Advice from the Millennials

Lately I've been reading a great blog--Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist. She is off the hook successful--wrote a book, launched three start ups, is a columnist at Boston Globe, and her syndicated column runs in more than 200 publications worldwide. Just like me, right?

At any rate, she just launched a new site www.brazencareerist.com which features 50 Generation Y bloggers. Generation Y, by the way, is defined by Wikipedia as children born between 1980–1995. I, born in 1968, am obviously not a Gen Y-er; however, I find Trunk's blogs to be very relevant to my professional and personal experience. At a quick glance, the bloggers on her new site seem a lot younger than I am--but a lot more professionally accomplished--and all seem to have a lot of drive and entrepreneurial spirit, but on their own terms.

Again the operative term being "quick glance", I read the bios and blogs of a handful of her bloggers (50 at this time) and each of them seem like super go-getters--enthusiastic, smart and idealistic. Maybe "idealistic" isn't the right word because they all seem to be pretty successful in shaping things the way they want them to be as far as careers go. It's a little funny to me, though, in an admittedly superior way, to see 20-somethings--some not yet out of college or grad school--writing like they've been around the block 1,000 times and are back to report on the way things really are. But then again, who am I to say that--many of them HAVE, in their short time in the job market, accomplished a lot more than us rule-following Gen X-ers.

Case in point: last week's OnBalance guest blog. That blog alone pretty much defines the difference between Gen Y-ers and the 40+ set: namely, the bitter "don't bother dreaming about a job you'll love because it will never pay the bills" attitude. Reading that blog last week made me shudder--reading post after post about how you're doing your kid a disservice by so much as allowing them to major in anything other than business or pre-law because in the "real world" you can only cling to solvency by going into soul-sucking, 60 hour a week+ professions like law or accounting. Teacher--forget it--you'll never be able to pay the bills. Musician, artist--you name it--if a job involves any measure of enjoyment then forget it--you'll never be able to pay the mortgage and your life will end. Seriously--go read the comments and tell me that I'm misinterpreting this attitude.

At any rate, I'll be interested to see how much of these millennials' (another term for Generation Y-ers) advice is applicable to this baby buster (again, thanks Wikipedia for expanding my vocabulary).

Wanna Play? Not!

I’ve written before about the readers/commenters on The Washington Post’s On Balance blog and how nasty they are. Yesterday's post—written by the resident stay-home dad guest blogger-- was about the value of mom or dad only playgroups. While nobody flogged the author about how stupid or small-minded he was--he was actually referring to ANOTHER article about the same topic and the nasty comments were directed at that person--I marveled once again at how self-righteous and same-minded the posters there are.

Day in and day out, regardless of the topic, the regular posters pounce on whatever idea the author touches on, ripping the author for his or her opinions on the matter at hand or writing style or whatever it is they can find to take issue with. It's like (or not "like"--they actually do) they sit at their computers, fingers drumming impatiently, until the day's post goes up at approximately 7 am and immediately commence the rip-fest with the ever-triumphant "First!" post. Bonus points if they can find something to make a personal dig at Leslie about--the names of her kids, the misuse of a word, a way in which someone perceives that she's contradicted herself, her looks--anything. Ditto any other author--the topic is stupid, the person can't write, Leslie is stupid for featuring this or that particular guest blogger, etc, etc.

Anyway, the thing that most cracks me up about the regular posters is what back-patters they all are--to hear them tell it their lives are all perfect: their marriages, their parenting styles, their kids, their jobs, their beliefs...they all act like they've got the whole thing figured out and anyone who thinks or does anything differently is a moron. One of my greatest satisfactions in life is knowing from personal experience that most people have whole Oprah-esque facets of their lives that nobody would ever guess just looking at them--and I'm sure the OnBalance regulars are no exception. I'm sure that more than a few honestly think their lives are perfect when, in fact, their husbands are cheating on them or they personally have some fatal flaw or whatever. I have no basis for saying this other than that it seems to me that almost everywhere I look this is the case--everyone seems to have some dirty secret--so the chances that the OnBalance crowd are among this flawed population are pretty strong.

Yesterday's post was particularly amusing because everyone was, as usual, so adamant that there could never be any impropriety between moms and dads in a playgroup scenario. Everyone, most of them assert, knows that there's absolutely nothing wrong with stay-home dads fraternizing with stay-home moms. Every interaction would naturally be totally above-board, totally innocent, totally child-centric, totally intellectual--because everyone in the world is as intellectual and politically-correct as they are, right? Why, the mere thought that maybe moms and dads playing unsupervised might not be the best idea in the world is blasphemous and discriminatory! Every one of them seems to know for a fact that all adults have perfect boundaries and that if a dad were to invite a mom over for a little backyard swim of a playdate of COURSE it would only be about the kids and they wouldn't even notice each other in their wet swimsuits....

Either these people don't know what they're talking about or I live in a different universe entirely, because my reaction to the question "Are mom/dad playdates a good idea?" is a resounding "no!" Go watch the movie Little Children and tell me what you think. Or Google "married dating", for example: you get 1,420,000 hits. Over 500,000 for "swinging parents." And that's just two totally off-the-cuff search tries. Or, better yet, go initiate a playdate with an opposite-sex parent and see what the reactions of your spouse and his/hers are.

Bottom line is that truth is stranger than fiction and you see a lot when you live in the burbs long enough. Maybe those OnBalance posters' problem is that they have always been at the office all day and never have gotten to experience the wacky world of life in the burbs during school hours.