Meghan Daum
Advice for Millennials: The Case for Spacing Out
A Gen Xer on the forgotten art of being lost in thought
When millennials ask me for work or life advice (and this does happen occasionally), I can feel my uselessness creeping in before I even start to answer. As member of Generation X, that oft-forgotten cohort of people born between 1966 and 1981, my work experience, especially in the early days of my career, bears little resemblance to anything a younger person deals with now. For those of us who came of age before the digital revolution, getting a first job meant doing things like making cold calls to HR departments or simply showing up and asking if there was any work available. Making friends and meeting romantic partners involved going to parties or joining softball leagues or hanging out in bars until you got drunk enough to find the courage to talk to someone. In the age of online job boards, dating apps, and Google hangouts, that’s horse-and-buggy stuff.
Usually the advice seekers figure this out and stop me before I get too far. (“Always send handwritten thank you notes!” I’ll say. “Cool, thanks, I gotta run,” they’ll say.) Recently, though, I met a young woman who felt so overwhelmed by life, so embattled by the never-ending cycle of online drama among her peers, so irrationally envious of…
