Mrs. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC, 20500
Mrs. Obama,
It was a few weeks ago that I received an e-mail from a progressive group trying to whip up support for Hillary Clinton. Specifically, the text of the message read as follows:
BREAKING: New poll shows ONE-THIRD of voters ages 18-29 plan to vote for a third-party candidate
These “protest” votes will put Trump in the White House!
Image retrieved via correspondence sent by Progressive Turnout Project, fair use.
In the days that followed, Mrs. Obama, I’ve had a chance to consider your statement. And after much and truly earnest contemplation, I can only arrive at one single, solitary conclusion:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that lines used.
“Not everybody wins a trophy.”
That patronizing line gets spat from the lips of sneering pundits on the news. It makes its appearance in venomous opinion columns in the local papers and it graces cover of national magazines.
“Not everybody wins a trophy.”
“Some people are losers.”
“This is what happens when you give kids awards for just participating.”
To hear some folks talk, the sum total of this country’s ills can be traced back to the coddling of America’s youth- Generation Y in particular. And certainly there’s no shortage of criticism launched in the Millennials’ direction.
This is the generation of entitlement, the generation of immediate gratification, the generation of the two-second attention span, the “me” generation. And all stemming from the baseless sense of accomplishment and self-esteem given out with every participation award.
Or does it?
The idea that kids are being handed award after meaningless award is rampant- so much so it seems to have gone unchallenged. Yours truly took to the internet to find out what the statistics were on the number of participation awards given out, and my efforts were utterly fruitless. Now there were plenty of polls on public opinion of participation awards, but neither my old friend Google Scholar nor the internet at large had anything to offer in the way of hard numbers.
And that should concern us.
Ask yourself- just for a moment- how many participation ribbons or trophies you’ve actually seen anyone receive. Not how many you suspect might be out there. Not how many schools or competitions have that “mentality”.
How many have you actually seen with your own eyes?
I’m guessing the number of actual occurrences might not quite be so high.
Then why the outrage?
Millennials are constantly painted as greedy, lazy, thin-skinned egotists as a result of a kind of upbringing for which little to no hard data exists. One might just as easily blame the decline of glam rock or UFO sightings for the supposed ills of Generation Y.
The Mindy Project, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Man Seeking Woman, and How I Met Your Mother.
What do all those shows have in common?
Well, for one, they all feature a millennial as their main protagonist. This protagonist is also single. In fact, most of them even kick off their pilot with a break-up of some sort.
This introductory break-up signals that love is going to be the end goal of the series. Of course there will be other ambitions and goals to meet along the way- especially for female protagonists (apparently women still have to prove that marriage isn’t our only goal in life)- but each of these comedies revolves around a quirky protagonist’s struggle to find a partner.
The “searching for love” trope has become even more common in contemporary sitcoms than the “quirky but loveable family” trope that was so common when we were kids.
Even just by comparing hit TV shows, I think it’s safe to say that we Millennials tend to struggle with different issues than our parents did at our age. After all, what is a sitcom for but to mock our deepest fears and help us laugh at ourselves?
Having binge watched most of The Mindy Project, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Man Seeking Woman,and How I Met Your Mother,I’ve noticed a couple of common themes running through these shows.
1. Women worry that they’ve been too successful, while men worry that they haven’t been successful enough
Mindy (The Mindy Project) is a OB/GYN, Jess (New Girl) is a school principal, Rebecca (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) is a lawyer, and even Liz (sister of main character Josh in Man Seeking Woman) is a lawyer. When all of these women find themselves unexpectedly single, they are introduced to a kind of panic none of the male protagonists are forced to face: will I be too old to have kids by the time I find someone?
In contrast, Nick (New Girl) and Greg (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) are bartenders, Josh (Man Seeking Woman) is a temp, Josh (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) works at a “laid-back” tech store, and even Mindy has dated the occasional DJ.
This is a bit of a red herring, since Ted did eventually become a pretty successful architect.
Last week I mentioned that I had stumbled across an online publication called Primer, marketing itself as a young man’s magazine for coping with life after college. I noted it bore a lot of similarities to Art of Manliness, and I had stated I wanted to compare and contrast the two once I had read up a bit more.
I’m not going to do that.
Don’t get me wrong, I did read Primer (and re-read Art of Manliness)- it’s just that the differences between the two aren’t going to take up an entire post to list off. Instead, I’m going to be looking over Primer, which is a pretty dang solid publication all around and fully deserving of a post all to itself.
A couple days ago, I came across Primer, an online magazine declaring itself “A guy’s post-college guide to growing up.” At first glance, it appears to share a lot of similarities with another publication I reviewed, The Art of Manliness, and while I’d like (and intend) to do a full-on compare/contrast piece, I’ve still got some research to do. As of yet, though, the primary distinction between Primer and Art of Manliness is that the former appears to be a lot more validating of the millennial generation, who are more commonly accused of laziness, selfishness, and naivety.
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