Now, if you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you don’t have to look too far from where you’re sitting to see a mother or a father, uncle or aunt, brother or sister, or best friend who has cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, sexually transmitted disease, coughing spells, unable to walk without a cane, or very far, or has a stint or two in their arteries to keep blood in their bodies flowing, or a double, triple, or quadruple heart bypass operations because after about nine months and twenty-one years, the time you have been alive, Nature’s revenge kicks in and levels loved ones who were simply doing what was cool.

It is not your fault that you were born into “Pacifier Nation,” which has a tolerance for everything except the courage to be intolerant of anything, especially something harmful to your health.  Chances are you were introduced early in life to a plastic nipple pacifier instead of a mother’s breast or a warm bottle of milk to keep you quiet and apparently content.  This has been magnified to the point that as Pacifier Nation we have fast foods, fast cars, fast boats, fast life styles, fast morals and indiscriminate appetites as long as it is more. 

Nor was it your fault that when you were full of zest with an appetite for life and couldn’t sit still and wanted to be doing something, running, jumping, yelling, laughing, talking, shouting at your heart’s content, only to find that this was all wrong; that you were supposed to hold your spirit at bay and behave appropriately at meals, in church, at school, that when adults were talking you were to be seen but not heard, to behave like a mannequin, cute but unobtrusive.

As you reached school age, a new regiment of pacifiers was introduced to quiet your spirit.  You now had language.  You could process information.  Only now you found school more inhibiting to your spirit then home had been.  It puzzled you when so many of our spirited playmates simply kowtowed to the demands of their parents, teachers, nuns, priests and ministers.  The drill was now to be polite, obedient, punctual, passive, attentive, focused, predictable, and lovable within the confines of well-documented tyrannical or draconian policies for behavior.

You had little choice but to rebel, or retrogress to that child before language was your outlet.  Only now the pacifier was not the innocuous plastic sucking nipple, but a regiment of Ritalin or Adderall given even to prevent your rambunctious prepubescent spirit from kicking in.

If this were not enough, with no idea what it meant, you were labeled with Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” in the form of being called an ADD or an ADHD child. With no say in the process, you had entered the world of psychiatric doublespeak and doublethink, where a ton of prevention was worth a pound of cure.

Small wonder now that you are nine months and twenty-one years of age you have probably experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. In fact, many of these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to legalization, as the “Sins of the Parents” who instituted this regiment of Ritalin and Adderall don’t know what else to do but to capitulate.

Soon, it will be possible to be on a high and have your feet never touch the ground until you die. Of course, chances are you won’t be able to do anything too productive during the interim. Not to worry, psychiatry, medical science and pharmaceutical research is covering your back with apologies and placebos and the rationale that give credence to “Pacifier Nation.”  These drugs will soon be labeled as mind expanders as was LSD several generations ago for the Haight Ashbury crowd of San Francisco.

We live in an age of excess in which one billion more souls are on the planet since 1968 or two generations ago. You are the fortunate member of the two billion souls who share 80 percent of the wealth and natural resources while the other five billion souls share 20 percent or less of the world’s wealth and resources.  We have conflict and terror for this reason and this reason, alone, no matter how much the political and economic dialectics rotate around the axis of “us against them.”     

We in the West and the rising Third World East along with Brazil in South America have gravitated to addiction as the norm. This is not only in the sphere of recreational and prescription drugs, but in all our pursuits and endeavors. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing it in the middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, drop out, depression, anxiety, bipolar or schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and having some kind of elected surgery to look thinner, younger or more attractive so as never to grow old and therefore never have to grow up. We have legitimized being sick as a socially acceptable way of retreat from the grind, or from life itself.  On the other hand, should anyone initiate such a retreat, say “dropping out” while being totally healthy, chances are it will generate whispers that you are sick in the head.  In a word, you young people are about to take ownership of this upside down world. 

It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to ultimately rebel from a regimented society to sponsor and create the Information Age that we now enjoy.  Ironically, one pacifier has replaced another, as the digital electronic mobile has replaced the plastic nipple.  

We become what we think, but we also become what we hate.  They are two sides of the same coin, as the moon has a bright and dark side, so do we.  Ritalin junkies, it can be imagined, couldn’t wait to escape the regiment of medication. The Jobs and Gates went off to college, and saw that sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always liked games, the weirder the better. So, they gravitated to crude games and toys on printed wire circuit boards, and voila! They were home!

