The Try-Hard Generation
The core charge against today’s youth is that they are achievement-orientedautomatons, single-mindedly focused on themselves and their careers. They are uninterested in delving deep into the search for inner knowledge, giving reign to their passions, or developing their character.
.. David Brooks is gentler but equally convinced that the young lack an interest in and a language for a discussion of character and virtue. They are, he believes, “morally inarticulate.”
.. But most of the complaints today are quite different from the concerns of the past. After centuries of bemoaning the fact that the young are too rebellious and disrespectful, the problem today, it appears, is that they are not rebellious and disrespectful enough. They aren’t willing to challenge conventional wisdom, neither the liberal pieties that offended Allan Bloom nor the conservative ones that gall Deresiewicz.
.. After all, they did not devise the intense system of tests that comprise the gateway to American higher education, nor did they create the highly competitive job market in anxious economic times. Admissions offices now prize nothing less than perfection. And the pressure doesn’t stop once students get into college... But much of that change took place from 1967 to 1987, and the percentage of freshmen who identify “becoming well off financially” as a personal objective has steadied significantly since then. That’s surely a rational response to the great post-1960s slowdown of the American economy and a world of greater competition, churn, and anxiety... Today, everyone is told, that compact has been broken. Everything is in flux. You must be entrepreneurial and recognize that you will need to change jobs and even careers over a lifetime. No company will stay loyal to you, nor can you lock yourself into one place... An older generation may have spoken loftily about morality and virtue and nobility. But many of them could be callous, cruel, and selfish in the way that they treated so many of their fellow human beings — blacks, other minorities, women, and people who were less fortunate than they were... As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.