Writes Cal Newport in "The Year in Quiet Quitting/A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well-lived life" (The New Yorker).
"Many in my [millennial] generation responded by adopting a new and more pragmatic ethos of 'hacking' work to serve a vision of the good life that expanded beyond the details of a particular job. This was the decade of the blog-fuelled minimalism movement, which argued that if you simplify your life, you can simplify your career, leaving more time for other meaningful pursuits...."
But what happens next? Apparently not "blog-fuelled minimalism." These new people — the Zs — have always been on line: "Every experience was a potential cyber-palimpsest of self-documentation, and reaction, and reaction to the reactions." They, Newport says, need to go through this "quiet quitting" phase even to begin to deal with the "unnatural melding of self and work."
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Baby boomer ended in 1964. If millennials are between 1981-1996, that leaves only 17 years for Gen X and Gen Y combined.
No. Millennials are closer to 1990 to 2005.
When the history is written with the proper amount of distance and measure, one and one alone statement about the boomers will remain: they were the richest generation in the history of the world, but they refused to live within their means, and they left their children and grandchildren in bondage of debt. Anything else the boomers told or tell their posterity is a con to get them to keep footing the interest of the debt.
"The Year in Quiet Quitting/A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well-lived life"
Should have stated: 'A new generation discovers what every other generation discovered since we've been drawing on the walls of caves.'
I suppose each generation views their experience as totally new and different, and has to make their own life full of mistakes to come to that thing we call the 'wisdom that comes with age'. Though my wife might disagree with my definition of wisdom.
As a '62er I firmly reject any suggestion that I am in any way, shape, or form a Boomer.
Stuff some writer made up to collect his pay.
Until the internet came along and people began to criticize these “trends” articles, I actually believed many of them.
Now, I know better.
Perhaps it was the "quiet quitters" that Elon fired when he reduced Twitter's head count by a reported 50%.
This is click-bait.
It's written for the same pack of women that want to espouse their social virtue.
that leaves only 17 years for Gen X and Gen Y combined.
No. Millennials are closer to 1990 to 2005.
Gen Y are Millenials.
Gen X is 1965 to 1981-82.
It's called the Millenial generation because they came of age (18) at the Millennium. It also corresponds to a change in the treatment of children. 1984 was the start of the "Baby on Board" viral sensation. Children had transformed from a liability in the 70's to something that was a precious asset and was going to "save the world".
Contrast with generation X where the message was that if we played around with computers we might start World War III.
I liked my work before and after 9/11, and continue doing it as a hobby today.
i Want To Know Why boomers (most boomers) now EXPLICITLY Trust the government; in Every Way
It didn't take till the '80s for those counterculture dreams to morph into something else (and it's an open question whether they ever really existed in the first place or whether it was anti-Vietnam performance art).
Remember the "Me decade" of the '70s? (Not coincidentally after Vietnam ended.)
Anthony said...
As a '62er I firmly reject any suggestion that I am in any way, shape, or form a Boomer.
Same Here!
My pop fought in Korea, Not Japan.. 1962 was Well After the 'baby boom' I grew up in school rooms that were half empty. I Remember the irritating day (Jan 1981), when they changed their 'definition' of baby boomer and started including baby busters (that's ME)
1960's? No real memories (Got to stay up Late to watch the moon landing)
1970's? el-hi school years
1980's? College (fun!)..
when You "Boomers" think of College, do YOU think of Ronald Reagan? i do! (that, and coke)
After 45 years of work I am impressed with the pure beauty of living with a field of endeavor that I have seen grow from my initial limited understanding to full mastery. Mastery being the ability to extend the frontier of knowledge in useful areas. You can do anything that is possible, but you can’t do everything that is possible. Mastery means you have seen the field from its base level, from having trouble making it work, to teaching others how to do it, and reflecting on why you are doing it. Then you return to the beginning, and do it over again a new way.
There have been jobs for the unengaged who preferred to do the minimum. This was when people did back room work and there were hundreds sitting at desks. That is gone, there is little lazy work left. Quiet quitters, like procrastinators, cheat themselves. You try to have fun little by little, and end up never reaching the great fun of achievement.
