Hey, Olds: Do Not Be Scared of Young People.They’re just like we were. They’ll end up as wrong as we were.

Last month, Emma Goldberg of The New York Times wrote a fascinating piece with the irresistible headline of “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them.” The premise of the piece was that workplace managers — more specifically, middle managers — were so disoriented by the widespread changes in office attitudes, particularly among recent graduates, that they are terrified to do much of anything at all, lest they offend the kids who are ever-so-eager to own the olds on whatever social media platform they happen to be using at that time. This article was widely mocked by exactly the people you would expect to mock it, but in the weeks it has been published, I have found that its general sentiments are shared by just about everyone that I know. (You are reading someone who is nearly a decade older than the 37–year-old in the headline. Just a boring Gen Xer here.) This is exactly how a ton of bosses, and managers, feel about their young employees. They’re terrified of them.

This is an undeniable change. It’s not that kids today are any more obnoxious or more certain their bosses are idiots than they have always been; I thought my bosses were lame and wrong about everything just like my parents thought their bosses were lame and wrong about everything. The difference is in the power dynamics. This quote tells the story:

“These younger generations are cracking the code and they’re like, ‘Hey guys turns out we don’t have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it,’” said Colin Guinn, 41, co-founder of the robotics company Hangar Technology. “‘We can actually do whatever we want and be just as successful.’ And us old people are like, ‘What is going on?’”

I am fairly certain — sorry, kids — that “these younger generations” have not “cracked the code” any more than I thought my generation had. (We hadn’t, it turned out.) The phrase “hey guys turns out we don’t have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it” has surely been uttered hundreds of thousands of times throughout history, and will be uttered hundreds of thousands of times more. The difference is that if I were to say it 20 years ago, my bosses either would have fired me, or shrugged and called me an idiot. (And told me to go back to work.) Now, because of the structure of social media and the sense that the world is somehow more uncertain than it has ever been, the bosses feel like they have lost that power. They ate shit for years from bosses, and they’ve been deprived of what they believe they’ve earned: Having their turn to tell someone else to eat shit. The dynamic has not changed. What’s different is that we can watch all this play out in public now. Because older people, by definition, have more to lose than young people — they have invested enough time and effort into their careers to become bosses, after all — they’re nervous about saying the wrong thing in a way that young people are not. Getting owned by the kids used to mean having someone snicker behind your back. Now they do it in the company Slack for everyone to see.

The story itself correctly observes something that’s clearly happening in the culture right now, but it ignores one key piece, maybe the most important one: Kids are absolutely certain they are right about everything, whether they are or not. It is baffling to me how this fundamental fact is ignored in these sorts of conversations. I thought I knew everything when I was a kid: So did you! The only difference is that I mumbled it to myself under my breath, and kids now put it on social media, a medium they’ve been using since they were children. Older people don’t understand young people, and young people think they know everything.

But they don’t. And you know how I know that? Because they’re going to be old soon — before they know it, and maybe even already. In a smart piece about the emptiness of much modern activism, writer Freddie deBoer touched on this in a key line that is absolutely vital to understanding this dynamic:

Most, I imagine, will end up like the vast majority of today’s screaming social justice set, in that in 10 or 15 years they’ll just be busy little Democrat soccer parents, people who vote blue and put some sort of sign up in their lawn but who are basically apolitical in every meaningful sense. Remember always that the 25 year old who’s screaming at you about Black bodies today probably won’t be a Republican in ten years, but more likely will someday be an actuary or a dentist and serve on the PTA.

As someone who was once screaming about Mumia Abu-Jamal and railing on how fake and corporate the modern world had become, and now has a 401(k) plan and volunteers for his local school and serves on the board of a local charity and coaches Little League baseball — and, more to the point, sees just about everyone I went to college with, little activists themselves at some point, doing the exact same thing — I can assure you this is how it turns out. “Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world,” Wilco sang (Gen-X reference!). When I was younger, I felt like every single thing I cared or thought about was the most important thing in the world. Now I’m old enough to realize not only that there are more important things than whatever was on my mind when I was 23, but ultimately no one really cares anyway because there’s always going to be someone younger and hipper coming along who will be louder and more strident than I could possibly sustain. The thing about young people is that they are not always young. In fact, they’re young for a very short time. Those 23-year-olds scaring their bosses? They’re going to be scared of 23-year-olds before they know it.

This is not to say that we should not listen to new voices — shutting off new voices is the best way to get way too old way too fast. It just means that these things must be kept in perspective. Young people are loud and have nothing to lose. Older people are quieter and have more at stake, because they used to be young people, but then they had to stop. On and on it goes. I know that young people think they’re among the most transformative generation ever put on this planet. I would be disappointed if young people didn’t think this; I sure did when I was young! But I wasn’t. And they’re not either. They‘re just people who haven’t become old yet. It happens to all of us. If we’re lucky.

Eventually, young becomes old, glorious self-righteousness is replaced by life as an actuary or a dentist or being a dull, pointless, lame-o Mom or Dad. This is not a reason to quiet the young. This is a reason to listen to them, to enjoy their passion, to let them point in directions we might be too tired or beaten down to go toward ourselves. It’s a reason to envy them, and to reflect on what it once felt like to be like them, before the world hit us with everything it’s got. But it doesn’t make them any more right than we were. And it sure doesn’t mean we should be scared of them. If anyone should be scared, it’s them. After all: They’ll be old soon.

Source - https://williamfleitch.medium.com