Millennials and the New Economy

~ Laura

Maureen Dowd’s column is an absolute train-wreck this week. The first three paragraphs are so confusing and tone-deaf that one should avoid the whole thing. But I did read it. At the end, she had some interesting quotes about millennials and the tech boom.

“The 23-year-olds I work with are a little over the conversation about how we were the superpower brought low,” said Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed. “They think that’s an ‘older person conversation.’ They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”

Ben Domenech, the 32-year-old libertarian who writes The Transomnewsletter, thinks many millennials are paralyzed by all their choices. He quoted Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman”: “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.” He also noted that, given their image-conscious online life in the public eye, millennials worry about attaching themselves with a click to the wrong clique or hashtag: “It heightens the level of uncertainty, anxiety and risk aversion, to know that you’re only a bad day and half a dozen tweets from being fired.”

Jaron Lanier, the Microsoft Research scientist and best-selling author, thinks the biggest change in America is that “technology’s never had to shoulder the burden of optimism all by itself.”

And that creates what Haass calls a tension between “dysfunctional America vs. innovative America.”

Walter Isaacson, head of the Aspen Institute and author of the best-selling “Steve Jobs,” agreed that “there’s a striking disconnect between the optimism and swagger of people in the innovative economy — from craft-beer makers to educational reformers to the Uber creators — and the impotence and shrunken stature of our governing institutions.”

You know what your problem is, old fart? You need to have the swagger of a craft-beer maker! So, grow yourself a beard and stop whining!

There are a handful of people making a load of money on the Internet with companies that sell preppy belts on Instagram or that help you locate people who want to hook up. There are also a handful of people who call themselves gurus and are suffering from the dreaded fullashit disease. They write books about belts on Instagram and one-night stand software. They make a nice living, too. Good for them!

I don’t know how the new economy is working out for millennials. The Atlantic and their 15-year old writers pump out daily articles about how they can’t buy houses or cars, because they have so much student loan debt. I’m on a ‘secret’ Facebook of 27,000 women writers that complain about working for free. The latest list of most well paid careers went to old-fashioned sort of careers like anesthesiologists. Not German barbecue pop-up store owners in Williamsburg.

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Millennials and the New Economy”

  1. Gee, the quoted sections of the essay seem like a train wreck too, for the reasons Laura adduces and about six others. If that’s the good part, I’d hate to read the “confusing and tone-deaf” part.

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  2. Well, that’s 3 minutes I’m not getting back. Those metaphors weren’t mixed–they were chopped and tossed.

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  3. That article is almost parody bad, but underneath the writing there is a point. The “innovative economy” people keep telling us how they are changing the world. Then they get upset that the rest of the world maybe doesn’t want to change so quickly. Aero, Michelle Rhee, FWD.us I’m looking at you. Or even likes things the way they are. It’s a real difference in world view that will probably become more obvious over time, though I’m not sure it’s really a millennial thing.

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  4. Where even to begin? Well, begin with not reading Dowd.

    But beyond that, I can’t be the only one old enough to have heard all of this before. I remember trying to book Lanier into conferences during the first dotcom boom; I wonder if he is still doing the same schtick 15 years later. I also remember all the gloom-n-doom about how Generation X was going to be the first not to surpass their parents in standard of living. Plus a heaping helping of “you’re so entitled” to go along with the main dish of “nevermind this recession we left you, bootstrap yrselves ffs!” that was being served up by the powers-that-be and their assorted lackeys.

    As for Isaacson, there’s a striking disconnect between running Aspen and failing to notice things like the asserted beliefs of the Republican Party of Texas. Having one of the only two governing parties available move more or less permanently into cloud cuckoo land is likely to hinder the country’s governing institutions. Peculiar, that.

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  5. We were the superpower brought low? Since we are the only superpower left that just seems like a bizarre statement and makes it hard to take the rest of it seriously. None of it makes sense – “shoulder the burden of optimism”. The burden of optimism. WTF?!

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  7. Maureen Dowd’s column is an absolute train-wreck this week. The first three paragraphs are so confusing and tone-deaf that one should avoid the whole thing.

    Like some others, I’d suggest that you could just repeat this opening every week and be right nearly all the time. Like Doug, I’d suggest the best thing to do is just ignore her. There’s no value there.

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