Sunday, July 5, 2009

"No idea what to do"

A 1993 high-school graduate:

"I was told, growing up, that I could do whatever I wanted, and I fully believed I could. And therefore I had no idea what to do."
Chris Colin, What Really Happened to the Class of '93: Start-ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations Through an Untidy Decade (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 56, quoted in Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2006), 226.

comments: 3

Slywy said...

This is on my TBR pile, although I fear that it will seem like old man grouchiness from a previous generation.

Michael Leddy said...

Dwenge identifies herself as a member of what she calls Generation Me. Not a great book (too many numbing statistics and "one of my friends" examples), but worth reading, I'd say.

Rob said...

As a member of the class of 1993, I can understand what this person's saying. I'm not using it as an excuse, but I get where they're coming from. I spent my mid-20s searching for what I wanted to be because no one ever gave me direction one way or the other. The skills I had weren't really cultivated by anyone because that would have been pigeonholing me, which wasn't the "right" thing to do in the ultra-PC years. Now, 16 years later, I wish someone would have told me I wasn't going to be this or that. Instead, I let MTV and sitcoms tell me that I could be a rockstar or just work in a coffeehouse and still have a great apartment in mid-town Manhattan.