I was born in 1970.
This means I spent years age 10-20 in the 1980s. As teens, my brother and I were latch key kids, and my parents didn’t helicopter us, or really pay much attention to what we were doing at all.
I spent my 20s very differently from the Millennials because my generation has something going for it the Millennials don’t have.
We didn’t have social media to broadcast to the entire World, the dumb-ass, repulsive and irresponsible things we did.
Thank goodness!
I don’t buy into generation bashing.
Since the dawn of time, every generation has dissed the generations above and below them. When you’re a kid, older generations are stuck in their ways and don’t understand you. When you’re older, younger generations are idiots and useless.
I never understood why the minute GenXers turned 30, we all turned into a bunch of “kids these days,” “get off my lawn” complainers who believed all good music stopped in 1988. Did we suddenly have amnesia and forget what it was like to be called “Slackers?”
It’s 100% revisionist history to act like we were so responsible and independent when we were young, and Millennials are all lazy and entitled. We can revise that history because there were no dumb Tweets, embarrassing Instagram Photos, or viral Facebook posts for the world to judge.
Every generation has good and bad.
I really try to not judge people by age; I try to stay age agnostic. As a business owner, I’ve employed people of many ages. I’ve had folks who work their asses off and take incredible initiative and others who put in the bare minimum necessary to keep their jobs. If you broke those folks down by age, you would find no correlation.
I have Millennial friends who are Entrepreneurs, Executive Directors, who are generally hard working and doing amazing things. I have GenX friends who maintained the Slacker lifestyle well into middle age. Both are respectable choices as long as you’re happy.
It’s all good, my friends. Stop being a cliche, middle-age grump and remember back to our early 20s — it wasn’t pretty, and fortunately, it’s not archived on the Internet.