On the Millennial Work Ethic
Monday, April 5, 2010 at 08:49AM Over the weekend the Washington Post published a story that takes a look at the Millennial work ethic. The article explains that Millennials are "the only age group in the nation that doesn't cite work ethic as one of its 'principal claims to distinctiveness,' according to a new Pew Research Center study, Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change."
The piece focuses pretty heavily on anecdotes about the distractibility of my generation - those who lack the attention span and desire to wait tables, and who watch whatever sort of handheld device they [inappropriately] bring to work. While I do find this generation's lacking-attention-span (including my own) to be troubling, it should be pointed out that it is easy to lazily substantiate this kind of story by painting a picture of disparate millennials who can't keep it together in the workplace.
Our friend Maya Enista, chief executive at Mobilize.org, was quoted in the article attempting to offer some context:
"[Enista] said the term 'work ethic' is misleading. 'It's not about being at a desk from 9 to 5. I work part of every hour I am awake.' Enista said her fellow 20-somethings' constant connection to technology keeps them at least as tethered to their jobs as older workers are. 'It's a given that we work hard, because the reality is that millennials are the most educated and most in debt.'"
What the story lacked, though, was a deeper look at why - culturally or historically - Millennials might feel this way about maintaining a work ethic worthy comparable to those of yesteryear.
From films like Clerks to American Beauty, and from the books of Douglas Coupland to Brett Easton Ellis, I grew up on entertainment and literature made by and for disaffected, dissatisfied Baby Boomers and members of Generation X. I was terrified by what can only be described - in retrospect - this collective narrative unraveling of every lie ever baked into the 20th Century American narrative. The viewer watched the absurdity of Clerks protagonist Dante Hicks taking his job at a New Jersey convenience store tragically seriously while s/he was encouraged to cheer retail anti-hero Randal Graves as he harassed the dim-witted consumer. We watched the not-so-subtle, phoenix-like rise of American Beauty's Lester Burnham, which was possible only after he realized how silly his life had become as a result of internalizing the myth and taking his job so seriously. We loved him because he was able to find freedom in a happiness-centered (versus a work-centered) life.
I have - on a number of occasions - had conversations with members of Generation X who describe Bret Easton Ellis' books - particularly American Psycho - as overwhelmingly accurate in their tone and description of Gen X's working youth in the 80s. A financial professional takes his life in context so seriously that he becomes a delusional, violently psychotic, misogynistic manifestation of said sector? Sign me up. And now we're constantly under the microscope and discussed for not sharing a similar views on work ethic?
We were raised in the shadow of the discovery that much of the American Dream was misleading, if not straight-up untrue. If we're optimistic - which countless stories and polls suggest we are - it is because we are vaguely confident that we can steer ourselves out of the mess that we inherited. Weaned in the 90s - a decade in which the unraveling of said myth became the fodder of pop-cinema - and in the Aughts - the decade in which, under the Bush Administration and in a post-September 11th / Enron world, it became somewhat difficult to not assume a worldview rooted in existentialist uncertainty about the payoff that comes with doing the same great job in the workplace reportedly preformed by the generations that came before us.
I say all of this because I know a lot of hard-working millennials in the for-good and not-yet-fully-imagined sectors. From members of Gen Y who are helping to reinvent the nonprofit organization as we know it, to those who are trying to reform the civic sectors, there are plenty of folks my age working hard to re-imagine and implement what America can look like. Those who are pushing for the construction of a new myth, one based on substantiating optimistic, though not-yet-true realities - the Maya Enistas and the Chris Goldens and the Aria Fingers and the Nathaniel Whittemores and the student protestors in California and on and on - are some of the hardest working people I know. Those employed (and often self-employed) in the "let's make shit better" sector are enthusiastically-hard working.
After all, having been weaned on that which we were, and living through the history that we just came through, I find it unsurprising that - on the whole - we're not particularly excited about working hard to maintain the same apparatus that gave us five-figure student debt, Enron, and September 11th. My mind - my friends - is on creating a marketplace and apparatus that does not yet exist. Fortunately, we're just under-employed enough to devote a substantial amount of our energies to making the creation of said apparatus possible.
Alex Steed is a teacher, activist and political candidate based in Cornish, Maine.