Model Modern Male Millennial

Via Instapundit:  Here’s the strangest part: I didn’t start out this way. I was a very industrious kid. I got my first job, working in a nursery, when I was 12 years-old. I worked at a responsible job in a church rectory until I was 17. I have never “not” worked. I’m an Eagle Scout and (nominally) a Knight of Columbus. I went to college, got the quarter-million dollar degree – the diploma hangs above my bed like the Sword of Damocles – and I’m faithfully paying off the student loans by working part-time jobs. There are the “seeds” of traditional masculinity inside me, and I never consciously rejected them.

But something has changed, and it hasn’t changed only for me, but for my contemporaries, too. Most of us are still living at home; a few of us have married, but we’re mostly still single. Why haven’t we moved on?

(Link to more)

Hillary Clinton cannot escape her own bio

Hillary spoke at PUSH convention. Mike Fourcher posted on Twitter a program for the convention containing a bio for Hillary Clinton. This is why I love millennials,  I'm assuming here this is a millennial because it has the millennial hallmark. Somebody told this campaign person (assumed millennial) to provide a bio on Hillary for the program, so they did, they copy and pasted from Wikipedia and without reading the whole thing and without knowing where to stop copy/pasting they included the uncomfortable bits best left unsaid on such a program. So her bio for the event that everybody has in their hands when she's speaking turns out uncomfortably honest. If they bother to read it.

Besides all that it is an impressive bio, I have to admit this.

The program will not show very well here. Follow the link above if you care to see it. The page is her picture above with wikipedia description below. The part that's hilarious for bio like this reads:

As First Lady of the United States, Clinton led the failed effort to enact the Clinton health plan of 1993. In 1997 and 1999, she helped create programs for children's health insurance, adoption, and foster care. The only first lady to have been subpoenaed, she faced a federal grand jury in 1996 regarding the Whitewater controversy; no charges were brought against her related to this or any other controversies in her life. Her marriage endured the Lewinsky scandal of 1998, and overall her role as first lady drew a polarized response from the public.

You were supposed to stop c/p before this paragraph! Except nobody proofread. They just trusted a young person. This is something a young person does. It's why we love them so.

It's all very funny but some people are not amused. From Mike Fourcher's thread:

Emily Longworth's opinion on Hillary Clinton

Emily, we read so much about millennial Americans. Please tell us your political opinion.

Emily Longworth's message to Donald Trump.

Emily Longworth's YouTube channel.

Commenters on YouTube are either deeply impressed or angrily butt-hurt. 

"People under 30 have way weaker grips than they did a few decades ago"

Quartz:  Researchers from the Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina found that men and women under 30 have weaker grip strength than they did back in 1985. Their work was published (paywall) in the Journal of Hand Therapy.

The researchers asked almost 240 men and women under 30—most 20 to 24 years old—to exert as much force as they could on a hand dynamometer, which measures grip force in pounds. On average, men’s hand strength decreased by 20 pounds, and women’s hand strength decreased by 10 pounds.

The culprit? Probably a combination of increased technology use at home and at work, and less manual labor. “As a society, we’re no longer agricultural or manufacturing,” Elizabeth Fain, an occupational therapist and lead author of the study, told NPR. “What we’re doing more now is technology-related, especially for millennials.”

It’s possible that looser grip strength could translate into a weaker handshake. That would be bad news for millennials, because handshakes have long been an important measure we use (paywall) to size up someone we’ve just met. (Link)

Millennials, the anxious generation

This comes from Karol Markowicz, NY Post, "'They can't even': Why millennials are the 'anxious generation.'"

The article is partial, leaves out more than it offers and it is wrong. Comments are even worse, far worse, far more pinched and far worse. And now I'm cross.

Where are these people writing from, who are they seeing? Their own relatives, what? Nothing I read online matches what I see every day. The young people I see every day are fantastic, and the situation we've given them more dire than the situation given me that drove me insane. I doubly admire young people considering heavily the economic situation they inherit from us. The anxiety over the requirement of advanced education combined with its ridiculous and unnecessary expense. We've made education more difficult to attain and more necessary, we've made home ownership more difficult to attain and considered necessary. Transportation more necessary and more expensive. And on and on, we've piled it on even in many cases placed on them the burden of our retirement while making that more expensive too.

