In my latest podcast I mentioned this - how elder people in general do NOT help younger people as you would think they would.
Matter of fact, I've found older people to not only NOT want to help younger people, but obstruct their progress AND take advantage of them. This ranges from obvious things such as the entire education industry (where older people vampirically feed off of younger people) to business "partners" screwing over their younger partners to bosses refusing to do any grooming, training, or mentoring.
Again, if you step back and ask yourself,
"Have any of my elders really helped guide, lead, mentor and help me in my endeavors?"
The answer is not only "no" but also "they have been antagonistic, obstructionist, even against us."
Understand I don't say this as a younger entitled "woe is me, every one is against me," but this HAS been my observation. Contrary to what you would think elders in a society would do (help the younger generations to become successful) I've found they are more against younger people, at minimum indifferent, and at worst taking-advantage of.
Thus when a reader sent me this article, two things stuck out.
1. The elders in this young man's profession had not interest, nor time to guide him or help him in his research.
2. His elders were also WRONG indicating they were manipulating the data for political gain at the expense of future generations.
The lesson to pull from this for younger people is to realize just how alone you are. Not in a social sense, but in a life-leading and guiding sense. NOBODY is here to help you. Nobody is here to lead you. Matter of fact, most people are here to take advantage of you. And the only way out of this mess is going to be through your own self-teaching, self-guidance, logic, and self-upbringing.
Yes, it would have been nice to have elders in society guide and lead you.
Yes, it would have been nice to have your elders be good stewards of the country, and groom you to one day take over and continue its progress, advancement and attainment of excellence.
Yes, these things would have been nice.
But unfortunately you are faced with a leaderless society forcing that role upon your unprepared self.
For the first time in US history the phrase:
"Don't trust anybody over 30 man!"
actually has merit.
yeah, well a lot of us old fart right wing curmudgeonly baby boomer hating bastards say that you can't trust anybody of any age, including you, captain, including you.
ReplyDeleteI can't count the times I have wasted my time trying to "guide, lead, mentor and help [some young, stupid, dishonest, weak willed idiot of a junior employee] in [his] endeavors"
My dad used to tell me, after I got old enough for him to be smart, that 95% of everything is crap, and that includes people, though in the case of my fellow man I'd be prepared to up the estimate to 99.9%
Aren't _you_ over 30? :)
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm weird. I actually got quite a bit of support from more senior people early on in my career. I've still got fond memories of a couple of my early bosses, and if I hadn't urgently needed to escape that hellhole of a state, I might still be working with one of them today. (One of them did invest money, when I was starting a business of my own.)
If I hadn't had them and their help, I'd have a lot more cause to be bitter about the state of my life right now.
Good for him for finding a flaw in the information. But Evergreen State College? Thats the is the hippiest college in all of Washington.
ReplyDeleteThe neglected their children to elevate themselves. They divorced, consumed, complained, and destroyed every social more that kept society together. Now the generation that they raised is confused, sick, and unemployed and in their infinite wisdom they believe that if they snub the next generation just a little bit, insult, piss on and humiliate, that this ignored generation will just pony up and pay for their exorbitant medical costs and upkeep. Why would anyone in gen X or gen Y provide ANY assistance to a group who refused to neither plan for their retirement nor help the next generation to support them. The baby boom generation is the best example of what America has become, a nation obsessed with it's own suicide.
ReplyDeleteLelnet,
ReplyDeleteYep, I'm over 30 and I wouldln't trust anybody in my generation either.
Fred Z,
Correct.
Everybody,
I wouldn't even call this a "baby boomer" issue as I believe older people in general (a 25 year old vs. a 15 year old) is more prone to take advantage or roadblock than help.
That's why strong families are so important to a free society. When you're young, you have a mother and a father, and when you're old, you have sons and daughters. No one else really cares if you live or die.
ReplyDeleteI would agree about self-teaching...but there is also praying for wisdom. So you can separate the wheat from the chaff.
ReplyDeleteIf anybody knows anything to get you ahead in life and is willing to give that info away it is God.
Reason # 10,000 to work in the maritime field- if your superior isn't training you to replace him when he moves up or out, you can gang up on him and roadblock his career, or, conversely, create an unsafe situation and blame him for it. Mutually-assured career advancement!
ReplyDeletedammit, kids. get off my lawn.
ReplyDeleteCap-
guess who just dropped $200 in pre 1964 1/2 dollars and quarters. and i plan on dropping $200 per pay period?
ended up with 22 quarters and 10 1/2 dollars.
Uh, how can you expect elders to help young people when these same young people have BASHED & TRASHED them for decades?! How can you expect that? Remember the old meme of never trust anyone over 30? Youth is worshiped and deified in this country, while age and maturity are mocked. I mean really, what do you EXPECT?
