Good News & Bad News: Prelude to the sequel "F@*k You, Do Better"

Good news: You're not special. Bad news: You're not special

So if you made it this far, congratulations, I didn't bore you with the first chapter. You may have noticed a pattern with my titles by now. So has, most likely, anyone else who's reading this sentence. The bad news is you're not special. I am what most people call a millennial. This was a title given to a group of people around my age group. There's a whole structure in regards to age round and titles but for the most part, you don't hear about them much, at least you didn't until now. You see my age group is blamed for a lot of the problems in my world today. I say my world because depending on when you are reading this the world has likely changed, for better for worse I can't tell you. The history of my age group is better explained by cutting my age group into chunks. If you were to look up articles on my age group you would find headlines stating that we are killing every "good" thing in the world. Good being the relative word here. We've been blamed for killing off food chains, golf course, the napkin industry, I don't quite understand that last one but you get the point. We are, reportedly, not having enough children to keep the world at the current population. Now give I'm in this age group here's my response. We have reasons for all of this that are not directly linked to us just being lazy. No, I do believe that there are lazy millennials. There are just lazy people, in general, it's not just our age group. Almost any age group there can be found at least one person that probably needs to do something more to ad value.  Now I can't confirm the group ten years younger than me. They are like 12 right now. So, I would give them a little bit of a pass until they hit old enough to work or at least until they are in high school. So how are these markets taking so much of a hit? Why are stores and establishments that have been around for decades closing so quickly? I can tell you one thing it's not because we don't value work. The real reason why I and my friends find it a much more valuable and logical to room with one another than buy individual homes, is the crash we went through. In 2008 around the time I was 13 there was a large housing market crash that caused a huge recession that we are still in. And now for story time.

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood. This means that most of my childhood friends, neighbors, teachers were white. I grew up learning how to speak the king's English so to speak and was rather well off. Well off meaning, my family was middle class for the most part. This cause a number of issues in regards to my extended family that I'll talk about later. My father owned a computer business. I was too young at the time to remember the exact details of this business. What I knew of it was that my dad fixed computers around the dot com boom. I have memories of helping him in his home office fixing a computer and replacing parts. Around the time my brother had turned 5, we moved into a smaller home. We were having money problems so we downsized. That's not the whole story but we're talking about money, not my childhood. I watched as my school programs got cut. People around me were losing their homes. My mother was in real estate at the time so I knew what the word foreclosure meant. People went from having a good amount of money, to having their kids be on the free food program. I watched my environment change and at one point I and my family were homeless. This I can say affected my outlook on going out to eat on a regular basis and the idea of spending money on golf. I learned that we needed to save money and that I needed an understanding of how money works, how I can make it and the value of the things I buy. When you don't have internet or cable for over a year you get comfortable not watching tv and only spending money on entertainment that you actually want to watch. My priorities in life were heavily affected by what I saw as well. I can't agree that I need the latest pair of Jordan shoes if my normal sneakers will last just as long and look just fine with what I'm wearing. The age group I was in watched as our parents had problems that they were not prepared for. The only solution we, as children, could see was finding a way to work hard enough to make the money we needed. If that meant going to college then we would work hard to get into the best college we could to up our chances of being paid. We looked into what industries would pay the most and would likely not disappear with shifting trends. That's why I'm not just an art major but a computer nerd and most of my classmates went into the medical field. We may find the cure for cancer soon but you'll still get a cold next flu season. My age group worked day in and out to get where they wanted to go and anyone that fell behind was no longer popular. Being a jock or cheerleader meant you had the best grades and no time. The most popular kids in my school were the ones in my honors and AP classes. I knew all the popular kids. I just never wanted to be one. If we wanted to get rich quick we had to decide sleeping was a recommended activity. So are millennials lazy? I'd say no. At least not the ones I surround myself with.

There is a reason why I explained the position of millennials. We are often called special snowflakes in regards to our complaints about how the world is. Here is where the fun part starts. We really aren't specials snowflakes. Hell snowflakes aren't even special they come in about many different patterns. Nothing about my generation is any more special than any other generation. Yeah, we have a magic box that can give us an endless about of knowledge true or false but before the phone, we have panics attacks over we had libraries. If you think about it they're about the same. Race, politics, religion, science, and human rights are not new issues it's just more people feel like talking about it now and can do so right before your beloved cat video. If we go back far enough we can find these issues through time. We would have to simplify what was actually happening, I do admit, but it's still there. I'm not saying the issues are not important. I'm saying they are not new. That's the bad news. This issues that we face today have been here for a while in one-way shape or form, maybe harsher before this point but still there. The way that we have thought about issues has changed over time but the way we think as people, as humans, remain the same.

Jonny has five apples. If Sarah eats four, how many apples does Jonny have? If your first thought was one you passed basic math. If your first thought was "Who does Sarah think she is, eating almost all of Jonny's apples?" Then you are someone that has a very sarcastic way of at looking at things and I like you. Most people know how to answer that question because we learned basic math. The pattern of thinking was taught to us. There are patterns of think that are not taught to us and come implicitly. The DISC is one of the pattern maps that can be used to help predict a person's train of thought. Notice I said help predict and not predict entirely. The DISC and many tools like it are just a particular map but not the exact science. There really is no exact science to find out what a person is thinking. Most of the time people can barely understand their own thoughts let alone each other's thoughts. The DISC separates people into four different pattern groups. Everyone would then fall under an individual group or a rare combination of two groups. The thing to note is that even the rare combinations could mean hundreds if not thousands of people that think in the same pattern map. Let me be clear I'm not saying thousands of people have lived your exact life in the exact same way. That's not possible. I'm saying that your thinking pattern is not original. The idea of not being special often makes people feel sad I'll cover why later, it shouldn't however. It's actually really good news. The TV show you like. The way you appreciate a cloudy day. The love and respect you feel people deserve are not original thoughts. Thousands of people believe in the things you believe in including the love you feel for the world, just like you do. I think that's a wonderful idea to have. You are not alone in your caring. You are not alone in your experience. There are people out there that can relate to your thoughts and feeling and can even help you through some of the bad stuff. They've been there and done that so they know what you need to do next to be better. You're not special and that one of the wonders of this world because that connects you to so many people. If you and everyone else aren't special then there's no need to feel like you have to be. You can just be you and be so connected to the world. I think that makes living here a lot easier, don't you?