The writer and especially the commenters need to open their eyes and look, impressive, creative, adventurous, bold and intelligent young people all around. The writer relies on studies and refers to internet and helicopter parenting. A silly example about cereal is given, the bowl and spoon being too much cleanup. That's nonsense. A joke. The writer concludes the real anxiety is moving and leaving family behind, and paralyzing choice. She refers to surveys.

Too bad she doesn't live in a city and have eyeballs and ears with which to listen. Put on her glasses open her eyes and look! And when she has a chance, converse. She'd write a completely different story.

 I wonder, do people even recall being that age? Do they not recall the things that drove us insane? Do the commenters not recall their own conversations back then? It's possible. If they could transport back and feel what was felt then and transport right back then they'd have an appreciation for what millennials must deal.

Here's where I gave up caring about their conversations. One commenter out of all those remarking sees beyond his own nose.

Maybe you can't blame the problems with millennial's created by their parents failed generation who embraced Free Trade, Government jobs, welfare for all and all the taxes now piled on to a home.  

We are an economic basket case and 20 trillion dollars in debt. Was that their fault also!

I thought, "there you go." We could have done much better. I feel shame on this point.

You just spouted the Bernie Sanders mantra, and that's who most of you uneducated dopes like.  Look, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all these schools that charge you $40K a year for a BAD education are your real enemies.  Wake up, you Millennial jerks!  The colleges run by Lefties are soaking you!  They take all your money and mis-educate you to believe all Al Gore's crap.  Wake up!  Down with BIG EDUCATION!  They're worse money grubbers than any oil company or energy company.  BIG EDUCATION = DEATH. 

How rude. But he does make a valid point, one that I make, the uneducated dope who makes a weird connection then attacks the dopey uneducated generalized connection that he made. What an ultra maroon. I had to leave. Truth is not all the commenters are so bad but there sure are a lot of pinched opinions.

The Great Unlearning

Link to video

Bret Easton Ellis: Generation Wuss

"My generation was raised by Baby Boomers in a kind of complete fantasy world at the height of the Empire: Boomers were the most privileged and the best educated children of The Great Generation, enjoying the economic boom of post-World War II American society. My generation realized that like most fantasies it was a somewhat dissatisfying lie and so we rebelled with irony and negativity and attitude or conveniently just checked-out because we had the luxury to do so. Our reality compared to Millennial reality wasn’t one of economic hardship. We had the luxury to be depressed and ironic and cool. Anxiety and neediness are the defining aspects of Generation Wuss and when you don’t have the cushion of rising through the world economically then what do you rely on? Well, your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked. And this creates its own kind of ceaseless anxiety. This is why if anyone has a snarky opinion of Generation Wuss then that person is labeled by them as a “douche”—case closed. No negativity—we just want to be admired. This is problematic because it limits discourse: if we all just like everything—the Millennial dream—then what are we going to be talking about? How great everything is? How often you’ve pressed the like button on Facebook? The Millennial site Buzzfeed has said they are no longer going to run anything negative—well, if this keeps spreading, then what’s going to happen to culture? What’s going to happen to conversation and discourse? If there doesn’t seem to be an economic way of elevating yourself then the currency of popularity is just the norm now and so this is why you want to have thousands and thousands of people liking you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler—and you try desperately to be liked. The only way to elevate yourself in society is through your brand, your profile, your social media presence. A friend of mine—also a member of Generation Wuss—remarked that Millennials are more curators than artists, a generation of “aestheticists…any young artist who goes on Tumbler doesn’t want to create actual art—they either want to steal the art or they want to BE the art.”" (read the whole thing)

"McDonald's eyes extending breakfast hours"

"McDonald's is in the early stages of looking at whether it can make breakfast available later in the day. Fans of the Egg McMuffin and Sausage Biscuit have long wanted the option to get breakfast at McDonald's after 10:30 a.m. But offering both the breakfast and lunch menu was considered logistically impossible, given the tight kitchen spaces of the restaurants.

Still, it's an option the chain is eyeing more seriously at a time when people's eating habits are changing - particularly those coveted customers in their 20s and 30s known as Millennials.

"We know, as an example, that breakfast on the weekend cut off at 10:30 doesn't go very well," Jeff Stratton, head of McDonald's USA, said in an interview.

Stratton declined to provide any details on how McDonald's would adjust kitchen operations to make breakfast later in the day.

"Well, we're just beginning. ... We're just taking a look at it," he said. READ MORE

After reading the story I suspected they were leaving out something. What is this story not saying here? Would you care to speculate? Hint