There are a lot people, young people,
around the world who are very angry at this point in time. This has been
labeled the Occupy Wall St Moment. What are they angry about? Why are they
angry about it? I'll try to summarize the same further according to my
comprehension. I strongly believe a lot of people or specifically a
generations', upbringing methodology and trends have played a part in
contributing to this moment. Which I feel is a caused by the occupiers
themselves and a few other contributing factors.
I was born in the
late 80's, Generation X, as immortalized by the great Kurt Cobain, right before
the Economic Liberalization (pun intended). This was the time where our nation
was entirely bankrupt, not that it is not bankrupt right now. Just that back then
it was for real and now it is conceived. Coming back, bankruptcy of the nation
made the basic needs of our already deprived nation very hard to come by. This
was the time when people were very angry but had no medium to express it. Hence
we turned to music and fine arts. A lot of artists from this period of time
will confirm my saying if you take a look at their work. In fact one of my
first verses that I ever wrote says the same.
"Dad hates mom, Mom hates dad.
Thinking of this makes me sad"
This also happened to be the part when the quotes,
"Government job is the safest bet", "get married to a government
employee" and the likes were coined. Reason being even though they were
having a measly wage compared to the private corporations' employee they were
much more secure on the longer run. The people born during this generation are
essentially a bridge between the old and conservative generation and the new
who gives a fuck, Gen X. This generation was a generation which could have made
the world a better place to live in. Since it had the best of both worlds.
Somehow strangely this generation was very short lived because of the fact that
this generation was literally transformed due the invasion of different
products, trends, customs, style, brands and ideas. This is the generation
which has grown up listening to Grunge and if you could play some numbers on
the guitar that would surely set some panties on fire. I'm not issuing a
sarcastic apology either. My point is to understand where did this all go wrong?
#4. Making You Ashamed to Take Manual Labor Jobs
I've grown up
watching the 80's and early 90's movies having their main lead as Sanjay Dutt,
Ajay Devgun, Danny Denzongpa and Anil Kapoor, and learned that the "cold,
unfeeling grownup who works too hard" was the villain or had a negative
tone attached to them in half of the movies. The message was clear: If you work
too hard, you'll lose your soul and family and probably even your chance to get
laid (I made up the last part. A Bollywood hero was bound to get laid at the
end, though same can't be said about Hollywood).
The characters who worked their asses off were shown to be stiff
prudes who come down on the lighthearted main character or character image with
an iron fist. Or maybe that person is the main character, but by the end they
realize that the only way to truly enjoy life is to lighten up let goes and
accept the inner child. They finally stand up and quit their hellish job in a
hail of applause, and lived a life of stress free bliss. As a side note, at
some point, those people had to urinate ... so the little kid trapped in the
dad's body was physically handling his dad's cock.
By the time the Grunge Era became mainstream, the
"slacker", "don’t' give a fuck" and "loser"
characters were heroes, the guys who knew that life was really all about having
fun. Some of us still do connect to Kurt Cobain's, Smells like Teen Spirit.
They were then a self-depreciating group of people who proudly declared that we
were what their parents always wanted to be: laid back and carefree.
"Loser", "don't give a fuck" and "slacker" was
terms of endearment. They knew that the whole suit-and-tie job was a one way
ticket to becoming rich but losing all the things we'd wanted to do so dearly
throughout our life. So many of them ended up slacking their way into part time
lower wage jobs. So that they can do whatever the fuck they wanted and
literally be their own bosses.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and most of them are now
parents, while some are still trying to get laid. They've since found out that
there's not much market for making a really good honey bear bong or winning a
contest for having the dirtiest flannel shirt (first place four years running,
thank you very much). They've cut their hair, bought some decent work clothes
and moved on -- lesson learned. But that fast food job and be your own boss
mentality stuck with them. It became a scare tactic to use on their own kids or
their juniors in my case. We want them to have something better.
But here's the thing: Those Baby Boomers who started this "do
whatever the fuck job you want, work at the restaurant or a garage" and
that wasn't something to be ashamed of back then -- that was the era before you
needed a bachelor's or a master's in today's case, degree to get a job waiting
tables (but more on that in a moment). But at some point between my grandfathers’,
my father's time and now, getting your hands dirty became something to be
ashamed of. My generation perpetuated that. We made it socially unacceptable
to:
A) Do any job that requires sweat and/or a uniform.
