Hey, I’m not talking about all Millennials. Just the ones who can’t figure out that the whole point of the “Millennials Are Killing XYZ” is to get clicks and angry Twitter shares.
But… but… I really can’t! For the same reasons a gorilla can’t clean up his cage. 
I hate this one too. I have a friend who keeps telling me I don’t believe enough to make something happen. Usually it deals with swimming or some other athletic thing. No, I’m not going to be breaking the times I did 20 years ago, no belief is gonna make that happen. It’s one thing if I said I couldn’t go half a second faster, it’s another to drop 20% of my time. There’s a thing called reality, and no ‘positive thinking’ is gonna get past that.
I said to my mom one day “Mom, do you think if you try hard enough, you can be anything you want to be?” “No, absolutely not.” I felt a mix of wow, how weird to not encourage your kid, and your honesty is refreshing!
That antidepressants are “happy pills”.
Any which amount to “[group] can’t [whatever]”. I don’t care if it’s “girls don’t like math” or “boys can’t wear skirts”: it’s forcing people into little boxes where they don’t necessarily belong.
gigi, if you tried hard enough, would you become an NBA player? I’ve met people who have told me that yes, of course I would! I’m a 5’4" 49yo woman. There’s a wide line between encouragement and absurdity and people who like that line often cross it.
And for many people it’s actually discouraging. When there are things you keep trying and failing at because of external circumstances you can’t avoid, being told “if you really wanted to you’d do it” isn’t encouraging, it’s the opposite. It tells you that all the effort you’re putting into that work isn’t really worth shit. I know dyslexics whose troubles reading got dismissed as “not trying hard enough” for years, but trying had nothing to do with it: all the trying in the world amounted to hitting their head against a brick wall until someone took their problem seriously and taught them the tools they needed to go around the wall.
I forgot my favorite: Love conquers all. I’ve had one friend driven to bankruptcy because while love may conquer all, it doesn’t conquer having $5 in your bank account and trying to eat with ten days until payday.
Love may conquer all, but it doesn’t conquer work visa rules so if you move to a foreign country without a work visa to be with your true love , don’t be surprised to get your butt deported and be issued an exclusion order.
No, don’t get me wrong, I totally agreed with my Mom. I just thought it was funny that she was the type of mom who didn’t roll out a platiitude to encourage her kid. Like one time my irrational fear of hysterical blindness was raging and I mentioned it to her. Rather than say “I’m sure you’ll be fine” she says, “oh yeah, I had that once!” :smack: Mom, not helping. 
Maybe I’m not grokking the complete Genuine Self idea.
Big Corporate America certainly seems to want many of the ordinary drone workers to suppress a bunch of their individualism in the name of getting along at work. Whether in an office or on a factory floor or in front of customers.
For the many Americans who treasure their “right” to behave mostly however they want and expect others to just absorb the consequences, this can be stifling.
e.g. If a cook’s Genuine Self wants to belch, scratch his privates, and spout racist nonsense while rustling up the grub, he’d probably be happier in a Mom and Pop diner or a one-of-a-kind high-end gourmet bistro than at a corporate owned Appleby’s. Appleby’s HR will be cramping that guy’s style. The others? Not so much.
Likewise the cook who cooks and plates by feel will resent Appleby’s insistence that HQ knows how to plate food better than he does and so the asparagus must always go on the right pointing left.
That much makes complete sense to me. If Genuine Self means something much more than that it’s got to be a variation on the whole vacuous genre of “Follow your dream and the money will happen.”
I suppose if your Genuine Self is to be an entrepreneur then taking a job as a low-level corporate drone would also cramp your style. In that sense it’s mere tautology: If you pick a job that doesn’t lead towards your goals, odds are you won’t achieve your goals. Duh.
YOLO.
While technically true, it should be used as a warning NOT to do the crazy, alcohol-inspired spring-break activity you’re considering. You really do only live once, and you will end up regretting the face-tattoo/cliff-dive/drunken-bike-ride adventure later.
- that all gay people crave the right and ability to get married
*that promiscuity is de facto inferior to monogamy and that promiscuous people are working through damage
*that the only difference between gays and straights is what we do in bed
*that people who care deeply about animal suffering are somehow shortchanging their fellow human beings
*that non-conforming people are trouble-makers, show-offs and childish
*that those who do not choose to have children are selfish, immature or lacking in something important
I dunno if this is prevalent in other people’s social media feeds, but most of my friends are 30-something moms of young children, or single 30-something women, and the obsession with wine is unnerving to me.
It’s not like everyone is actually getting sloshed on wine and neglecting their kids or whatever. But the memes also aren’t advocating drinking wine because it’s tasty (like I see from my craft beer or craft liquor loving friends). Huge wine glasses, wine hiding purses, wine for breakfast, wine as fruit, kids and wine, blah blah blah. It’s so creepy to me.