A generation or two ago, those of Ritalin Nation were not serious students of anything but opportunists. Freud would say they weren’t looking for a career, they were looking to escape the common good. They were looking for a new pacifier that was of their own invention that would allow them to retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.

Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big Blue’s IBM and GM and GE who were lock stepping to the past, and turned toys into tools that could be their constant pacifier not unlike that plastic nipple remembered affectionately so long ago. God is no longer in the machine but in the latest electronic wonder, and as they say in sport, “You’ve not seen anything yet!” 

It doesn’t stop with what we have in our ear, on our lap or in our hand, always something because we cannot stand not to be doing something, listening to something, or chatting with someone 24/7 because we cannot stand for one second to be alone. The fact that you can probably identify with this temperament shows how pervasive the condition.

How can anyone always be on?  We have only so much psychic and physical energy. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed so it is with us. You cannot cheat Nature. In Nature everything is connected to everything else. Everything in Nature has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. There are no free lunches in Nature. Science has proven this on innumerable occasions yet people try.

Athletes take steroids to get an edge, which destroys as it builds muscle and ultimately leads to entropic damage and on occasion early death. Now we have energy drinks to enhance workers’ performance but with no idea what it is doing to their bodies. With food manufacturers, the worry is not what is ethical but what is legal. This finds them producing candy coated caffeine capsules or caffeine loaded energy drinks, and advertising them as safe as drinking water.

You may ignore these references as the utterances of a cranky old man, but few would deny we are in unchartered waters with little more than our optimism and hubris in support of our fancies. The world is quickly moving away from a white American-European dominated society, which is inevitable.

What is not ineluctable is to go passively forward with no sense that there is any point of going against the current, when there is, and the reason for this open letter. You of nine months and twenty-one years of age can change the course of history if you but have the will to do so.

·         You may be an unwed mother, or an absent unaccountable father.

·         You may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling, licentiousness or a myriad of other counterproductive excesses.

·         You may be using the shibboleths of codes to establish distinction from older generations.

·         You may know all the integrations, all the electronic Apps to networking that differentiate you from your elders.

·         You may feel self-disgust, self-loathing, self-doubt, isolated, disconnected, or alone.  That is because you are a stranger to yourself and have not accepted yourself as you are.  The way you are is the way you have chosen to be, and if it isn’t working for you, only you can chose to change, no one else can do that for you.

In every age in the marketplace of ideas, despair resides, but there is no law that says you must buy into the despair because seemingly everyone else does. Existentially, self-alienation differs little from one generation to the next. It is just given different names: “the lost generation,” “the beat generation,” “the baby boomers,” “hippies,” the “yuppies,” “the me generation,” and so on.

At one time the greatest form of subtle torture was to strap a person to a chair to the constant dripping of water with no recourse to do anything about it but to go mad. Today, there is no need to strap anyone to a chair because the constant drip through a myriad of media outlets, not to mention the personal ones as well, texting and tweeting, disenfranchises us from our normal lights. The irony is that no one notices as they are strapped voluntarily to the same kinds of electronic devices, not to mention the subliminal torment that is a constant cacophonic roar to our supple subconscious.

Consequently, we go forward looking for answers outside ourselves when they all exist within us. We attempt to be everyone’s friend ending up being no one’s friends, because when we try to be everything to everyone we end up being nothing to anyone, including ourselves. Not everyone will ever love us; nor can we solve anyone’s problems but our own

Each generation looks expectantly to its elders with the demand, “Show me something new!” Well, there isn’t anything new. Despite all the technological progress of one generation to the next, people remain essentially the same only the toys and tools change.

Each generation experiences success and failure, surprise and disappointment, pain and pleasure in the moment, and each generation differs as to how it embraces or rejects that experience. There is a dread of every generation to contemplate the future or to deny its hold on them.

If this sound like a preamble to some sage advice, and how to deal with the future, you would be wrong. Instead, it formulates questions that you should ask yourself because you, alone, are the source of the answers:

·         What is it you would like to do?

·         Why would you like to do that rather than something else?

·         What is the relationship of your essence (genetic gifts) to your personality (acquired tastes)?

Chances are you been too preoccupied to the answer the first two questions. Few of us did when we were your age. We stumbled into the future ending up doing something or other, which proved either adequate or inadequate, more a matter of chance than choice, more a product of attitude than aptitude.

