MSNBC has a story which is the latest installment of “every generation sucks a little worse than the one that came before.” Apparently 20 somethings don’t talk about their work ethic or “respect” as much as older people.
I’ve harped on this before, but was there ever a generation that viewed the younger generation as having it tougher, working harder, or listening to better music than the one that came before? I doubt it. But I’ve been hearing about the Decline since the 70s. If folks grousing about the kids actually knew what they were talking about, we should be living in huts, wearing rags, and starving by now.
I read a book once that described “age diversity” as the hardest diversity dynamic to manage in the workplace. I have had very good workplace experiences with all ages, but also a couple of very painful ones. So, I tend to think that other traits are also involved, and that these can exacerbate problems stemming from the age differences. It is true, I believe, that people of different ages have different expectations concerning workplace responsibilities and relationships, and this can cause tension. There should, however, be a minimum standard of cooperation and achievement in order to advance, and from the article anyway, it seems this is not as obvious to some as it should be. I do recall one (age range deleted here ) person in an office where I worked who was told it was not necessary to be at work 9-5 five days a week as long as her work was done. She actually brought this up when it was later pointed out that she was spending about 15 hours a week at work. Of course her work was finished, no one could find her when any more work needed to be done. She wasn’t dumb!
I had a teacher in high school who liked to show just the text from two of these kinds of columns. Then, the next transparency would be photocopies of the two articles – as it turned out, both were from Time magazine, written about 20 years apart (one from the 60s, one from the 80s, I think). Both used basically the same language, too.
They do the same exact stories every 20 years about the decline in education in America and how we are falling behind the rest of the world.
You see the same dynamic in fears/views about immigration. (One can make a case for some differences over the years– for example, from changes in welfare policy, immigration restrictions, etc.– but these are relatively modest.)
To Mary’s point, a bit of a tangent: I’d argue that class differences are far larger than race (or, probably, age) differences. Class differences certainly receive less attention than race– and less relative to their actual weight.
A thought experiment: hold two of those three categories constant and ask yourself (and others) whether it’s easier to communicate with those of the same age, class, or race.
Well, kids–you’ll be finding this out in 20-30 years anyway–every twenty years or so a new group finds itself middle-aged and rolling downhill, and suddenly discovers that the young are brash, intemperate, and about half as bright as they think they are, not to mention utterly indifferent to the middle-aged, except as co-signers. It isn’t so much that this story is replayed every couple decades so much as everything is.
The flip side is that Youth imagines that everyone who came before was the hopeless slave of a mindless fashion now years out of style, the source of endlessly amusing anachronism. Trust me; Hot Tub Time Machine will be thought of as a documentary in ten-twelve years. And in-between, and in transition, are the early middle-agers, currently a bottomless font of Atari jokes.
(We’re reminded, by the way, of a certain President of the United States who claimed, as recently as 2008, to believe that political
partisanship in this country was a post-shelf-date remnant of simmering regional differences over bell-bottoms and shag carpeting.)
Here’s two more recurring favorites:
-“This election is critical.”
-“This may lead to peace in the Middle East.”
I wonder if they will still be marketing solutions so we can think outside the box while developing whole new paradigms? Hot Tub as a documentary? LOL. It is always fun to watch old movies or even tv shows that were supposed to be so cutting edge socially to see how poorly they have aged over the years and how really self absorbed some of us seemed with our generation of the time. All those 30’s and 40’s movies where the women talked so harsh and fast and hep and then the 60’s wild hogs movies, then the stupid wild hogs movie of the o’s or even that frost nixon movie that captured the evilness of nixon and the stupidity of the nation so very well. And yet his people are still shaping public policy and opinion. Never mind. We never learn and we think we are always better and more hip than the future and the past.
Eric,
Age, class, race, I have worked with all iterations of these. It depends on HOW MUCH you (the universal you) want to communicate and then HOW you do it. And then it depends on the personal traits on both sides of the communication. And then, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Theories aside, there’s just no substitute for real life.
Mary, absolutely. For example, I’ve seen some wonderful examples where people have overcome all three within the Church. Then again, they have the most important thing in common! (Of course, the Church still has a long way to go in this realm.)
But I’d say that the gaps between class are greater than those between ages which are greater than those between races– and that more effort and/or better methods are required as those gaps are larger.
Eric,
“more effort/better methods.”
To me that means more listening and less telling, more accepting and less fixing, more asking questions and less having the answers. But it’s hard to remember in the heat of any given moment, especially if we even sub-consciously regard our age, race, or class somehow more (fill in here worthy, accomplished, something) and the situation is exacerbated by the need to move a project or agenda “forward”.
Sounds good…but it’s not even necessarily a “heat of the moment” thing.
In any case, do you agree that the gaps between class > age > race are generally larger– or is your experience different than that?
Eric,
Hard to answer. I know how old and what race I am. Maybe I’m not so sure what defines “class” and maybe those I deal with have ambiguity about that as well. How do you define it? I have the most problem with people who seem to lack self-awareness; age, race or class don’t matter then.
“In the heat of the moment” means I try to do those things I mentoned, but sometimes I fail to practice them, especially if there is stress of some kind involved. That’s when more self-awareness would be helpful.
So many people find self-awareness in their favorite blog. We live in an era when ID is an equal alternative to scientific method,and its more like choosing ‘our class’ than being educated. Extremists can wrap themselves around sophists like Glenn Beck and say that Thomas Jefferson is the inspiration for the Tea Party movement and suggests that Sarah Palin would have signed the Declaration of Independence in front of John Hancock. There’s a belief from many neo-conservatives, especially, that everything anybody believes as valid as anybody’s else belief.. President Obama is being taken to task for answering honestly that he marked ‘black/african -american’ as his race on his cendud form.
So public commentary has us believe that Obama is trying to distance himself from his white ancestory. If he had marked multi-racial then the same people would say he’d be ‘pandering’ to the whites.It’s all just a culture game.This is just the current example of ‘culture fixing’.
Nobody has to figure anything out from scratch anymore,so we can’t analyze why we believe as we do.We just choose our culture and defend it through our favorite pundit..But choosing is much more a sense of rejecting than understanding what we believe and that’s the huge problem for our country now ( as I see it).Our origins as a country have been rewritten by some.Texas politicians are writing ( or trying to write) history text books for the whole country.
If I could Id just dump all our teenagers in a foreign country for a year and make them figure things out.Then they wouldnt have to go to school.Id suggest a really civilized country like France,where the inpsiration of our Declaration of Independence really started with the very secular, and scientific-minded French philosophes. Take a 2-hour lunch break every day and talk with the other diners the whole time.That would be education in context.Drink some wine in context ,too.
Lou,
By self-awareness I mean knowing myself and my strengths and my weaknesses. Knowing that my weaknesses may be inhibiting to my ability to listen to others and be accepting of their preferred way of communicating or working. Knowing that under stress my default position may indeed be to my weaker points. Knowing that I may have to consciously decide to operate differently than in my default position in order to have better results from this situation. Only when I am self-aware can I choose to be my better self.