I think it hits me harder as the child of an alcoholic, and the aunt of two kids who actually have a falling-over-drunk-from-wine-mommy… but still the whole thing is just short distasteful.
What Corporate America wants is people who can come in, do a job, and leave with a minimum of hassle. Individual managers might want drones, but drone-hood is orthogonal to the grand scheme quarterly balance sheets.
And, guess what, you can find asshole managers anywhere, and in Corporate America, the assholery is restrained, to some extent, by an HR department which can spell “lawsuit” and “wrongful termination”, which may not be the case when the manager is the owner’s fuck-up brother.
That cook would be happier at some specific mom-and-pops. I can guarantee if he tried to work at Taco Sano in Missoula, he’d be on his ass faster than Applebee’s could manage to write him up three times and go through the rest of the process with him to finally get him out the door.
(Taco Sano is Spanish for “healthy taco” and Missoulian for “university town hippie grub”; a racist lout would not last long there, as a matter of company culture.)
This, again, varies by place. I doubt a perfectionist could get away with their anal retentiveness during the busy times at Five On Black, a cheerfully low-end Brazilian buffet type place.
My point is, some people really and truly want a safe, predictable job with fixed hours and a regular paycheck. That’s Corporate America all over; even if specific corporations can’t always manage it, you’re more likely to find that existence inside Corporate American than outside. They may want that job because they want to decouple their job from their lifestyle, because they’d be driving themselves into burnout from obsessive fixation without those external limitations, or because they’re just generally neat and orderly people who don’t handle uncertainty well. Therefore, the insistence that you can’t be your Genuine Self in a Corporate America job either ignores those people or dehumanizes them.
Right. That’s basically what it amounts to, in the extreme cases: “You are a being with a destiny, which magically isn’t something like being a CPA or anything else describable as an office job, and by following your destiny you will achieve total self-actualization and not end up a vagrant holding down a marginal existence between stays in homeless shelters.”
Thus we prove that every truism has a tautology at its core.
The problem is that truisms want to spread out, to claim exciting statements as true, because that’s what gets people to share them. When called on those exciting statements, they can retreat to mere tautology, and claim that they never stated the exciting interesting things and can’t for the life of them imagine what all this hoo-hah is about.
It’s a specialized form of equivocation called “motte and bailey”.
Whenever I hear “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” I always add, out loud, “or maims you for life.”
or “makes you whinier.”
How about if you stand up to the bully, he’ll back down? Usually followed with a story how they won the fight and got their grudging respect. I did that, and the bully pounded the crap out of me. He was stronger and more skilled at fighting. The power of positive thinking was not on my side.
Or the other tale that if you take out the leader, his buddies will back down. “No, man, this is his fight”, while they watched with bemused detachment watching their friend start losing? Nope, he called for aid, and they jumped in and pounded the crap out of me.
A few other generalizations I hate:
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“If you are angered by something, it must mean that that thing struck a nerve in you because it was true.” No, 9/11 conspiracies anger me, and they’re not true.
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A related version, kind of an ad hominem: “If you are angered by something that insults Group X, it must mean that you personally are a member of Group X.” i.e., if you are angered by how society treats people who are fat, or unemployed, or on minimum wage, or single, you must therefore *yourself *be fat, or unemployed, or on minimum wage, or single.
Not just that, but some bullies are experts at hurting others in a surreptitious way, then immediately playing victim when their victim retaliates in a public way, so that the teacher will only see their victims’ retaliation.
This issue happened with refugee students at some schools in upstate New York. American students would deliberately provoke or harass them in a sneaky way, and when the refugees responded (usually in an obvious or violent way), the American bullies would make sure it got the teachers’ attention so the teacher would only punish the refugee victims, not the American bullies.
This has me wondering if alcoholism is perceived as less distasteful among women than among men.
With men, alcoholism is stereotyped as beer, whisky, violence, wife-beating, unemployment, abusive, smoking, drugs, homelessness, etc.
With women, though, it’s more like, anything goes, as long as its elegant and about wine. The rough/uncouth image of alcoholism isn’t there; it’s a more civilized and sociable alcoholism.
Maybe it’s more about the beverage than about gender. Maybe, it’s considered socially OK to be an alcoholic if it’s all elegant champagne, wine, cocktails, etc. The image of moonshine, beer, whisky, vodka is much rougher and uglier.
The one that bugs me the most is the whole “Dad sitting on the porch cleaning his shotgun when his daughter’s date shows up” thing (or any other variation of Dad being a neanderthal asshole to his daughter’s date/boyfriend as if he’s the only thing keeping his “little girl” safe from <gasp> boys!) :mad: