Are the 20-somethings soft, or do Boomers need therapy?
Peggy Claus's The New York Times article, Thank You for Sharing. But Why at the Office? both exposed me and confused me. I am guilty of some of the dialogue mentioned in the article but completely stunned by others.
I desperately want to know the 20-something-year-olds who were behind this, "A human resources manager for a manufacturing company told me that several young workers had asked her how many times they could be absent before she fired them." Reading this statement initially made me feel stupid for being in the same demographic as the people who talked to their boss like that. The way the question was asked made it that much more problematic. They may as well have said, "So what's the least amount of time I can be here? How much can I get away with?"
I have a hard time believing that a person in their 20's referred to calling out of work, or otherwise not showing up to work, as being "absent." Then I thought to myself, there's no way this can be real. Is all this information correct- are we sure these aren't teenagers at their first jobs? I know how older generations like to lump the younger generations together- I remain skeptical.
At the start of the article, Claus reported on young people lacking a level of professionalism, as seen in how they speak to their managers. Then, she added cloudy examples of us being overly emotional and that we love to tell everybody everything.
Claus wrote, "The workplace has become our second home, the place where we spend a majority of our waking hours, so we want to make it as comfortable as possible, which often leads to a lot of sharing." I want to know what you all think of this- Why is this a bad thing? Why shouldn't your place of work be your second home?
The younger generations make great friends with their coworkers, and sometimes managers (Claus seems to draw the line there), and work becomes a community; there's a socialness to it. If my coworker is having a bad day, I know it immediately. Why can't we talk about it while we work? Does the younger generations sociability and capacity for empathy offend Baby Boomers?
I like to think that Millennials and Gen Z are a lot kinder to each other than Baby Boomers were (and still are). Regardless of political standing, Boomers are known for being in bad moods all the time. Rejecting emotions, and how they affect the mind and body seems to be a Boomer mindset, and for that I'm glad. I'm not saying all us younger folk are experts at handling our emotions by any means, but we are way more likely to talk about our feelings than that generation. How is this a negative? We, the younger, oversensitive, dramatic, and dumb ones, understand how to listen to each other and how to be vulnerable about how we feel in order to feel better.
All in all, Boomers grew up in an era of affluence, success, and The Beatles, and are still unhappy. If anyone needs to have a therapy session in the workplace, it's them.
