Generation trap: why gen-y is doing okay

We suffer from a lack of motivation. We are inherently selfish.

We are Generation Y, (alternately millenials, echo-boomers and digital natives), and these are the perceptions of our group identity. These characteristics are often misattributed to us, derived from our substantial differences, both in behavior and attitude, from generations past.

My father is a proud man. A baby boomer, he’s earned a college degree, enjoyed a 40 year professional career and even won a Maine state championship bridge title. During his 62 years he has also been a Vietnam War protestor, a dedicated Christian, and a great dad.

Ask him about his accomplishments and he’ll say they are a result of “hard work, and a sense of social responsibility, something your generation doesn’t seem to understand.”

I love my dad, but it absolutely kills me when he starts giving me the “you kids these days” garbage that seems to occupy the minds of many of today’s older adults.  Sure, we have faults as a whole, but it is only through blind and reckless comparison that one might say these shortcomings are any more egregious than those of previous generations.

A common complaint is that GenY’s have grown too lazy, inundated with technology that does our work for us. It is, however, the efficiency with which we complete our work that gives us more free time. Indeed, technology is a key component to our generation’s improved efficiency, not something to be criticized.

As technology has changed, so have the users. My generation, explain John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in their book “Digital Natives,” has a “tendency to multitask.”

In this case, multitasking involves more than simply chewing gum and walking. It is, rather, the ability to expand a thought process across several different mediums simultaneously. We can see an ad for a new restaurant on T.V., call a friend to meet us there and look up the directions on my laptop all at once. Our mastery of technology and enhanced multitasking gives us extra free time that older generations would have spent performing these tasks separately.

Just as the Industrial Age made production more efficient, the Digital Age has expedited several common tasks. Academic research, for example, that used to take several days and many miles of driving to acquire, now takes a few hours on a computer. Students spend less time on research, but that doesn’t mean they are learning less.

Could it be that all this technology has made us self-centered, as is often alleged? Perhaps the spike in technology has isolated us to the point where we have lost the ability to empathize. More likely, however, it is simply a recurring theme of young people throughout history.

Selfish youths, again, are not something unique to any one generation. I’m sure my dad and his friends were accused of being selfish by draft dodging or protesting Vietnam. While their actions may have been morally justified, they were often framed as self-centered and unpatriotic by their parents’ generation. Selfishness is subjective and relative to the values of those who perceive it.

Even decisions made purely out of self interest are understandable for young people in all generations. Young people generally have very few responsibilities to others, so to be self-centered is entirely natural.

Collectively, Generation Y has perpetuated, and in some cases improved the tradition of social responsibility in America. The generations before us made racism illegal, but we are making it infrequent. The generations before us made smokers popular, but we made them pariahs. The generations before us gave us a planet warming at devilish rates, and we are hell-bent on fixing it.

The point is not to say that our generation is better than my father’s, but rather to insist that we aren’t any worse. No generation is without faults, but to blame the perceived declining state of our society on one generation is irresponsible.

Today’s older adults would do well to realize that our differences don’t make us wrong.