The "young psyche"

An excerpt from an email sent to me by a young friend:

Also I did some research on the "young" psyche in general. Basically the "millennial" generation which is born from 80's to now vs.. the generation before that of course. They say "our" generation, meaning mine I guess, suffers from the "Self-Esteem" movement. Where we were taught to be strong and never let anything get you down blah blah blah. Well, it seems that this "philosophy" has developed an impervious shield in our brain in that "you're wrong" and I'm not. Always have a sense of "entitlement". Never really see "themselves" as imperfect or wrong. When I learned of this it hit right on the nose. I act in this manner sometimes. And I never looked at it within myself. I hate to mention this Tom, but I'm afraid for the "millennial" future. I've noticed a lot of college grads nowadays feel they're entitled to the highest position and most pay because they have years of schooling and high self-esteem, and leadership skills etc. I don't want to go too much into this but I hope you know what I mean.

I know exactly what he means. For me (probably because most of my friends are as gray as I am) the impact is mostly in the workplace. For example, I once had a very bright young woman working for me as a software engineer. She was a few years out of school, ambitious, and a very hard worker. But she had a habit of turning in work that was just plain unacceptable, for the old-fashioned and quaint reason that it didn't function correctly. This young engineer was completely unperturbed by the fact that her work product was useless -- and she really could not understand why I was critical of her because of that. After all (as she told me very directly), she had worked diligently on her project, pouring her best efforts into it. For that reason she believed she deserved a promotion and a raise, and she very forthrightly demanded that I provide those rewards. She equally forthrightly demanded that I stop my silly insistence on judging her value to the company by the quality of her work -- as clearly the quality was an irrelevant factor! This incident was the first time I ran into the "young psyche" in such an unambiguous way (though I've run into it many times since). I was quite taken aback, and engaged her in a long conversation about her mindset. In the end, we mutually concluded that her beliefs had been fostered by her schooling, all the way through her Masters degree (from UCSD, no less). If I am to believe her, she had never once in her schooling been truly held accountable for the quality of her work. Not once! Instead, she was judged by how hard she tried (my characterization, not hers -- though as best I could tell, that was the meaning she conveyed).

As someone famously said (George Carlin?), I don't want to ride in an airplane designed by someone like that...