ReplyDeleteFred Z: Stupidity, dishonesty, and a weak will are kind of expected in younger people and rooting it out of them should be the first step in any training program. If they were smart, honest, and strong-willed, would they need your training to begin with?
ReplyDeleteIn any case, the young are your cross to bear for living a WORK WORK WORK ADAPT ADAPT ADAPT lifestyle instead of, say, trying to understand and communicate the truth to people with clean hands and pure hearts. (What advice would you give them?)
Lashing out at easy targets might be a cheap way to pretend to be alpha for the ladies, but I'm pretty sure this is a man's site, and complaining about how you just can't handle those kids is worse than beta and a sign that you've been swallowing a lot of corporate wishful thinking in life.
just finished the podcast. i smoke nubs too. there's a hand rolled from miami i like called "the big bastard. shoot me an email with a mailing addy and i'll send you one.
ReplyDeletealso just paid you buy purchasing ETD and AIWTBR via your site.
As a Gen X-er, I still tell horror stories about how unhelpful Boomers were when I got my first real job. I've never really gotten over this resentment. Not only did they impede progress of our generation, but they refused to consider our culture and music anything worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the really old men and women in the office -- the Greatest Generation -- were a blast and very nice. And ironically, they were the ones who seemed interested in why rap music was big and why various sitcoms had caught on. Go figure.
- Days of Broken Arrows
Peter Nolan already pointed this out about a year ago when he published his second book called The TRUTH Be Told, in which he explains very clearly how the older generation of men have betrayed young men. One of their biggest betrayals is selling us into a system of slavery through feminism.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how 90 percent of baby boomer older men support feminism.
The sooner their generation is dead and gone, the sooner we can repair the damage they did.
Baby boomers were the most selfish generation of people to ever exist.
What an overgeneralized piece this is. As a 56 year old economics guy who bought your books and was willing to listen, good luck with alienating a good chunk of your readership. We help all the time, and continue to help. What a simple assessment and scapegoating that passes as some kind of analysis. BTW, if you ever want to learn how to really ride a bike fast, or dive a race car at speed, I'm the selfish ass wipe that teaches YOUNG people how to do it, and at 56 I will assure you, I can still outride your street-leaning ass. You see, there are "old people" out there that have years of experience that I, for one, am most happy to pass on, and do everyday. Also a 25 year airline Captain teaching young people how to fly. And a certified VW/ Porsche and race mechanic showing young people how to really work on cars, and a BS in economics. I'm also willing to help young men navigate the crap that exist today for anybody willing to listen. I did not create this. I fought hard and long for treatment of young men entering these fields, and watched as young men did nothing to help there own cause and played their days away on video games.
ReplyDeleteI'd always heard people rag on young people for being lazy, but it wasn't till I entered the corporate arena when I realized the laziest person you'll find is the baby boomer who's two years from retiring.
ReplyDeleteThis is primarily a Generation X trait; according to Strauss & Howe, like the last Nomad generation the Lost, we're derided as a generation of bad kids - since as latch-keyers we were thrown into a world that taught us survival, not social mores. It's only now as we get older that we start becoming moralists.
ReplyDeleteMillenials are a bit better off, getting more protection & support than we did... but that said, society's going through such a tearing apart right now that even they're being left pretty bereft.
Evergreen State College? Oh, I remember. That's the alma mater of Saint Pancake.
ReplyDeleteBeing in the computer field since the late 1970's there really were no mentors. In college I knew more about computers than most of my teachers, and in my first few jobs the bosses couldn't understand why we couldn't build applications as fast as the machine men could weld the boxes together. Everything I learned I had to learn myself.
ReplyDeleteNow that I'm older all of my managers are younger than me, they think they can be better managers by taking self improvement classes like the seven secrets to being a better manager or how to be a better public speaker, and think that we won't realize they're playing psychology games on us. I took psychology in college when they were in diapers. I just smile and pretend to go along with it.
And the people they hire are young and full of attitude like they know everything, that every idea they come up with is new and has never been thought of before and why are we doing it this way, that's stupid! And those of us who've been doing this for years laugh and remember how stupid we were at that age. Every new idea is just an old idea with a different name, been there, done that, learned from our mistakes and moved on.
Except today's young kids have been raised to think they are perfect and special and how dare we find fault with their ideas or not listen to their brilliant "new" ideas. They won't follow instructions, they refuse to listen to advise, and they never admit to being wrong, and after carrying their weight through an entire 6 month long project the company has little choice but to let them go.
Or we get some brilliant super star engineer who talks a mean talk, knows all the high tech catch phrases, and convinces management that we need to adopt some new bleeding edge framework or methodology. Six months or a year after they have been promoted out of IT or left the company for a better job we're stuck with code that isn't supported by anyone, that is so new there is no documentation anywhere online, and as it turns out it has performance issues or isn't scaleable or is otherwise totally useless for what we need. Always the young kids with their we can save the world ideas. Eventually you grow up and become more realistic.
