Growing up, my dad had a sticker on his music entertainment center that read, “If It’s TOO LOUD, You’re TOO OLD!”  What it didn’t say is that if I tried to play Tupac, my dad would turn it off and say it sounded like “just noise,” that my generation was trying to pass as music.  When I got older I asked him if his parents thought the same of his rock and roll music, he just laughed and reluctantly agreed.  The point is each generation seems to look down on the one following, like one brother would treat his younger one.

Millenials are a very popular topic right now. Back in May, Time Magazine ran a cover that read: The ME ME ME Generation. Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.  Why they’ll save us all.    Here are some quotes from Time Magazine:

“What worries parents, teachers and employers is the latest crop of adults want to postpone growing up. At a time when they should be graduating, entering the workforce and starting their own families, the 20-something crowd is baulking at those rights of passage.  Companies are discovering to win the best talent they must get a young workforce that is considered overly sensitive at best and lazy at worst.  They would rather hike in the Himalayas then climb a corporate ladder. They have trouble making decisions.  A reluctance to embrace the dying work ethic of the former generation left this generation sounding like whiners,”  echoed Brad Karsh of JB Training Solutions on his very informative webinar (for which I base this post) on Millennial Retention at work.

Here is the funny thing, it’s not from the time magazine above, dated May, 20, 2013; It’s from this Time Magazine below, dated July 16, 1990.

I think we like to haze the new generation. It would seem that it has become a time honored tradition. If you back a little farther, say 1985 (Newsweek – The Video Generation), you find complaints about how this generation is so obsessed about taking videos of themselves and a decade earlier in the New York Magazine in 1976,  where it talks about the baby boomers and the “Me Decade”.

While every one is quick to focus on the here and now and what technology is doing to the current generation, one needs decades of perspective before just calling the current generation selfish with eyes out just for ME ME ME.  In the end it’s partly the culture to blame, making each generation seem so selfish.  Pop culture cultivates an entitlement mentality by steering kids towards immediate rewards. This immediate reward makes it easier for marketers and advertisers to forgo the work of the relationship they could foster.  All we try to do to help is create rules, but rules without a relationship lead to rebellion from a good financial foundation amongst other things.