Moving this video to bobknight33's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Mordhaus.

That was quite good.

But man, that 4th issue is a doozy. Learning that "hard work pays off" is difficult when it just really doesn't, at least not anymore. Massive income inequality, zero class mobility, and on and on. We feel like relatively easily replaceable cogs in a relatively pointless machine because WE ARE.

We hear lots of stories about people that manage to buy in, feel like they are doing something important and making a real impact, enjoy some period of good job satisfaction...

...and then all too often, they end up looking like saps when the company that they work for gets bought out by some massive faceless corporation that doesn't value their years of loyal service at all, at which point they get replaced by A) a robot, B) an outsourced sweatshop laborer in a 3rd world country that can be payed a fraction of the local rate, C) a younger and more compliant hire that will inevitably have a massive turnover rate, but who cares because there are plenty more where that came from, or D) the cokehead nephew of the new CEO that needs a job to keep him out of trouble, and hey, might as well keep things in the family, right?

Maybe I'm just a bitter, late Gen-X'er.

I agree with with most for the most part.

But not at the 11:30 mark when they say its not their fault but is the fault of the corporations for not understanding and adjusting to their needs.

Parents and the societal norms of the day failed these kids.

kids as adults finally see the real world for what it is and need to adjust, not corporations.

The term "life is a bitch" has been around for many generations for good reason.

@newtboy

Great sage of the Sift, What say you?

*comedy

Adding video to channels (Comedy) - requested by ant.

Since you asked so respectfully.....
Taken one point at a time....
1)You are not a special, beautiful, unique snowflake everyone treasures. You are just part of the all singing all dancing decaying compost heap that is humanity. Your parents lied to you.
2) IMO, children under 18 shouldn't have smart phones at all, and should only be allowed to access a highly filtered social media if any at all. Both are highly destructive when misused, and children misuse things, especially when unsupervised as most are. I'm 47 and still don't indulge in either. (Unless the sift counts)
3) I actually think impatience is good....If paired with the drive to make what you want happen yourself and the intelligence to grasp the work required to make it happen and recognize your own abilities. Being impatient while expecting handouts should get anyone nowhere fast.
4) You escape the trap of being unrecognized by your jobs and easily discarded by having skills and making yourself invaluable, not by having no skills (or ubiquitous so worthless skills), social or otherwise, and just expecting advancement for attendance like your childhood.

I agree those he describes were dealt a bad hand....I disagree that this is unique to any one generation. We all had generational issues to overcome. That so many have failed to even attempt to overcome them to better their own lives and instead think the world at large owes them happiness, is at fault for not delivering, and must change to suit them IS a fault of their own, imo, contrary to the narrator's repeated assertions. It may be a flaw their parents fostered, but it's their own personality flaw now, no one else can fix it for them.

Honestly, I down-voted this for the title alone. The video isn't that terrible, but it falls into this bullshit "generation" trap.

Here's some facts:
baby-boomers? not a thing
Gen x? not a thing
Millenials? also... not a thing

These are all lazy, bullshit shorthand ways of lumping massive groups of people together based on the date they were born and conveniently, the problem is almost always either:
- those lazy kids or
- old people who had it easy.
Funny how the people writing these videos/articles almost never seem to blame their own generation.

FFS, stop generalising large groups of people like this. If you do it based on race, people (rightly) call you a racist. So why is it ok to do it based on age?

Newsflash: some "millennials" are lazy/entitled/whatever. Why? Because they're PEOPLE.

I've worked with "boomers" and "gen x" people who wouldn't know a work ethic if it punched them in the face and I've worked with "millennials" who work their damn asses off, only to find out (as @MilkmanDan pointed out) that companies these days generally give zero fucks about their employees.

@newtboy -
I like / agree with your take on each of the 4 issues, but 4 really is easier said than done.

Having skills and making yourself invaluable happens quite slowly over time, and only if the arbiter correctly recognizes that value. I think capitalism has such a stranglehold on modern life that minor variations in short term profit/loss potential get overvalued while major intangible things (or at least, less tangible in quarterly reports) get ignored.

And just in general, everybody needs a job or purpose, but we can't ALL stand out and be invaluable. Eagles may soar to great heights, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines. Sometimes steady adequacy is, well, adequate.