B) Work 26 days a month to get ahead.
So if you don't do either of those things, what's left? Getting an
education (not Bachelor of Mass Media by any fucking chance) and waiting for a
good job (not Advertising or Public Relation by any fucking chance too) in your
field. So when my grades fuck up at school all my parents ask me to do is the
same. Go work at a garage or some restuarant. Why? Because right from my birth
I'd been hearing that these jobs are for failures and idiots. But the truth is
that these jobs are for people who have the will to work hard and make ends
meet. Oh fuck! Did I say work hard here? No that is something none of the
people like to do these days. We are so accustomed so laid back attitude lately
that if it would have been possible we would just climaxed and enjoyed sex
rather then go through the same old boring procedure.
#3. Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job
Last month, I
overheard a conversation between a young waiter and an older couple he was
serving. He knew the couple, but not intimately. They politely asked how his
classes were coming along, and he said that he had in fact graduated with a
degree in engineering. For the next several minutes, the old couple awkwardly
tried to reassure him that something would come along while he attempted to
justify to them why he was serving for a living.
It was painfully clear that he felt like a failure, and that he
dreaded having this conversation with every older member of his family he
encountered. Having to put a positive spin on his own life, trying to reassure
them that he wasn't a failure, or lazy, or hadn't dropped out of society due to
a drug problem. Yes, I did get my degree. No, they're not hiring.
So, here's the thing. You have to go to college. Your parents told
you that, I'm going telling my kids that. Every high school teacher you have or
had told you that. ("You don't want end up at a garage or a restaurant, do
you?")
And they're not wrong; if I'm an employer looking at 200
applications to fill one job, and 50 of them have bachelor's degrees, those are
going to be the ones I move to the top of the pile, even if the job is that
poor bastard who delivers refreshments at my work place.
The problem is that we've sort of set you up to think that after
high school, the next step is college, and after that you just jump in and
start working at the job you went to college for. We kind of implied that this
"college to job" transition is as natural and orderly as "high
school to college." That is, if you get the right grades, you
"graduate" to it. That's not true, and it's our parents and elder's
fault that so many of us think that.
See, our parents told us that because they didn't actually know.
As a generalized whole, they didn't go to college. You have to realize how
recent the whole "everybody goes to college" thing really is. It was
only two generations ago that college educations were rare -- in 1950, less
than 10 percent of adults had bachelor's degrees (hell, only half even
graduated high school). People back then were less mobile and more likely to
stay in the town where they were born. That meant that their options were limited;
men joined the military, or went to work at the local
factory/warehouse/whatever was hiring. Women got busy having babies and being
waitresses/secretaries/whatever was hiring. College was something that smart
kids and people with money did. And they probably thought those college kids
had a free ticket to a nice job in an air-conditioned office.
So when they worked hard and gave their kids the opportunity to
get a degree, they thought they were giving us what those fancy smart kids got:
an automatic job with a hot ass secretary to feel up. Sexual harassment wasn't
a thing yet.
Now everybody has a degree. It's the baseline minimum. So when you
finally take those first steps out of university life and enter the work field,
it's an absolute system shock to find out your 100,000 - 500,000 bachelor's
degree doesn't guarantee you a position in your field of study ... possibly
ever. At least 40 percent of you who get degrees will wind up in jobs that
don't require a degree at all. And the rest will wind up in jobs outside the
field they studied.
Again, it's not that you shouldn't get a degree. Far from it. It's
that the system we've declared to be the default also happens to be fucked. And
not in the good way ... You're not going to use 90 percent of what you learn.
#2. Adding Seven More Years to Being a Teenager
In my parents'
day, it was always just sort of assumed that at age 18, you pack your shit and
get the hell out of the house. Go back 40 years and you find everybody getting
drafted into the military at that age (Indo-Pak, Indo-China and before that the
World War II). When you got back, you started having babies. So if you were
still living at home at age 25, they made you stay in the attic and told the
neighbors you had died from tuberculosis.