Many in my [millennial] generation responded by adopting a new and more pragmatic ethos of 'hacking' work to serve a vision of the good life that expanded beyond the details of a particular job.
"Well, I'm just trying to get ahead."
In the real modern world, generations are something like 25 or 30 years. In the way we've come to think of generations they may only be 15 or 17/18 years. The big exception is the Greatest Generation or GI Generation which was expanded to include those who were fighting age in the Second World War.
There was actually a difference between people who came of age in the Depression and had to cope with mass unemployment and those who came of age in the war years and benefited from the GI Bill (Strauss and Howe even include people who came of age in the 1920s in the Greatest Generation), but the war and the post-war boom tended to smooth out those differences, as did being sandwiched (with the Silent Generation) between the Lost Generation and the Baby Boomers.
I'm not sure the article is right about Boomers and their Millennial kids. Much depends on class and other factors. One shouldn't generalize about the world based on the experiences of New Yorker writers. Boomer parents weren't as likely as their parents had been to tell children to study something that would get them a job, but a lot of them certainly did expect their children to go into some well-paid profession and did their best to point them in that direction.
There's not always a clear cause and effect relation between what parents tell their offspring to do and what the younger generation actually does. Parents who went through the Depression and valued being able to put bread on the table had Boomer children who did what they wanted to and studied (or didn't study) what they liked. The state of the world -- especially of the economy -- has more effect than parental injunctions.
This used to be David Brooks territory. Whatever happened to DB?
“As a '62er I firmly reject any suggestion that I am in any way, shape, or form a Boomer.”
For people born in 1960-1964, here’s the two-part test:
1. Did your father, mother, or any of your uncles or aunts serve in World War II?
2. Were you, any of your siblings, or anyone you were in high school with (including classes ahead of you) subject to the Vietnam War draft (whether or not actually drafted)?
If you can answer both questions no, then you are not a boomer.
Yes, yes, yes: Quit the idea of "going above and beyond" - walk the earth, be kind, center yourself, just don't make someone else feed, clothe and house you.
Well, I was born in 1966, and both of my parents are Baby Boomers, though my father was born in June 1945, which put him just outside the oldest Boomers by a few months. So, that excerpt is a bit wrong- the Boomers birthed a significant portion of Generation X demographically.
There is a huge class bias here. Boomers didn't start having kids in the 80s. The type of boomers that read the New Yorker started having children in the 80s. A lot of Gen X have boomer parents. We are the ones who have parents that didn't go to college and didn't go to Woodstock and didn't have the luxury of spending their twenties fucking off. Our boomer parents were the ones who joined the military when they turned 18 and started raising families in their twenties.
My wife and I tried to teach our children how hard, honest work is of great value. It is a balm for the soul.
And there’s nothing funny about peace, love and understanding.
Having a "fun" job is a great luxury. Few get to do that. Even when you do, there are parts of the job that are tedious. Fun jobs also often pay very little. Too bad the boomers could not take the realities of life in stride--probably all the drugs.
Not a lot of deep thought given to the generations by that author. For example, few Boomers were counter culture, the oldest Boomers were only 23 at Woodstock. And many of the early Boomers had their kids in the '70s, such as my 2nd year Boomer cousin who had is first child in 1970 and the last in 1980.
What happened was that the early Boomers didn't navel gaze about work as they got jobs in the factories, but by 1980 that was a poor option. The theory of work when your factory closes and you are in the middle the economic crapfest known at the 1970s, is find a job and keep it so you can feed your family.
Similarly, a last Boomer like myself graduated from high school into a poor prospect future. Trades were poor bet unless you had an uncle as they were swimming with experienced 20-somethings who had been laid off from the factories. College was the push, but as I considered majors, I remember a Newsweek or Time article advising against what is now STEM as there were PhD astrophysicists washing dishes in NYC because the space program were winding down. My mid-Boomer brother had gotten his BA in history and became a master carpenter. As did several of his friends.
'Quiet quitting' wasn't an option as you'd be loudly fired. Who knew Reagan would turn things around from the German pattern of socialism, the interventionist economy that had crept in since the War. But he did and personal computing took off.