Thinking that the world owes us happiness is a character flaw, but "checking out" by half-assing or phoning it in is a fairly rational response to a system that doesn't give a fuck about us as individuals, even those that DO go the extra mile. Fix the system (to the extent that it can be), and better results would follow.

Certainly we can't all be eagles, but those who've resigned themselves to being weasels should recognize their station and act accordingly, not pretend they fearlessly soar the skies of death deserving rewards and accolades from the comfort their burrow.
I get where you're coming from, but I disagree it's one or the other. Checking out and half assing it because success didn't come fast enough only ensures it will never arrive. Working hard and smart striving for greatness is the best way to achieve it, but of course it's still no guarantee.
And yes, the "system" could certainly use improvements too, but an individual can have far more positive impact on their own lives by working to improve themselves than they can on the system working to improve it. It's best to work on both whenever possible.

@newtboy
i am neither weasel nor eagle.

i am a leaf on the wind...watch me soar.

Well said. I'm fairly comfortably in "weasel" territory, and I don't bitch about it. Too much. Any more.

Actually, in all seriousness, while I am one of those cynical beaten-down types in terms of how much I care about corporate / management expectations, I do take pride in holding myself to rather higher standards than those external ones. That's a good thing, and it means that I can look myself in the mirror and honestly feel like I'm contributing something real, even if the machine that I'm in is apathetic, highly inefficient, and moderately pointless to begin with.

As (the great) Kurt Vonnegut said, "so it goes."

Oh cool, can I join the ageism bandwagon too? When I was young I had to get up at 3am in the morning, 2 hours before I went to bed... I remember being much more subservient to man when I was young. Oh wait...

The trap is assuming a particular individual belonging to a group shares all characteristics of the average member of the group. Or that a particular individual acts how they do because they are a member... that's fuckin' bigoted and ugly.

That said, I don't see why we can't generalize about a GROUP. In general, black people have a much tougher experience of this country than white people. In general, people born twenty years after me have a much different cultural, social and material experience than I did. In general, people of 100 years ago were way more outwardly racist than people of today. Are these generalizations unfair? They don't match every single member of the group, so should we stop trying to recognize broad cultural forces at work over time on large populations of people? You certainly are free to argue that any of the particular generalizations he made are inaccurate or even too dangerous to be spread, I saw a few... but to say that the act of generalization IN GENERAL is taboo...?

Historians 100 years from now won't hesitate to lump our primitive asses all together...

Fair points, but I think there’s a big difference between understanding the circumstances of a particular demographic and then assigning characteristics to the members of said demographic.

“Black people are more likely to be pulled over by the police” is a verifiable fact.
“Black people are more likely to commit crime” is a different kettle of fish.

I know that’s not what you’re saying though.

Your absolutely right that characterising an entire generation as the 'same' is flawed.

However, I also believe there is more to the whole 'entitled millenials' view than just the bias of 'those darned kids again'.

I think the lumping of generational groups is just a miswording and but reading of the problems facing society at different times. Baby-Boomers as a generation were just people, same as millenials, same as anyone else. The thing is, kids born between 1910 and 1930 grew up in a world at war. Baby boomers grew up in a post world war/cold war era. The societal problems that shaped those times and people still existed, so dismissing the problems as just perception or bias isn't necessarily a good idea.

I've been out of high school 20+ years, and the notion of participation ribbons for everyone was already starting then. The notion that losing or winning isn't important, even if you lost because you were lazy, or won because of years of hard work was already starting. The problem of basically denying hard parts of the real world has been building for 20 years, and the current generation has been buried even deeper in it.

For anyone born in Canada or the USA to cry that no amount of hard work, talent or anything else can help them get ahead and that the system must be changed to help them is insidious. When 80-90% of everyone born in Canada or the USA will never know real hunger, never face homelessness, never have a warlord burn and destroy everything they own, complaining about the inherent injustice of being born where you were as a Canadian or American is just wrong.

The ideology that has grown up in the western world over the last 20+ years has the stink of the rich, entitled world we've enjoyed here. We have a society so removed from hardship, that hardship is working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week to lead a life more comfortable than 90% of the world.

It's not millenials, it is however the society that millenials are growing up in(so all of us).