Tag: Millennials

Words Of Advice!

I’m an optimist.  However, I must admit ever since the Millennials began drifting out of the universities and into the general population, I’m losing my girlish laughter.  Seriously! These people are difficult to deal with.  It’s like playing chess with a pigeon — they don’t actually understand the game, but they strut around the board as if they invented it.  Lighten up, folks!  Here’s some advice.  It might not make your lives any better, but it’ll certainly help all the people around you get on with theirs.

1 — Nobody in the real world gives a damn about your feelings.  Being over-sensitive about everything doesn’t mean you’re a unique, complicated or interesting person; it means you’re an emotional train wreck who doesn’t have any coping skills.

2 — I think it’s wonderful that you want a totally cool job that utilizes your intelligence, ability and years of education.  Unfortunately, your diploma in Gender Studies or any of the other 1001 bullshit degrees out there didn’t provide you with any marketable skills.  To get a job (cool or otherwise) you need MARKETABLE SKILLS, so either get some or learn how to make coffee.

3 — If you live in the Western World, you’re already part of the 1%.  Nobody but you — and your Instagram buddies — thinks you’re ill used, abused or downtrodden.  And, like it or not, you’re not oppressed, so give it a rest.  You have the bounty of this very, very wealthy society at your disposal.  Bitching about that is kinda counterproductive.

4 — Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.

5 — People who disagree with you are not assholes, morons, idiots, or Satan’s evil twin. They’re ordinary people who are just as smart, aware and informed as you think you are.

6 — The real world does not come with a safe space.  That’s a pretend game the universities made up so your parents wouldn’t sue them.

And finally:

7 — Even though he’s not on Twitter, read Copernicus: he has documented proof you’re not the centre of the universe.

What Writers Think About

ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

Why Young People Are Grouchy!

bored

After years of research, I’ve discovered why young people are grouchy all the time.  It’s pretty simple, really.  They’re bored out of their skulls.  The problem is, despite the entire 21st century lying at their feet like a cornucopia of earthly delights, they have so many politically correct rules of engagement that they’re scared to touch it.  Let me explain.

They can’t play games or even watch them.  There is a myth that young people like board games, but I think this is just spin (“lie” is such a hard word.)  Think about it!  Games are, by definition, competition, and when you have competition you have winners and – OMG – losers.  This is the Anti-Christ of the 21st century.  If an activity isn’t win/win, it just doesn’t happen.

They can’t watch television — except The Handmaid’s Tale.  The trigger warnings in Game of Thrones alone would fill an encyclopedia (that’s Google for old people.)  Even the blandest of the bland, the antique sitcom, Friends — a program so inoffensive it can’t even be called vanilla (that suggests way too much flavour) is a minefield of politically incorrect thought.  Nope, TV is out!

They can’t go to the zoo.  Animals in captivity?  That’s just crazy talk.

They can’t go to a museum.  If the single statue of some dead guy is offensive, a whole building full of history could cause apoplectic shock.

They can’t read books published before 1980.  In a time when To Kill a Mockingbird has been censored, Huck Finn rewritten and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Screw banned, we’re not many days away from politically correct mobs ransacking libraries and burning the books in the streets.  Sad as it may seem, Fahrenheit 451 isn’t fiction anymore; it’s a training manual.  So reading is a no-no!

They can’t go to the movies.  Here is an industry that has, on several occasions, confessed that it is a whitewashing, cultural appropriating, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, anti-Muslim monopoly, controlled by misogynistic old white men.  What’s left?  Michael Moore’s “Ain’t It Awful?” documentaries — and even the politically correct are fed up with that guy.

They can’t dine out unless the restaurant grows its own organic food in a hydroponic biosphere in the back garden.  Even quinoa and avocados, the meat and potatoes of contemporary life, are suspect.  The carbon footprint that brings ancient grains and Aztec fruit to the modern table is just too deep to be tolerated.

And, of course, the super biggie:

They can’t flirt.  Don’t even go there!

And that, boys and girls, is why young people are so 24/7 bitchy!