"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
If You Think You Understand the Millennial Life...
Really? You need to work on that. Putting a stamp on an envelope and dropping it in a mailbox shouldn't give you anxiety. (Registering the form might be another matter.)
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it, it's that the system makes it more difficult - post offices not always accessible by bus, hours quite limited, having to buy paper, envelope, and find a mailbox (truth: I've delayed mailing letters at times, due to difficulty finding a place to drop it off).
A couple of things struck me in her lament but the biggest was the incessant comparison to people on social media and the feeling of utter failure if her life wasn't at least as fulfilled as some blogger/media personality's (claimed) life.
They are also the heirs to the "everybody gets a prize" mentality so they've never had to recover from failure. They expect every attempt to result in utter perfection and collapse into a puddle of goo when Reality smacks them in the face.
You can by stamps and envelopes at grocery stores and the USPS will pick up a letter from your mailbox when they make a delivery, why the crippling angst over sending a letter?
After making my comment, I went back and read more of the article. I stand by the idea that "I can't mail a form" is a ridiculous whine. On the other hand, I think that was a bit too prominent in the article, because almost the next paragraph, the author starts talking about being overwhelmed with a bunch of mundane tasks: "I was deep in a cycle of a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.” I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months.
None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”"
The point I was making is that many people don't have stationary on hand, and many stores that formerly kept stamps on hand no longer do.
Leaving a letter in your mailbox can be an invitation to thieves, plus, if you don't have the stamp, how do you get one? In Mom's day, you just left some coins taped to the letter; the mailman would exchange them for the stamp. Today? Probably wouldn't work.
You CAN print your own stamps, but it requires a monthly fee - too expensive for all but the most prolific mailers.
Stamps are easy to find if you actually look for them instead of blaming a lack of convenient post offices. Grocery stores, office supply stores, local mailbox stores, etc. Paper to write on is the same: lots of sources, you don't need cream vellum 16lb cardstock to write a letter, basic printer paper will do the job.
If you are going to work the company gets mail, either at a common box (with an outgoing slot) or hand-delivered where the postman can pick up the letter. Either way, a secure way to send a letter.
When my father was twenty-one, he was piloting a B-17 through flak and German fighters on his way to bomb the German war machine. When he and his crew were freezing at high altitude in an aircraft that had neither heat nor air conditioning, that didn't have a bathroom, that didn't have a coffee maker or hot meals available, he and the men that fought beside him did what had to be done. I'm sure some of them griped about the poor food on base (often better than some of the British locals were eating, though), or other conditions occasioned by being at war. But they flew in nasty weather, the mechanics fixed and maintained the aircraft in bad weather and freezing cold, and the job got done.
I'm as lazy as the next guy. There are a lot of times when I'd rather sit down with a coffee and a book than do chores, but when the chores need to be done, they get done, and the coffee and the book are my reward when work is done.
When I worked for the California Highway Patrol out of Yreka, CA, I owned a small 40 acre ranch. In addition to my eight+ hours a day at CHP, I had horses to feed (I raised Shire draft horses), worm, trim hoofs, brush down. I had milk goats to feed and milk. I had chickens to feed and gather eggs from, and a small herd of sheep to feed. Fences had to be fixed every so often, sheep had to be sheared once a year, and other chores and maintenance that didn't get done if I didn't do it.
Millennials - as a group which _does_ have its outliers who _can_ function as adults - have been coddled and swaddled in protection from the realities of life, with "safe places", stuffed animals and puppies available, and socialist adults to kiss their boo-boos when someone's "micro-aggressions" - triggered their "trauma". Like the college professor who triggered their "trauma" by correcting their papers.
Their socialist/communist teachers in high school and their socialist/communist professors and instructors in college failed them so badly that millennials were never equipped to deal with reality. They were allowed to choose "women's studies" and many other curricula that did _not_ prepare them to get a paying job in the real world, although many feminist women have been hired to work HR at various businesses, making life miserable, unbearable for normal human beings who hadn't been told that holding a door for a lady was a firing offense, that complimenting a co-worker - of either sex - was sexual harassment.
But many millennials, males perhaps more so [see "women's studies" above] than female, were unable to hold down anything more significant than a couch cushion in their parent's basement, playing World of Warcraft, or whatever the popular computer game is/was called.
I've read a number of screeds from millennials who accuse Boomers such as myself of screwing up their world. They could be right, since we didn't take the time to line up and shoot all the socialists in the educational system, and send their parents to prison for sparing the rod.
7 comments:
“I hate mailing stuff; it gives me anxiety.”