One thing said to me by a 20-something in 1994 does mark the early and mid-Boomers. "The Boomers grew up to make everything they did illegal for their kids" That's the 'counter-culture' legacy.
"Quayle said...
When the history is written with the proper amount of distance and measure, one and one alone statement about the boomers will remain: they were the richest generation in the history of the world, but they refused to live within their means, and they left their children and grandchildren in bondage of debt. Anything else the boomers told or tell their posterity is a con to get them to keep footing the interest of the debt."
Any statement about a generation that includes tens of millions of people is bound to be an exaggeration, and this one is typical. I was born in 1957. My father was a carpenter who died when I was 16. My mother was a seamstress. My wife grew up poor in the Philippines. We inherited nothing. My wife and I had no pension plan, so we worked and saved for decades. She is retired and I only work part time because I want to. We built our own retirement and have set up a multimillion-dollar trust to leave everything to our kids and grandkids.
In short, your statement is typical of boomer-bashing bullshit where you try to blame everyone else for your own personal failures. It must suck to be you.
One shouldn't generalize about the world based on the experiences of New Yorker writers.
Thread winner.
I do not understand why some people have to overthink the 'meaning of work'. It's to survive! Full stop. Nothing else. This has not changed just because we have moved past huddling in caves, painting the wall for entertainment (cave painting reference Number 3!).
Like the others here born in the early 1960s, I hate being called a Boomer. We're Generation Jones, evident in every one of our comments to this post.
You don't "balance work with a well-lived life." Honest work (paid or not) is an intrinsic and necessary part of a well-lived life. The issue is integrating all the components with (and not against) each other. FWIW, I'm a few months pre-boomer myself and my children are of the '80s.
You cannot be a quiet quitter if you are an entrepreneur or in an occupation where you eat only what you kill. Which leaves those in corporate jobs where it is unlikely your work results in much value to your employer. As noted above Musk gets this and relieved half of his workforce from theIr tedium. Time will tell but I expect his instinct correct. Expect more employers to follow suit as the economy weakens. In other words the quiet quitters may be quietly quit.
Top Myths About Boomers:
1. They're all the same.
Actually, that about covers it.
Gilbar - us boomers are collecting inflation adjusted social security benefits and using Medicare benefits for which we pay $164 a month. Of course we trust the government because we rely on them.
1. Did your father, mother, or any of your uncles or aunts serve in World War II?
2. Were you, any of your siblings, or anyone you were in high school with (including classes ahead of you) subject to the Vietnam War draft (whether or not actually drafted)?
WW2 ended when my Dad was 17. Vietnam ended when my older brother was 17.
That said, my Dad's older brother (and my namesake) was killed on the last day of WW2.
1. Did your father, mother, or any of your uncles or aunts serve in World War II?
2. Were you, any of your siblings, or anyone you were in high school with (including classes ahead of you) subject to the Vietnam War draft (whether or not actually drafted)?
WW2 ended when my Dad was 17. Vietnam ended when my older brother was 17.
That said, my Dad's older brother (and my namesake) was killed on the last day of WW2.
1. Did your father, mother, or any of your uncles or aunts serve in World War II?
2. Were you, any of your siblings, or anyone you were in high school with (including classes ahead of you) subject to the Vietnam War draft (whether or not actually drafted)?
WW2 ended when my Dad was 17. Vietnam ended when my older brother was 17.
That said, my Dad's older brother (and my namesake) was killed on the last day of WW2.
I'm not sure why, but this post keeps making think of Mr. Dooley's comment on education that it doesn't matter what the children study so long as it's unpleasant. I suspect a lot of millennials of having a big shortage of difficult, unpleasant, tedious and necessary in their upbringing and this results in people who don't know what to do with themselves.
I was a tail-end Boomer, and I NEVER had any counter-cultural dreams. In fact, witnessing the 1960's made me utterly disgusted with the counter-cultural hippies and anti-war crowd. That carried over to the 1970's and the anti-nuke crowd. Idiots and hypocrites all.
We’re all influenced by our environments and the times we live in. I’m not sold on the idea that the Coming of Age period of anyones life is more significant than any other.
And most of My Generation talk is just stereotypes.
