Say hi to Lucy.
Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born
between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture
that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.
I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y
Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of
yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special
story.
So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy. Only
issue is this one thing:
Lucy's kind of unhappy.
To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or
unhappy in the first place. It comes down to a simple formula:
It's pretty straightforward—when the reality of someone's life is better
than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than
the expectations, they're unhappy.
To provide some context, let's start by bringing Lucy's parents into the
discussion:
Lucy's parents were born in the 50s—they're Baby
Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I.
Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great
Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely
not GYPSYs.
Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed
with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure
careers. They wanted her parents' careers to have greener grass than their own,
and Lucy's parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable career
for themselves. Something like this:
They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that
lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work
to make it happen.
After graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked
on their careers. As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a
time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Lucy's parents did even better than
they expected to. This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.
With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own
parents, Lucy's parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded
possibility. And they weren't alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and
world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be,
instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.
This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the
point where their parents' goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn't
really do it for them. A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.
This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:
GYPSYs Are Wildly
Ambitious
The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of
prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn't quite exceptional or
unique enough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The
American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.
To be
clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did—they just
also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn't
think about as much.
But something else is
happening too. While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more
particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message throughout her
childhood as well:
This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact
about GYPSYs:
GYPSYs Are Delusional
"Sure," Lucy has been taught, "everyone will go and get themselves some
fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career
and life path will stand out amongst the crowd." So on top of the generation as
a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual
GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even
better—
A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.
So why is this delusional? Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which
defies the definition of special:
spe-cial | 'speSHel
|
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is
usual.
According to this definition, most people are not
special—otherwise "special" wouldn't mean anything.
Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, "Good point...but I
actually am one of the few special ones"—and this is the problem.
A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job
market. While Lucy's parents' expectation was that many years of hard work
would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an
obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it's just a matter
of time and choosing which way to go. Her pre-workforce expectations look
something like this:
Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not
be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they're
actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to
build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most
successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or
mid-20s.
But GYPSYs aren't about to just accept that.
Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor
and GYPSY expert,
has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic
expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and
"an inflated view of oneself." He says that "a great source of frustration for
people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel
entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual
ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and
rewards they are expecting."
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the
interview question, “Do you feel you are generally superior to your
coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?” He says that “if the candidate
answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an
entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an
unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe,
perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that
they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this
belief."
And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few
years out of college Lucy finds herself here:
Lucy's extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with
being a bit deluded about one's own self-worth, has left her with huge
expectations for even the early years out of college. And her reality pales in
comparison to those expectations, leaving her "reality - expectations" happy
score coming out at a negative.
And it gets even worse. On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem
that applies to their whole generation:
GYPSYs Are Taunted
Sure, some people from Lucy's parents' high school or college classes ended
up more successful than her parents did. And while they may have heard about
some of it from time to time through the grapevine, for the most part they
didn't really know what was going on in too many other peoples' careers.
Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing
is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own
existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are
usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while
struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy
feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to
her misery:
So that's why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated
and inadequate. In fact, she's probably started off her career perfectly well,
but to her, it feels very disappointing.
Here's my advice for Lucy:
1) Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with
opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The
specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out—just dive in
somewhere.
2) Stop thinking that you're special. The fact is, right now,
you're not special. You're another completely inexperienced young person who
doesn't have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working
really hard for a long time.
3) Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no
new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks
like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive,
self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll
never have any reason to envy others.
http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html