The real reason not to trust praise is because it comes right before somebody is trying to get you to buy something or do work you won't be paid for.
Maybe we take the "compliment sandwich" notion of correction and switch the bread for the filling? You suck, but this part was good, but mostly you suck so much.
I think you mean shit sandwich.
But that sounds like a good idea!
Unlike most of your ideas, which suck.
Does this mean I'm free to insult others people's children?
Thankfully, I've been keeping notes just in case I could ever use them.
1. Taking for granted for a second that a "trophies for all" culture exists or existed among millennials, obviously millennials aren't to blame for it. (And while we're at it, I wouldn't take for granted that blaming a trend on a generation makes sense, or that a generation is a meaningful concept at all, as I've complained about before, but anyways.) 7-year-olds don't buy plastic trophies and give them to each other. Their parents, teachers, and schools buy the trophies. If the "trophies for all" culture is a problem, blame Baby Boomers and maybe Generation X, not millennials.
2. Actually, blame the lost generation, if not an earlier one. Pretending that there's anything new about a "trophies for all" culture is toxic and exceptionally dumb.
14.1: It's not about blame. It's about who is the most unbearable.
For any kid that cares about sports, getting a trophy doesn't change anything. They know if they are good and they know who won.
Little kid soccer was insistent on not keeping score, but it turns out that little kids can count just fine.
They mostly really sucked at soccer though.
They were so bad, the rules had to forbid using a goalie or nobody would score.
There is an online culture of excessive praise that I associate with millenials. That kind of thing on Instagram when a person posts a picture of themselves and dozens of people comments stuff like "OMG, you are SO GORGEOUS" and then dozens of those heart-eye emojis. A person that gets that kind of response regularly might start to wonder, "How do I know if am truly beautiful?"
Just try to steal somebody else's partner.
14.2, I think, really gets to the meat of it. I can remember people banging on about trophies for all 50-60 years ago. Basically blaming the millennials is just another version of "kids these days".
To the limited extent I've encountered it, I interpret the phenomenon peep addresses in 19 as a form of on line politeness, parallel to cultures where when people ask you how you are you have to say you're fine.
20: Exactly. They aren't bad people, they just need to know.
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, ('the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no 'One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out 'The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, 'But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, 'everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'
parallel to cultures where when people ask you how you are you have to say you're fine.
For a while it seemed like I was living in a culture where the expected answer to "how are you?" was "AWESOME!"
I think that's gotten a little less ubiquitous.
I read a book arguing (among other things) that self-esteem is brittle and not actually helpful because it doesn't prepare you for when you actually do fail, and instead you should be teaching self-compassion (also the name of the book). The book itself was a little self-help-y for my tastes and has some issues (I think the way she writes about her autistic kid is problematic), but I think this main point is basically right, and I found it pretty helpful. I imagine it would be useful framework if you're thinking about how kids should relate to themselves.
Failure to connect rewards with merit can absolutely lead to a damaging excess of self-esteem. The only practical solution I know is impeachment.
When I was in high school, the student council president was cited for possession of alcohol while serving as a designated driver. The people in the car with him, also cited but really drunk, held up signs at the next school assembly calling for his impeachment.
25: I've heard that distinction, too. It's true that "self-esteem" meaning "high self-regard" isn't exactly what a healthy person has for themself. A healthy person tries hard sometimes, phones it in other times, isn't too hard on themself when they screw something up, but does clean up the mess if it impacts other people. It's sort of "be objective about and kind to yourself"
There should be a joke involving being hypertrophied, but I'm not finding it.
29: It's OK Heebie! We think you're funny! Good job!
I don't know how related it is to the supposed trophy phenomenon, but the thing about some kids being underpunished definitely seems real to me by anecdote, although the two worst stories I know come from Gen X parents, so they aren't causing any of millennials' problems, whatever they are.
