Needle, Meet Haystack

A while back, I lamented on the only real gap between generations existing insofar as each group understands and utilizes technology.  But that’s really only half the story; you can’t have nature without nurture.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing disconnect between myself and the rest of my generation.  I feel like an old man who just doesn’t understand these whippersnappers.  Sometimes it comes from a post on Brazen Careerist or 20-Something Bloggers.  Other times, it comes from reading MLIA or Lamebook.  And occasionally, it comes from social networks.  But the main place that I think it comes from is my parents.

My dad was born during the Depression, and my mom arrived with the first wave of Baby Boomers.  So this means that a lot of the values and beliefs that I was raised on might be more in line with those of a Millennial’s own parents.  But this might not be a bad thing.  In fact, it might give me a leg up on the competition.

I understand my bosses and clients better than most people in my generation.

You can read articles and books about different generations and how to manage them until the cows come home.  You can pay people to talk to you about managing the new crop of workers until they’re blue in the face.  But unless you have someone who really understands the disconnect and differences between groups, you won’t have much useful information.  And I bridge that gap.

Essentially, one of my workplace USPs is that I’m the link between the older and younger people in the office.  Through the lessons of my parents, I know how to communicate better with clients, and through time spent with my peers, I can relate to my co-workers.  This is especially handy when it comes to explaining some new developments in a presentation or decoding memos.

The real disconnect that I mentioned earlier, however, comes from reading online content provided by other Generation-Y people.  I kind of miss the days when we all hid behind an anonymous screen name and didn’t put embarrassing pictures over everything.  Although my generation values transparency and openness, it seems that we’re a bit too open.

I recently ran an experiment where I searched on Twitter for tweets mentioning phrases like “my boss sucks” or “I hate my boss” or “my boss is a douche” – keep in mind that these searches show all results, even those on accounts that have blocked public reading without an approved follow – and came across over 300 results…from the past week.  And most of these accounts showed the actual names of the Twitter users.  So do these people really think that their bosses will never look them up online?

This is to say nothing of most of my generation’s inability to delay answering phone calls and texts – voicemail exists for a reason.  The need for instantaneous communication at all times baffles me.  I mean, I sort of understand how the new social contract works, but this technological dependency is ridiculous.

I suppose that no matter my age and generational affiliation, I’ll always feel a bit like an old man, the product of an earlier generation.  Now get off my lawn.