To the Millenials from a Gen Xer

[SheilaT]

26. Every generation has its challenges.

I'm a Boomer, and almost nothing makes me crazier than to listen to members of my generation talk about how the young people today are lazy, incompetent, and so on. Trust me, when we Boomers first entered the work force our elders thought very little of us.

I spent about twelve years attending a local junior college, and it was quite instructive sitting in the classroom year after year with nineteen year olds. I noticed early on that the Xers tended to work pretty hard at really crappy jobs. They had it much worse than I did at that age. I only had a couple of years with Millenials, but they seemed softer and slightly nicer, but don't think that means I thought the Xers weren't nice. They did have a toughness I admire.

For those of you who think the whole generation labelling is crap, please read the book Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It's very enlightening. For one thing, they tend to define generations by a common set of experiences, not merely birth years. For all that it is twenty years old, it's amazing and accurate in its assessment of things.