The problem of my generation, the era of the Great Depression, was more a matter of the third question, as we were pretty ignorant of balance or imbalance between “who we were and what we could do” (essence) and “who we thought we were supposed to be” (personality).  We stayed pretty much within the white lines that were assumed to be our designation which meant doing pretty much what our parents had done and were.

Essence is what you are born with; personality is what you acquire. Essence is your DNA, which is cumulative, not only of your parents, but also of many generations in your family tree that preceded them, and contributed to the human being you happen to be in terms of potential. Essence is your exclusivity, your uniqueness. Essence you own. Personality is what you only rent because you cannot own what you can only acquire.

You may be inclined to disregard your essence, your potential, because of what sociologist Dr. Billy G. Gunter calls “Ambient Deficiency Motivation.” ADM finds many of us, strangely, attracted to what we are not or the antithesis of what we are or could be.

·         The profligate sinner to the priesthood.

·         The common criminal to law enforcement.

·         The CSI junkie to R&D chemistry.

·         The wallflower to radio/television shock jock or comedy.

·         The town gossip to journalism.

·         The inveterate liar to writing novels.

·         The constant screw up to management.

·         The spendthrift to accounting, banking or insurance.

·         The poor student to teaching.

·         The resentful of authority to politics.

The current emphasis is on personality, fitting in, or being consistent with the prevailing norm.  This is fad driven, and fads have a short shelf life. Consequently, when you could be almost anything in this rag tag bone of the heart world of ours many are attracted to what everyone else seems to think important instead of their obvious gifts.

Essence, however, is not enough. We must also develop our personality. We start acquiring personality from birth. As a baby, we discover what works with our caregivers and what doesn’t; what results in satisfaction and what does not. The baby calibrates the benefit to pouting, tantrums, and tears, and uses them judiciously to its desired ends sometimes throughout life.

The child also learns the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in getting what is wanted, which is not necessarily congruent with what is needed to grow and develop consistent with essence.

It is no accident that several generations since the middle of the 20^th century have been suspended in terminal adolescence as a result of learned helplessness, looking outside themselves for direction, security and satisfaction.

Our bloated and deficit economy is the collective product of this mindset on a national basis, and an example of the culture, climate and character of the world you are about to inherit. 

If anything is advocated here, it is a better balance between essence and personality. You are entering a celebrity driven culture where personality (fitting in) has become dominant at the expense of essence. This translates into it being more important "who you are" than "what you are."  It is apparent when you consider the many masks we are forced to wear, as we go through life to accommodate constantly changing role demands (our jobs) and self-demands (our self-regard).

Masks are so much a part of our culture that we are constantly changing masks in private as well as public to the point that it is hard to work out what is the mask and what isn’t. In other words, we are still calibrating like that baby we were nine months and twenty-one years ago. Seldom, if ever, do we abandon our masks for fear others will see us as we are. Indeed, we change our masks so quickly in private as well as public that the naked eye cannot capture the change.

Some of these masks work at one stage but not at another. It is beholden to the mask changer to know which masks is being worn and in which situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. Some might claim, “I don’t wear a mask!”  You know they are talking about masks when they say, “He’s a nice guy but just a tic off.”

If this seems confounding, take heart in knowing that the mask you wear will consistently be appropriate if you don’t let external factors dictate your internal integrity. You have your best interests always at heart when you have a sense of humor about yourself and start treating yourself as your very best friend.

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[1] The relevance of this was brought home today (June 12, 2013) by New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks Op Ed piece on the NSA leaker of secret documents to the press by high school drop out Edward Snowden.  Brooks sees Snowden as part of an unfortunate trend of the age -- The Atomization of Society.  I see him as the personification of the rise of personhood among young people in the vacuum of duplicity of a paranoid nation.  Brooks writes, "Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good."  As the Peripatetic Philosopher, I track and have been tracking the incipient movement to complacency and complicity of spineless leadership over the past several decades.  Snowden, in my view, is not the exception but the rule of young people, and scolding him for being "atomizing" will not change the trend.  The end of duplicity and chicanery in all institutional life would be a powerful first step.   But we must first get rid of two-dimensional problem solving and entertain three-dimensional thinking.  Buying and selling fear is two-dimensional as justification for positive freedom (See Isaiah Berlin's "Four Essays on Liberty," 1969).