Guilty
Guilty, guilty as charged.
Along with others of my Baby Boomer generation I too have concluded that the members of the Millennial generation are unsuitable for hire. Sometimes exigencies of circumstance do result in a business relationship, then one must be prepared for inordinate commitment to parent-like support, to the kind of patience which one exercises for a not-yet-adult teenager. I speak from experience.
Nonetheless, we are stuck with each other on the planet, and with the conditions of life which we jointly created, and with the unforeseen results of our presence. We must do what we can for one another.
Here is a fine piece of writing excerpted from a larger article. It’s from the latest issue of AdBusters Magazine.
A Millennial’s Guide To Taking Back Control
By Doug Haddow
True to form, Millennials went from precocious to precarious with style. If one job didn’t pay the bills, we’d get side hustles. If that didn’t do the trick, we drive strangers around in our cars. If it still wasn’t enough, we’d fuck each other on a livestream for loose change. And if we were still left wanting? We’d monetize our personalities and trade influence over peers for branded merch.
Of all the Millennial stereotypes, only one ever rang true—distraction. The ADHD generation, we were plagued by intermittent concentration and an inability to see the forest for the giant gun pointed at our collective face.
For all the time and emotion we poured into social media, we never looked much past the surface, so caught up were we in the dopamine tunnel of poking and following and hearting. Addicts of the convenience of constant connection, we failed to grasp how truly revolutionary was the tool in our hands.
Plug in your phone and the kinetic turns electrical. From a far-off dam or coal plant, electrons flow through a loop into substations and aluminum lines, poles and drums, the charge finally entering the knotted-up fire hazard of white plastic cords that connect your Instagram account to the now-drowned corpses of woodland caribou.
Connected. Everything is connected.
Our relationship with our tools is chiastic.
Not only are we Jonah,
swallowed up by the algorithmic whale,
but the whale is also us,
swallowing everything else.When we begin to untangle the mess of wires in which we’ve ensnared, we see the strangeness of this landscape, of our politics, ecology, and technology. Not quite nature, not quite future, but a taiga in between.
—-Douglas Haddow is a Vancouver BC journalist