That said, the first half of boomers (1946-55 born) Came of Age in a prosperous country as the result of WW2. And the Civil Rights Movement preceded them. None of the Civil Rights icons are Boomers.
The first Millennials also Came of Age in the peaceful prosperous 90s.
The 80s and 90s were so prosperous that the US had the Fortunate Son election of 2000. The thoroughly mediocre prodigy born and raised in privilege who should have been car salesmen.
Larry J. You live in a democracy where the majority rules - by a form of exaggeration of the vote of the people. So my exaggeration as you call it stands valid as descriptive of and commensurate with the direction the majority took the country. The public debt run up by the boomers will be one of the defining acts of our time. Mark my words.
I was born in 1953, so I guess I'm a middle Boomer. I never had the chance (or desire) to "counter-culture" or whatever the hippies got to do because I was too busy helping my parents on the farm. (AKA Hard work.) They taught me a lot of survival techniques learned from The Big Depression and WWII years. I'm glad they were able to enjoy their later years not having to pinch every penny. But a lot of what they taught me by example has helped me all through my life. I tried to pass the same lessons onto my two kids ('79 and '81, whatever that makes them. I never figured it out and it's not important to me to do so.) I once heard my son tell someone, "I feel like I was raised in the '50s!" Yeah, and he was way ahead of his peers when it came to maturity, responsibility, etc. And now the grandson is also showing signs of his maturity - joined Army Reserves as a Junior in high school, and even though he is currently without a job, he didn't check to see if he was eligible for unemployment because he "wants to do something and not sit around." No, he hasn't found his "career" yet, but he's only 19. It took me many years also to find my fit.
BTW, when I hear a snarky "Okay, Boomer," I just want to punch them in the mouth. And I'm usually not a violent person - just sick of the stereotyping.
I was a tail-end Boomer, and I NEVER had any counter-cultural dreams.
I was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom. The “counter culture” never covered the entirety of us Boomers; it was mostly the children of the affluent, who could always count on Mommy and Daddy to bail them out if they got tired of being unwashed and poor. Plus some losers who bought in and suffered the consequences. I grew up in a quarry town. I never had any illusions about living in poverty being cool.
Thus the conception, birth, and progress of "our Posterity" is a "burden" h/t Obama in a countercultural miasma.
Left Bank of the Charles said...
For people born in 1960-1964, here’s the two-part test:
2. Were you, any of your siblings, or anyone you were in high school with (including classes ahead of you) subject to the Vietnam War draft (whether or not actually drafted)?
If you can answer both questions no, then you are not a boomer.
Being born in 1962.. I'm SO YOUNG, that Not Only DIDN'T i get drafted..
They ENDED the Draft (when i was 12?)..
They Stopped Registering For the Draft..
And..
Start Registering for the Draft AGAIN (when i was 18).
Both Mark's comment #1 and later Brian nailed it.
The Boomer generation, one of the first to be explicitly defined while still alive, ended in the 1960s. About the time cyclical history or generation theories started to get hot (Strauss and Howe published Generations in 1991) the generation following the Boomers was still in childhood and got the indeterminate monikers of '13th Gen' from S&H, for being the thirteenth generation since the American Revolution, and 'Gen X' from Douglas Coupland. The generation following them, whose births started around 1980, was therefore nicknamed Generation Y until they acquired the more descriptive nickname 'Millennials' since their exit from childhood occured around the turn to the 21st Century. Generation Z, which I sometimes see called 'Zoomers', started after that and is only now just barely exiting childhood.
Even talking about 9/11 and the financial crash affecting work-life balance is a Millennial issue more than Gen Z who largely aren't in the workforce. While Gen Z has been online since childhood, the Millenials are not far behind. Facebook launched in 2004 and by 2006 had over 7 million mostly college age users.
Leora,
"Of course we trust the government because we rely on them."
WTH??? The notion that having to rely on some person or entity inherently makes them reliable, is just about the most bizarre thing I've ever read all week.
I am really hoping that you just misstated yourself somehow, and that's not what you really meant.
Boomers were willing to fight for the good of all. Then the Military Industrial Complex attacked and slaughtered the leaders Jack, Martin and Bobby. We hope the next generation learns from access to internet information and teachings. Their courage is still strong. And new leaders are around.