Really? You need to work on that. Putting a stamp on an envelope and dropping it in a mailbox shouldn't give you anxiety. (Registering the form might be another matter.)
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it, it's that the system makes it more difficult - post offices not always accessible by bus, hours quite limited, having to buy paper, envelope, and find a mailbox (truth: I've delayed mailing letters at times, due to difficulty finding a place to drop it off).
A couple of things struck me in her lament but the biggest was the incessant comparison to people on social media and the feeling of utter failure if her life wasn't at least as fulfilled as some blogger/media personality's (claimed) life.
They are also the heirs to the "everybody gets a prize" mentality so they've never had to recover from failure. They expect every attempt to result in utter perfection and collapse into a puddle of goo when Reality smacks them in the face.
You can by stamps and envelopes at grocery stores and the USPS will pick up a letter from your mailbox when they make a delivery, why the crippling angst over sending a letter?
After making my comment, I went back and read more of the article. I stand by the idea that "I can't mail a form" is a ridiculous whine. On the other hand, I think that was a bit too prominent in the article, because almost the next paragraph, the author starts talking about being overwhelmed with a bunch of mundane tasks: "I was deep in a cycle of a tendency, developed over the last five years, that I’ve come to call “errand paralysis.” I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months.
None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”"
That's actually a lot less ridiculous.
The point I was making is that many people don't have stationary on hand, and many stores that formerly kept stamps on hand no longer do.
Leaving a letter in your mailbox can be an invitation to thieves, plus, if you don't have the stamp, how do you get one? In Mom's day, you just left some coins taped to the letter; the mailman would exchange them for the stamp. Today? Probably wouldn't work.
You CAN print your own stamps, but it requires a monthly fee - too expensive for all but the most prolific mailers.
Stamps are easy to find if you actually look for them instead of blaming a lack of convenient post offices. Grocery stores, office supply stores, local mailbox stores, etc. Paper to write on is the same: lots of sources, you don't need cream vellum 16lb cardstock to write a letter, basic printer paper will do the job.
If you are going to work the company gets mail, either at a common box (with an outgoing slot) or hand-delivered where the postman can pick up the letter. Either way, a secure way to send a letter.
Snowflakes are easy to melt ("burnout").
When my father was twenty-one, he was piloting a B-17 through flak and German fighters on his way to bomb the German war machine. When he and his crew were freezing at high altitude in an aircraft that had neither heat nor air conditioning, that didn't have a bathroom, that didn't have a coffee maker or hot meals available, he and the men that fought beside him did what had to be done. I'm sure some of them griped about the poor food on base (often better than some of the British locals were eating, though), or other conditions occasioned by being at war. But they flew in nasty weather, the mechanics fixed and maintained the aircraft in bad weather and freezing cold, and the job got done.
I'm as lazy as the next guy. There are a lot of times when I'd rather sit down with a coffee and a book than do chores, but when the chores need to be done, they get done, and the coffee and the book are my reward when work is done.
When I worked for the California Highway Patrol out of Yreka, CA, I owned a small 40 acre ranch. In addition to my eight+ hours a day at CHP, I had horses to feed (I raised Shire draft horses), worm, trim hoofs, brush down. I had milk goats to feed and milk. I had chickens to feed and gather eggs from, and a small herd of sheep to feed. Fences had to be fixed every so often, sheep had to be sheared once a year, and other chores and maintenance that didn't get done if I didn't do it.
Millennials - as a group which _does_ have its outliers who _can_ function as adults - have been coddled and swaddled in protection from the realities of life, with "safe places", stuffed animals and puppies available, and socialist adults to kiss their boo-boos when someone's "micro-aggressions" - triggered their "trauma". Like the college professor who triggered their "trauma" by correcting their papers.
Their socialist/communist teachers in high school and their socialist/communist professors and instructors in college failed them so badly that millennials were never equipped to deal with reality. They were allowed to choose "women's studies" and many other curricula that did _not_ prepare them to get a paying job in the real world, although many feminist women have been hired to work HR at various businesses, making life miserable, unbearable for normal human beings who hadn't been told that holding a door for a lady was a firing offense, that complimenting a co-worker - of either sex - was sexual harassment.
But many millennials, males perhaps more so [see "women's studies" above] than female, were unable to hold down anything more significant than a couch cushion in their parent's basement, playing World of Warcraft, or whatever the popular computer game is/was called.
I've read a number of screeds from millennials who accuse Boomers such as myself of screwing up their world. They could be right, since we didn't take the time to line up and shoot all the socialists in the educational system, and send their parents to prison for sparing the rod.
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