I bounce back and forth with this… I don’t know if it’s millennials(I’m a millennial) specifically or our culture in general but I think overall, us as a society is definitely softer. I think that’s the normal evolution of each generation, for better or worse. The whole, “everyone gets a trophy,” mentality, how people need emotional support animals, everything seems to be offensive now a days, micro aggressions, trigger warnings, etc. That very well could be the result of how the standard of living has risen so much.
While the meme is meant as a joke, it does shed some light on the silliness of how people have handled the election and I don’t think it’s specific to millenials. But, the safe spaces, cry-ins, schools bringing in counselors for kids who had a hard time with the election is a sad sight to behold.
Or maybe it’s the way our unfettered access to information saturates our brain to give the illusion that all these terrible things are the norm, and not the exception…
Yep. Further, THIS JUST IN: MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BEHAVED SENSIBLY AND REASONABLY TODAY. FILM AT 11 is not the sort of nightly-news tease that garners a lot of eyeballs.
@dt79
I agree. Steel must be forged and pounded to turn it into a sharp weapon. Grasshopper.
On the flip side, when my friends with kids in fancy colleges (or who failed to get into one) tell me how much more competitive things are now, because kids are so much “smarter”, I laugh at them. Kids aren’t smarter now, but they sure do have a ton of access to instant info on the internet from experts. As long as they have the basic intelligence to have a decent filter, pretty much any kid with decent Googlefu can appear “smart”.
If that’s the case, there are a lot more exceptions now than in my grandpa’s generation. However, that was not my argument that that behavior i noted is the norm. I believe it’s the natural order for a wealthy society to become more soft as they continue to prosper as a nation.
Yes, this circle of history is nothing new - it was a constant obsession of the Ancient Romans - that their citizens are becoming soft after the legions were professionalized and citizens stopped serving in their ranks and warfare moved away from Roman territory proper to the barbarian lands.
Roman national identity was centered around the ideal of a hard, taciturn, no-nonsense small landowner who would gladly volunteer to serve in the ranks of citizen soldiers when called upon. This mythic ideal was so enduring that there’s a city in Ohio named after the archetypal farmer/soldier.
The same thing happened in France during the ancien regime just before the French revolution, when smart dressed wealthy young men with powdered wigs were considered a sign of decadency.
There are drafts in 2 batches twice a year every year. I’m talking about adapting to boot camp vs developing PTSD from an election. Upper middle class kids here will normally have a maid tending to them since birth. I’m still liable for reservist training every year so I’ve seen the most recent batches.
Guess hard times are around the corner. Exibit A, I just saw Dakota Meyer post about a “Vegan Influencer” that thinks looking people in the eyes is disrespectful.
I’ve started and stopped like 5 responses to that article, I just don’t even know, kudos to him, I guess. If people are buying what he’s selling and he’s making a living off of his skill set (?) but he definitely encompassed all of the ‘terrible millennial stereotypes’ very efficiently in five answers ha