One story, told to me by father: teenager takes her credit card she's supposed to use to buy schoolbooks, etc., spends $10k on fast fashion that, in the chaos of a move, isn't noticed for a long time. She neither gets punished nor even productively engaged with. Her father has a lot of ideas about the mental health causes of this behavior (although not the most screamingly obvious one, that she knew she would be found out eventually and was on some level trying to get attention and provoke a more active reaction from her parents). I, desperately trying to avoid sounding like I was responding to this friendly confidence by telling him how to parent, tried to explore ways to talk about it with her, and he just says they don't have the kind of relationship where they talk about things like that and they both joke that they're sociopaths who don't have feelings. I ask him if she has a therapist and he says, "she hasn't asked for one."
Even more shocking, told to me by another family member: teenage child accepts money to do other kids' homework, runs out of time to do her own, and her mom does her homework for her to relieve her of her stress. That's really the way to raise a white collar criminal.
These families are both white and upper middle class.
Arguably, there's never been a better time to try white collar crime.
spends $10k on fast fashion
Did she get to keep the clothes?
30: 29: Thanks for trying, heebie! It's great that you're thinking about a joke. Super pwning, AcademicLurker! goddammit.
35: You're a great commenter bill! Really great! Keep it up!
You all suck so much. Except Heebie.
34: Maybe? My first, instinctive reaction to hearing "my daughter spent $10k on clothes on a family credit card" was to say "did she get puuunniiished?" -- I was just morbidly curious about what hellrain fell upon the head of a teenage girl who had done something like this; I wasn't anticipating the answer, no. I think if he had taken the clothes away he would have told me as an example of a consequence. Apparently the extent of engagement about the issue was a conversation in which they informed her that she'd stolen ten thousand dollars from her family, which surely felt bad to her, but is still not doing quite enough to teach her that there are consequences to her actions and stealing to fuel compulsive shopping isn't an okay way to regulate her emotions.
The fashion was so fast, it was all used up before they found out.
What is "fast fashion"? Like something for Lent?
It's English for "depeche mode", but Depeche Mode was already an English band so I don't know.
My first, instinctive reaction to hearing "my daughter spent $10k on clothes on a family credit card" was to say "did she get puuunniiished?"
My first reaction is to think that maybe they should give her a card with a lower credit limit. Unless textbook inflation has gotten more out of hand recently than I had realized.
Millennials killed going to the library to photocopy an entire book.
spends $10k on fast fashion
Isn't this like spending $10K at Chipotle, though? Or is this more Burberry Brit rather than the fancier label I can't remember? (That speck of knowledge is itself due to a wool-overcoat search turning into morbid fascination with the transformation of Burberry, from North Face-style performance outfitter to mindbogglingly overpriced outfitter for performing conspicuous consumption. I've mentioned this before. Although -- do they ever do "vintage 1910s flight jackets in silver lamé"? It's okay to spend your parents' money on that.)
At one meal per day for each family member, $10k wouldn't even last a year at Chipotle.
Because parenting is important, no guacamole except when homework is done.
45: Right, but imagine that they're eating pants. Doesn't that seem like a lot of pants?
I am deeply and intimately aware of how fast $10K disappears into restaurant coffers, as it happens.
. . . a wool-overcoat search turning into morbid fascination with the transformation of Burberry, from North Face-style performance outfitter to mindbogglingly overpriced outfitter for performing conspicuous consumption
Random trivia, Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat was a Burberry (from the link, one that he got in 1959 and lost in the early seventies).
As for the OP: trophies are for the parents, right?
Burberry is a chav label now, or was until recently.
23: Was Carrol making a contemporary reference there?
He was trying to marry a teenager. So, yes.
53: ah, so multiple North Face parallels. Parallel faces.
All the cool people buy outdoor clothing from cottage manufacturers who make fun of North Face for having become a fashion brand.
Oh yeah, but if you're climbing Denali, North Face tents are still pretty reliable, as far as I know, whereas you can't reasonably retrace the polar explorations of Ernest Shackleton in today's Burberry outerwear. Again, to my limited knowledge. If no one else derails this conversation it will go on in this vein.
Denali isn't just a mountain in Alaska.
Yet, you come from a literal farm.
Nebraska is about as non-alpine as places get.