>>In looking for a compromise between corporate conformity, which they still distrusted, and their own failed attempts to reject work altogether, the boomers came up with a clever solution: telling the millennial to seek work that they loved....
This may explain the ubiquitous presence of the word "passion" in job interviews. I never heard the phrase "My passion is . . ." uttered by a job-seeker until sometime in the 1990s. It rarely seemed genuine, so maybe they were trying to convince themselves.
"I was born in 1953, so I guess I'm a middle Boomer. I never had the chance (or desire) to "counter-culture" or whatever the hippies got to do because I was too busy helping my parents on the farm. (AKA Hard work.)"
"The “counter culture” never covered the entirety of us Boomers; it was mostly the children of the affluent, who could always count on Mommy and Daddy to bail them out if they got tired of being unwashed and poor. Plus some losers who bought in and suffered the consequences."
Apparently, "majority rules" so you (and me and everybody else like us) who believed in keeping your word and earning your keep don't have the luxury of being respected for our values and instead are to be lumped in with the useless.
And people wonder why we are where we are today.
As far as the public debt goes, it was fairly steady until 1982. The presidents since then?
Reagan (born 1911)
Bush (born 1924)
Clinton (born 1946)
W. Bush (born 1946)
Obama (born 1961)
Trump (born 1946)
Biden (born 1942)
Four are Boomers, but three are barely so. Does anybody honestly believe that someone born in 1946 has more in common with someone born in 1961 than someone in 1942?
The generation breakdowns are too long. A person developes their values from age 12-19 or so and relate to world events at that time. And,unless there is trauma later in life, those values remain. As an early boomer, that puts me into JFK's Camelot, "Ask not what your country can do for you...", and Vietnam. It always comes back to that for me. Later boomers from 1955 to 1964, such as Obama, are somewhat incomprehensible to me.
Regarding Biden, system thinking, the interrelationship between players, gained prominence in the 60s and Biden's brain formed prior to that. So he is stuck with bilateral, single cause and effect thinking. Sad.
In 1981, I was pregnant with my second child and working my butt off juggling the household, a toddler, and my job. Hubby was working until dark and at night we were working on building our house (we lived in a mobile home). We fell into bed exhausted and got up at five in the morning to do it all again. We had very little in the way of extras, never ate out (my husband took his lunch each day), and purchased our children's clothes from a factory outlet store nearby. I wore the clothes I had wore while in school that my parents had purchased me. It took us five years to finish the house but it is paid for and we still live in it. We didn't spoil our children and they are both in their 40s and working hard themselves. I'm not going to fit in the cubby-hole this writer is trying to place me.
BTW, when I hear a snarky "Okay, Boomer," I just want to punch them in the mouth.
@BG, + 1
Like the others here born in the early 1960s, I hate being called a Boomer. We're Generation Jones,
I hear you, being born in 1961 and with almost no memories of the 1960's, not even the Apollo 11 moon landing, despite loving all the spaceships. I have a vague memory of the lunar surface passing slowly beneath Apollo 8 on the B&W TV at our farm, but that's almost certainly because of the Christmas tree beside it and the combined magic for a little boy.
I'm amused by the two questions set above to establish "boomer", one being that you had a WWII parent. Well my Dad did fight in the war, in North Africa. He was 46 when I was born and both he and Mum had clear and distinct memories of their teenage years in the Great Depression, plus all the well-known attitudes towards money, ethics and morality that generation is known for and which were (largely) passed on to me.
But the periods of time that set you occur in young adulthood - 18-25 - and that for is the 1980's. The soundtrack of "Grosse Point Blank"? Knew every song. So yeah, I'm Gen X, but having grown up knowing that my parents were quite different to those of most of my friends (not all, there were others with WWII parents).
Such experiences lead me to think that instead of having these start and end birth dates there should be a graph of a "generation's" young adulthood fitted against what are regarded as distinct periods of history! Or perhaps fitted the opposite way, which is the culture dominance. So if yours fits the late 1960's/early-mid- 1970s you're a Boomer, while if it fits the 1980's/early 90's you're Gen X.
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