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YOUTH NOW
Why Older People Have Always Trashed Young People
It’s partly fear, partly self-flattery, and partly delusion, and it’s been happening for thousands of years
Ira S. Wolfe is a business consultant in Pennsylvania. A decade ago, all his clients were worried about the same thing: millennials. “Millennials at that point were mostly either teenagers or just getting out of college,” Wolfe recalls, “and they were this horrible, spoiled, rotten, narcissistic, egotistical, lazy generation. Every hiring manager and every manager in the universe was saying, ‘What are we going to do about these young kids?’”
Wolfe’s job was to answer that question. So he did, in a book he wrote in 2008 called Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization. He was 58 years old at the time and meant it as a guide to intergenerational workplaces — a how-to for getting everyone to work in harmony. Chapter nine was dedicated to the workforce’s newest members. He titled it “The Dumbest Generation?”
It is not an exercise in subtlety. Wolfe begins: “What a difference a few decades can make. A young student was once embarrassed and his parents shamed by poor grades on a report card. A young worker was remorseful if he disappointed his boss.” No longer, he wrote. The basic decencies of past…