Grass. Cows. Teutons. What more do you want?
So goddamn picky. Must be a millennial.
I dunno, "alpine without Alps" just doesn't seem like a very useful or intuitive concept to me.
55. I imagine so. Most of his reference were contemporary.
I certainly don't remember this "trophies for everyone" thing - what I remember is a ferocious, gruelling obsession with tests, mock exams, practice exams, and real exams. Also, it wasn't "if you ace these you can be whoever you want" or whatever, it was "you must absolutely not fail, and failure includes anything but As, or you will die horribly in a gutter".
It was definitely a journalistic/political trope at the time; every Education Secretary of my lifetime has been declaring war on whatever and bringing back exams, and the impact has been a test burden that gets bigger every year. God knows how students today put up with it.
Burberry had a revival in the late 90s and its then managers responded by discovering outsourced manufacturing and flooding the market with tat. This went on until they ruined the brand and there was a crisis. Later in the 2ks the new management took it back upmarket and went in a high fashion direction, and began emphasizing that they still manufactured the cloth in my home town. That's roughly where they are now (although they cancelled plans to build a huge new factory in Yorkshire due to Brexit)
Anyway, I didn't grow up on a farm, just near them. I was raised in town.
The narcissism of small differences. And you know where narcissism was invented? Yes, that's right. Moby is alpine as they come.
I'm going to go up to the hills and try to not be eaten by a bear this weekend.
If I make it back, I'm buying myself a 🏆.
Denali isn't just a mountain in Alaska.
I laughed.
I think "the problem with millenials" is just an intensification of the problem of capitalist modernity - what happens to people when they are treated as fungible commodities and told that it's possible and meaningful to rank people along every axis. That is, it's possible to rank any group of people from 1-10 as the most beautiful, most employable, best programmers, etc, and that people are swappable for each other with the idea that if you're lucky you can trade up.
So of course praise doesn't mean anything, because all it means is that you're still being ranked and ranked and ranked - there's never a way out. You're never going to be best-enough to stop worrying about being ranked, so the emotional state will be the same forever.
What kids know is that praise and "success" are always about instrumentalizing them - who can be the best worker? Add in the pressure to turn your hobby into a "side hustle" at which you can once again be the best worker and the way the internet works, and it's a recipe for breakdown.
The characteristic of Generation X is that we were poised on the brink of the current system - hence all the "don't sell out" and fuss about thrift shopping and independent record labels and kneejerk cynicism and hostility to authority. The current state of affairs was then visible but not universal; there was still an outside. There's no point in having a Gen X-like attitude now because there's no outside anymore.
Maybe Gen X was just so great at cynicism, the young people felt they had to do something else.
I think 23 et seq prove what we all knew already, that "millennial" has never meant anything but "kids these days".
Especially since Millennials are now in their thirties and being blamed for teenaged stuff.
First Millennials were people who "came of age" at the millennium. Then it was people who were born at the millennim.
Next it's going to mean people who came of age during the millennarian climate apocalypse. Then people who were born during the apocalypse.
The side hustle thing is addresses to me to be nuts for most people given the way the economy is going. The wage premium for certain skills/employers is high enough that spending time to get into a higher paying job would have a higher expected utility than charging scooters.
Addresses? What the fuck am I typing?
there's no outside anymore.
That's not true! I was just there. I saw a bunny.
The bunnies and the deer have stopped running away from people in my neighborhood.
I must personally apologize for how this thread is going to attract spam like flies to shit. Also, Frowner is right (as usual).
The wage premium for certain skills/employers is high enough that spending time to get into a higher paying job would have a higher expected utility than charging scooters.
Sure. On the other hand, a gig that brings in cash today can be a better deal than debt today to pay for training that may well be pointless tomorrow if the economy decides to go poof. Look at all those people who entered law school in 2007.
88: Sounds like "venison dealer" could be your new side hustle.
81-83: For this thread too, there's a relevant XKCD strip.
