After finishing Part 1 with a pair of quotes from our generation's pop culture commentary on itself, I'll begin Part 2 with a fresh duo.
"Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."
Tyler Durden, Fight Club
"If I'm going to marry someone, she has to be perfect... Well, it's not like I have a list... Attractive, college-educated. She wants two kids, a boy and a girl. She likes dogs, Otis Redding, does the crossword. She's into sports, but not so much so that her legs are, like, more muscular than mine. That weirds me out. And she plays bass guitar like Kim Deal from the Pixies. Or Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. Any Kim from any cool band, really."
Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother
One complaint commonly levied at Generation Y is a sense of entitlement (often out of proportion to our actual efforts and achievements). We were raised with unconditional love, constant praise and a trophy for every kid on the team. This manifests itself constantly in our interaction with our workplaces, career decisions, finances, relationships with family and our search for love.
A note on our sense of entitlement as it pertains to both school and work: It often displays as either an inflated sense of our own talents and intelligence, or an inherent belief that we are deserving of our position regardless of the work ethic we display. Reading about these attributes that we exhibit triggered a round of self-examination, with mixed results. In the workplace, I consistently work my butt off. Extra hours? Fine. On call? You bet. If there is something undone, I willingly go out of my way to solve it personally and innovate within a system to proactively prevent the situation from recurring. In short, I do my best to display the traditional nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic in addition to the initiative and creativity that hallmark our generation's talents.
However, when examining my roller coaster experience doing undergraduate work at Oberlin College, I find significantly more red flags. Despite the hefty price tag ($40K a year is no joke) that my parents paid into and I took out significant loans to cover, I regarded my position there as a given, something that I was entitled to because of my intelligence and the diversity of interests and strengths that earned my initial admission. I took advantage of the resources at the institution to further explore my interests without placing significant value on simple academic discipline. When I survey my seven semesters at Oberlin, it is clear that I didn't waste them playing videogames and drinking. I earned a spot on the varsity tennis team, traveled to Big 10 tournaments with the table tennis club and captained the men's Ultimate frisbee team. I traveled to Guatemala and I expanded my cultural knowledge through literature and cinema coursework in my Hispanic Studies major. I wrote the syllabus for, applied to teach and successfully executed an accredited course on Calvin and Hobbes which continued onwards in the hands of some of my students. I helped organize a program to train and bring college students into every classroom in the Oberlin public elementary schools to teach Spanish twice per week, and volunteered to teach in three separate classrooms when we were short on instructors. However, I consistently brought back B's and C's and dropped a couple of classes when I fell too far behind, earning myself only three years of completed coursework before I left Oberlin.
The ability to accept basic, sometimes boring requirements and display dedication throughout is the very definition of discipline, and our generation lacks it. We bounce, free as ADD, from one source of stimulation to the next in search of the right pieces to construct our personal identity. We believe our jobs should be personally fulfilling, but overlook that we need to prove we deserve those positions. We want responsibility and creative control, but forget to pay our dues in the hierarchy. To be honest, more damning than any of these characteristics is how terrible we are at taking criticism. I have friends, exceptional ones, who generally avoided the above pitfalls and vices, but I am not sure I've met anyone from Generation Y who handles professional criticism well, and I wonder if this is because of how much our work is now a part of our identity. If I equate a significant part of my personal worth with my work, then criticism of my work is criticism of who I am. If my job in the non-profit industry brands me as someone who cares (Oberlin's old motto, the one that attracted me: "Think One Person Can Change The World? So Do We"), then criticism of the work I've produced suddenly equates to questioning how much I really do care.
The same concept can easily extend across to any other aspects I've included in my personal brand. I am a music blogger, so music is a part of my personal brand, one of the little arms of my unique snowflake. If someone hears me playing TV On The Radio and asks why I'm listening to music that sounds like it's made by stupid hipsters from Brooklyn, by the transitive property they are insulting me as well. Here is where we start to get into the search for love.
If we twenty-somethings are all unique little snowflakes floating towards the ground displaying our personally fulfilling careers, sophisticated taste in pop culture and cool hairstyles, most of us want to hit the ground in our mid-thirties right next to a similarly designed (or complementary) snowflake, preferably with a nice house and a kid or two. Getting from A to B will already be challenging enough given our desire to travel the world and be choosy about the jobs we accept. To complicate matters further, you have to actually find that person.
The two quotes at the end of Part 1 illustrate our debates over how much we need to have in common with another person to date them. I think we can all agree it's more fun to date someone who shares a lot of common interests - if you can go rock climbing together and then enjoy a microbrew while listening to the new LCD Soundsystem album, then your date doesn't involve making any sacrifices - you're doing exactly what you'd be doing with your friends anyway. This seems ideal from a Generation Y standpoint, as it essentially maintains what we feel we are entitled to (composing our life of the parts of our preferred personal brand) without requiring significant sacrifice. Sure, you eventually have to learn how to compromise to work through the inevitable rough spots, but we've all heard "relationships are hard work" enough times that we can accept the necessity. It still seems like dating someone who likes the same activities and brands themselves with the same pieces of pop culture as you is a win-win situation.
