“Everyone’s either anti-semetic or jealous.”

First, this post is not about being Jewish.

I was at an interview for a graduate program and overheard another prospective student say that her grandmother used to tell her that everyone was either anti-semetic or jealous to make her feel proud of her Jewish identity.

Yuppies. Hipsters. Millennials. Generation C. The Go-Nowhere Generation.

How the hell did we go from being known as “young urban professionals” to being profiled as “risk-adverse and sedentary”? The New York Times article entitled “The Go-Nowhere Generation” postulates sweeping and negative generalizations about my fellow millennials by plainly stating that we are “literally going nowhere.”

And you’ll never guess who’s to blame.. no, not our hippie-dippie parents (who partied WAY more than we did/do, by the way). It’s the Internet’s fault, naturally. Yep, the Internet. Otherwise known as the modern-day sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

At another interview for a graduate program, which I’m convinced I completely screwed up based on one tiny statement in which I expressed my feelings toward a topic rather than approaching it as simply a research interest. (By the way, since when is it bad for a social scientist to have altruistic motivations for their work? I’ll save that for another post..) Basically, I alluded to this impending culture shift toward digital connectivity and how I wanted to prove that it’s happening, and that it can work for people.

I was immediately shut down and told that I was never to intend to prove anything, indicating that I was almost too invested in my research interests. Too excited. Too motivated. Too eager to navigate an emerging space.

So you see, it’s not that I don’t want to go anywhere. But the people that have the power to allow me to do so are so put off by any shred of ambition and excitement that they, by proxy, force me and my fellow millennials to go nowhere. And I think that if the author of this article actually spoke to people from my generation, they’d find that this was in fact the problem:

Everyone’s either generationalist or jealous.

@1 year ago