The characteristic of Generation X is that we were poised on the brink of the current system - hence all the "don't sell out" and fuss about thrift shopping and independent record labels and kneejerk cynicism and hostility to authority. The current state of affairs was then visible but not universal; there was still an outside. There's no point in having a Gen X-like attitude now because there's no outside anymore.
I like the way of putting it. I'm not sure that I completely agree, but I think it captures something important.
The characteristic of Generation X is that we were poised on the brink of the current system - hence all the "don't sell out" and fuss about thrift shopping and independent record labels and kneejerk cynicism and hostility to authority. The current state of affairs was then visible but not universal; there was still an outside. There's no point in having a Gen X-like attitude now because there's no outside anymore.
The Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke-Ben Stiller romantic triangle in Reality Bites was clearly a prescient metaphor for all of this. Somehow.
I can't find it now, but there was an interview with Sleater-Kinney in which they describe the shift from worries about selling out to the status quo now, where everyone celebrates when their song gets picked up by a car commercial because they'll finally be able to pay the rent for a few months with a little extra time to record more songs. Maybe that Instagram over-positivity is a reaction to swimming in the great rising sea of negativity?
romantic triangle in Reality Bites was clearly a prescient metaphor for all of this. Somehow.
I never did see that film because I didn't like the way a giant studio was marketing it like they were trying to sell us OK Cola, but as a movie.
My Gen X cynicism, let me show it to you.
I remember seeing it when I was 14, and my bff and I watched incredulously for a while and then had a giggling fit in the back of the theater about how stupid it all was towards the end. The moral seemed to be "gee, life is really hard when you're this dumb," although probably it would seem different to me now that I'm not an adolescent jerk?
The moral seemed to be gee, "life is really hard when you're this dumb"
If my life has a moral, that is probably it.
The thing about actual narcissists is that mostly they don't have much self esteem. They need everyone to tell them how wonderful, because they don't have a sense of their own self worth.
I'm still not saying anything nice about the orange shithead.
99: I'm sure that's right, but it still seems wrong to me. Narcissus didn't need anyone to tell him he was beautiful.
He needed to look himself all the time. Not easy in the days before phones had cameras having both ways.
103: You're saying he was insecure, because he needed to see his own beauty constantly to maintain his sense of self worth.
That's a good point.
Interestingly, the OP's insight came in handy today. I think I've said before that dance teachers are the masters of the backhanded compliment - if you get called out for something good there's inevitably a twist coming - and tonight's guest class with Terribly Famous Ballerina [not sure if g/oogle p/roofing still w/orks?] was a case in point.
"Nice balance! That was beautiful!" [I look over my shoulder, assuming this was meant for someone else] "No! YOU! Alex!" [OK then, she is staring directly at me and evidently remembers my name from 2017.] "Take it!" [I grin into the mirror, milking the moment for laughs, you kind of do learn stagecraft by osmosis when you're doing this] "...it's the bit after that that was kinda odd."
Right; if it wasn't for the twist at the end I might not have believed the first bit.
I didn't get eaten by a bear but I did get woken up by either a badger or a shaved porcupine. Also, seeing two butterflies on the corpse of a crow that is sitting at the head of a footbridge you need to cross? That's good luck, right?
It really looked in a badger, but I only saw it from the back. Very squat and low to the ground. However, the internet says badgers don't live in Pennsylvania except right on the border with Ohio they have been seen a few times. I was in the middle of the state.
It wasn't shooting communists and was too small. Statistically speaking, it was probably a groundhog that was just ugly.
||
destroying people's farms while grazing will strictly be frowned at|>
There are a lot of ugly groundhogs in Pennsylvania. Maryland's groundhogs are much more attractive.
SoulCycle costs $42 for a single class?
If you want a clean soul you should probably stump up for a rinse and spin cycle too.
Isn't a campaign medal basically the same as a participation trophy? Literally all you have to do is turn up in the theatre of operations to be awarded it. (Mind you, most of the people criticising millennials didn't even make it that far.)
SoulCycle costs $42 for a single class?
For longer distances, Soul Train is better.
114: They are encouraging people to get memberships.