Bagger,
ReplyDeleteDo I have to provide another disqualifier for all the boomers I like and respect or did you miss it?
I never said all the boomers were like this, please don't make me invoke the St. Leykis Clause. I was SEEKING adivce from an older man and got YELLED AT.
I WILL NOT, NO MATTER HOW MANY SALES IT COSTS ME, DENY WHAT I"VE EXPERIENCED
Remember, I have NOTHING to lose.
Cpt.
Ya know,I really didn't get much mentoring once I graduated from college and I'm pushing 60. But I sure learned a lot from observing and trial and error.
ReplyDeleteBut I have done considerable mentoring at work and in other things like 4-H.
I can pretty much echo what James Wolfe said above and add some - the trade rags are always trying to sell some "great new technology thing" and younger execs and managers get sucked into the hype, the coolness of the technology and how impressive it is to their superiors.
Of course, the reality as anyone experienced with technology can tell, is that most of it is BS, the benefits overstated, the drawbacks ignored and the implementation and support costs aren't considered. Many of these things "flame out" rather quickly, but a few actually are good and useful in some environments. The wisdom to tell the difference comes with a lots of skepticism and experience.
Captain,
ReplyDeleteEvergreen State College and UMass-Amherst have been communist madrassahs since the late Sixties. Beta male putz has a PhD student in sociology for a girlfriend, for frick's sake.
The boomers love this guy, because he told them exactly what they wanted to hear. They reckon that because of one minor coding mistake in one paper economics is racist, and they, the boomers, can go back to pissing away their grandchildren's inheritance without a second thought for the consequences.
Good luck pulling off something like that with a study showing that women earn less than men because the only jobs they really can do as well or better than men all involve the mechanics of conceiving children. Dude would be blogging about it on an MRA website in his taxicab between fares because nobody would print a word about his research, never mind offer him a tenure-track job.
Back in the real world, correcting the coding error doesn't change anything important. Let the boomers borrow money that could be funding research into safe, clean nuclear energy too cheap to meter (and/or a pill to cure the mental illnesses called socialism, feminism and Islam) so they can spend it on boner pills, and you'd better be prepared to enjoy the decline, because it'll only be a matter of time before it sets in.
It is dangerous to generalize and put labels on an entire generation. That said, the Boomers inherited a country that was in pretty good shape, and are passing a seriously depleted America down to our children.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I did the right thing and saved for my retirement, setting aside money for the past 40 years. Now my government tells me that the amount in my IRA is twice the amount they consider to be "fair". Not a problem - I will pay the tax and move what's left into profitable tax-free investments. Too bad the government doesn't understand that attacking people like me is taking 2 percent off the growth rate of our economy.
"...but they refused to consider our culture and music anything worthwhile."
ReplyDeleteYour problem, anonymous, is your assumption that your generation's "culture" and "music" amount to dogsquat in comparison to what predated your existence.
"Matter of fact, I've found older people to not only NOT want to help younger people, but obstruct their progress AND take advantage of them."
ReplyDeleteSometimes, such older folks are your own damn PARENTS !!!
I have visited and lived in Mexico for 30 years. One learns more about his home culture by living a few years in another culture than living in his own culture. Years ago, affluent families did not view their children as educated until the young folks had lived in another culture at least 2 years.
ReplyDeleteEven after this much time, I still learn something once in a while. What I learned last year was, in the United States, everyone hates old men INCLUDING OLD MEN.
In Mexico, old men are respected. In fact, in rural Mexico, I estimate maybe 5% of young women would actually prefer an older man. I mean really older, not 5 years. I get hit on around once a year by a 20 something, and it took me a while to realize it wasn't gold digging.
I will agree a lot of old people in the uS really piss me off. One of the things I hate most is to see a guy in a large motor home pull into a restaurant where the workers struggle to get by, and demand an elder's discount while the young, poor people have to pay full price. I have tried to not take the discount, but the workers tell me if I don't take it, they will be disciplined.
Another thing that irritates me is not paying full taxes on Social Security pay out. Any person who only gets SS has to pay no taxes. So, why should high income people in these hard budget times get SS without having it taxed at the full rate?
There is more.
However, think twice about fighting with them. Some of those old guys have combat experience and can still shoot.
Anonymous age 71
I don't think it's an issue of "hating" old men. I think it's a currently-playing-out phenomenon where society has degraded so much that the younger generations are slowly realizing the leadership, guidance and wisdom we received from our elders was sub par to say the least. And my anecdotal experience corroborating that, even showing many of them will go so far as to take advantage of younger people.
ReplyDelete