It is, however, very different from past generations. They paired off at younger ages and, depending on how far back we go, were lucky to have one or two major unifying factors. Often the primary shared interest very quickly became raising mutual children or managing finances, leaving obsolete the myriad factors we Gen Y-ers are using as our criteria. Sure, they succeeded at continuing the human race and advancing our society to where it is today, but isn't it a sign of progress that we are looking for real love?
Perhaps that depends on the criteria we are using. Sadly, that awesome Pavement album you both adore isn't going to be of much use when you're arguing over who gets up to feed the baby. Even your shared love of gardening will wither if the economic crisis dries up your nest egg and tough decisions have to be made. Lori Gottlieb took a lot of heat for her recent book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (and the title is indeed unnecessarily inflammatory), but she writes with remarkable poise about recognizing what qualities make up a successful partnership. It turns out that our fantasies about locking eyes across a crowded room and dancing all night don't exhibit significant statistical correlation with successful marriages. The feminist ideals of generations slightly older than us left them in the position to write regretfully about misplacing their priorities in search of Mr. Right, but their experiences pale compared to what we may be about to put ourselves through.
If it helps, I've got no useful answers. It seems smart to spend your twenties with someone who does overlap with your personal brand, to maximize your enjoyment of life while you are young and free. However, if we hit thirty without having invested in our love life the same discipline and recognition of paying dues that we're still finding in our careers, it may not be easy to transform overnight into someone who knows how to evaluate real compatibility. Best of luck to you, though...
Finally, here are the latter ten tracks I am branding myself with, pre-2000. Part 1 brought us up to 1992, so here is one more ingredient (1992-1999) of my personal brand.
The conflicted poster boys of grunge had already overshot their expectations with Nevermind and Kurt went back to write a personal piece with "Heart-Shaped Box." Somehow his bitterness towards women (nice work, Courtney) comes off as raggedly gorgeous, laden with heavy riffs and vaginal imagery.
These indie elder statesmen etched out their part of the canon with an unreal run of brilliant records in the 90's (There's Nothing Wrong With Love, Perfect From Now On, Keep It Like A Secret). From the first of the above, Doug Martsch lets his guitar loose and nails the early 90's Pixies/Pavement catchy yet DIY sound as one of their contemporaries, no less.
The first (but far from the last) hip hop song on this list, Biggie Smalls was a force of nature behind the mic. From his prophetic debut album Ready To Die, "Juicy" is still the gold standard, a rags to riches Bronx tale.
Nothing sounded like this in 1996. Nothing has sounded like it since, either, but not for lack of imitators. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing is still one of the most intense open-to-close listening experiences on record, and "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" really deserves to be listened to at night, driving somewhere in a car, definitely within sight of the ocean. Moon optional. Head-nodding required.
Bjork is a very strange lady, but she's made her mark with fearless songwriting, abandoning traditional structure to an extent that leaves other artists uncomfortable and envious. "Joga" lays down swooning strings and echoing percussion for her adventurous lyricism, and the experience is unforgettable.
The highlight of the album that defined the 90's. OK Computer said "Fuck Brit-Pop" and went on a distorted Pink Floyd-esque trip down paranoia lane, peaking early as Thom promises "When I am king you will be first against the wall" accompanied by a pair of mind-wrecking guitar solos.
The essential Staten Island kung-fu rap collective blasted onto the scene early in the decade, but nothing displayed their lyrical muscle like the posse cut "Triumph." Five-plus minutes of eloquent threats and violent metaphor, completely eschewing a chorus or even a chance to catch your breath.
After honing his skills in the Freestyle Fellowship, Aceyalone went solo and took his wordplay with him. "The Guidelines" is a manual on internal rhyme, assonance and metaphor dripping all over a dusty, sighing beat.
Still my favorite hip-hop track of all time, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Common brought beauty to the slums with this anthem to nighttime in the city. The lyrical content can take a thousand listens to parse properly, but it only takes one to realize that these three emcees truly are in sync with the heartbeat of the metropolis.
As the glory days of Pavement and The Pixies faded away with the decade, it was easy to notice just how terrible the crap on the radio was (Nickelback, Creed, Linkin Park) and give up on rock music (notice the previous three tracks were hip hop). But somewhere out there, someone had dreamed a dream of a type of music that was actually new. The Dismemberment Plan fucked with rhythm, chipped away at guitars and almost sung - and somehow all of these oddly aimed attempts at musicianship empowered them to write something I had never heard before. "Gyroscope" is truly groundbreaking two and a half minute paean to the moment of breaking up, and its poignant sting refuses to fade.
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