Things started to change with the "everybody goes to
college" era. Going to college means you're probably not supporting
yourself, you're living in temporary student housing and your parents keep your
old bedroom in place for when you come back for the summer. So then if you
don't get a job out of college, you're right back home at age 23, possibly
still sleeping in your parent's home.
So now we guys are living in a world where kids don't move away
from Mom and Dad until their mid-20s to lower 30s. And it's the same story with
marriage -- today you tend to marry in your late 20s, as opposed to my parents'
generation, who did so five years earlier.
But this has created a very annoying, ugly side effect in the
culture: the phenomenon of the immature Man-Child. The twenty-something dude
with his collection of anime action figures, the guy pushing 30 who's still
sticking it out with his garage band and spends his nights getting in screaming
matches with teenagers, the hipster who spends 80 percent of his income on wacky
ironic clothes and mustache growth supplements.
In other words, we've extended the awkward teenage years into the
mid to late 20s. Now, I would not be expecting anyone to be apologizing for
this if it was just the result of social and economic factors outside our
control. But the problem is that we made a hero of that person and become
dependent on it. But let me tell you from experience, the longer you put off
adulthood, the harder the transition is.
And staying home longer does delay it -- a huge part of becoming
an adult is living on your own and finding out through trial and error what
works, living through seemingly simple things like balancing your budget,
cooking your own meals and shitting in front your neighbor's home without them
suspecting you.
And what's going to happen is you're going to run into a whole lot
of people who still judge you according to the age scale set by my parents'
generation -- that you should have your shit together by 23.
So you grow up in a culture that tells you maturity is for boring
assholes, and then suddenly you get dumped into a world that expects maturity.
#1. Taking Away Every Reason To Go Outside
Recently, I
noticed some ads on the channels that my folks watch, urging their viewers to
turn off the TV and go outside:
Needless to say, kids these days are mostly occupied with
Computers, Xbox/PS3 or Shin Chan/Takeshi's Castle on TV (because those shows
are fucking awesome) and when they got bored, they'd switch places. And if
their parents didn't make them take a break from it, they'd do that all weekend
without batting an eye. Their parents have to force these kids to go outside,
for their parents know that these kids need some outdoor activities (even
includes peddling drugs) to remain healthy and competitive.
Older people talk about how fat you're getting, about childhood
obesity and diabetes and how you're all lazy slugs. They imply that back in
their day, kids got up and did 50 jump squats every morning just because they
enjoyed the sense of pride in their self-discipline. But let me let you in on a
little secret: We only got exercise because there was nothing fun to do
indoors. If they had Modern Warfare multiplayer when I was a kid, we would have
played the shit out of it.
Instead, we had two channels on the TV, video games were something
rich kids had and there was no Internet. So when we wanted to have fun, we did
live-action Modern Warfare, i.e., grabbing plastic toy guns and chasing our
friends around the park pretending to kill each other (and the toy guns back
then were awesome. So was beating the shit out that poor neighbor's kid).
All that running around burned calories. Not because we cared
about fitness -- what kid does? -- but because we were waiting for somebody to
invent something better. They did, and now we spend so much of our day on our
asses that we have to remind ourselves that there are legs below it.
Again, it's unquestionably progress -- I wouldn't go back to a
time before I could pay all of my bills, catch up on missed episodes of Balika
Vadhu (die bitch, die), order a pizza, roll a joint and do all of my work
without ever leaving my keyboard. But today's kids are also missing something
crucial. Not just the great outdoors and beating each other till it became
local headlines. I'm talking about in-person interaction, away from the
grownups, outside the structure of a classroom or organized sport. I'm talking
about kids, on their own, getting in trouble and setting things on fire. Kids’ stuff.
Why should kids these days go outside to socialize when all of
them already have a cell phone with BBM or WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Google
Plus (No one uses that though) accounts to connect to each other play games and
socialize.
We talk a lot about how geek culture has taken over the mainstream
and I worry that another part of geek culture -- the social awkwardness and
inability to deal with social settings -- is also going to become the norm.
We've slowly killed off most of the activities where kids get together with
other kids and have fun (and in the process, learn how to interact).
No one did it on purpose. No one did any of this on purpose. But
we'll suffer for it just the same.
So, uh, sorry about that...
