YOLO, Unemployment and Concentration Camps | Hacker News Reader

YOLO, Unemployment and Concentration Camps

powerfulnonsense.com

33 pointsckyildiz18 comments

So that's a huge jump from Concentration Camp behavior to tagging your instagram photos with "YOLO".

Just thinking out loud, but I wonder how much of this is due to an entire generation basically reaching the end of the escalator and not being sure what to do after that. In my personal experience, my peers tend to have had their entire lives set up for them.

Starting at 3 years old, kids are placed into the appropriate school (preschool through college). Everything is formulaic: join a club or two in high school, pick a college, etc. I feel like the majority of my peers have yet to have made a real decision when they graduate college at ~22.

Now suddenly they're "grown ups". It's time to get a job and be independent. But their entire lives have really been set up for them: all they've had to do is to execute the given plan. And all of a sudden they have to find meaning rather than just live up to some challenge placed on them by parents / teachers / what-have-you.

It's a tough transition, I imagine! The ride's over, now where do you go?

Note: I use the third person because I feel that I've been fortunate enough to have been rather independent and made my own decisions for quite some time. Maybe everyone feels that way?

Miraculously I decided nearly a decade ago that it was more risky to graduate college and get full time employment than to drop out and do my own thing.

Each generation has its own share of problems, some more extreme than others. What we are dealing with now is quite mundane compared to those who were in their 20s when the Vietnam draft started. Or, being Jewish when Hitler seized power.

Its still good to understand stupid behavior -- mostly explained by lack of forward thinking.

> Note: I use the third person because I feel that I've been fortunate enough to have been rather independent and made my own decisions for quite some time. Maybe everyone feels that way?

Not everyone. I'm happily employed but I still don't feel like I'm "grown up" and really up to making my own decisions (though buying (mortgage) a flat felt like it made me grow up, if only because I'm now responsible for this very expensive thing). I think there's a kind of impostor syndrome going on; adult life feels like it should require more skills than I have.

I like definition of grown up from Cracked. You haven't grown up until you are responsible for another's human life.

Note: You don't need to be married with children to grow up. Kids that take care of their mother are just as grown up.

While I raised my younger siblings and was often referred to as more 'grown up' than my peers, I still have that 'imposter' feeling described above. Married, good job, have adult worries about kids, house, job. But my husband and I still watch old cartoons and half jokingly talk about what we want to do when we grow up.

In the obituaries of the baseball manager Earl Weaver this year, he was quoted as saying much the same; curiously, he dated it from his divorce.

This is certainly a major change, compared to the past, in which there was no free decision to make whatsoever, and adulthood too consisted of tweaking the parameters within a prearranged formula of a life.

The craziest thing about this is that he/she (Cem?) is both correct and a perfect caricature of the thing they are describing.

I’m a Digital Content Producer and Online Marketer...

Stop. Stop selling your aspirational self. Stop being a reaction to the world around you, and start molding the world as it should be.

Don’t be a stranger, join me on… Twitter @ckyildiz And Google+

Stop it. "Don't be a stranger"? Fuck.

(Artsy picture, probably from Tumblr, with inspirational quote on it.)

Somebody shoot me. We've gone plaid.

The idea that being employed gives your day-to-day life structure and meaning is hardly a new one, and the rest of the post just came across as a bit smug.

Also noted that after clicking through the Amazon affiliate link the top review on the book also used the Nietzsche quote seen later in the article.

I think there's a lot to be said (socially, psychologically) on the subject of millennials having trouble finding work, but there's plenty of better journalistic pieces that appear on HN already.

Hey Hipster_unite, thanks for the feedback. You are right, there are plenty of better journalistic pieces out there that's for sure but I simply write these blog posts to 1. Help me makes sense of the things I read 2. Improve my writing 3. Point others in the direction of some interesting reads. I'm currently unemployed but do some freelance content work mainly video and social media management so I don't think I have much to be smug about! Thanks for reading anyway, enjoy the rest of your day - Cem

PS: Yes it's an affiliate link, you're a great analyser but I'm not laughing all the way to the bank just yet :)

'Digital Content Producer and Online Marketer.' Right.

Also the linked YT video.. brought to you by "your-key-to-success", created by dtamarketing. This comes across spammy as hell.

Hey Clarry, Sorry if it comes across that way. I'm just a fan of Eric Thomas and found the video as rather fitting to the blog content. There's nothing in it for me. - Cem

Could that be made shorter by saying "I tweet about companies"? (Said tongue-in-cheek)

Well, I've seen some MBA scumbags pull the same stunt in Sweden. Now we got this Swedish Techcrunch run by an Arrington-like person that post news about startups and what not.

Nothing wrong with that I guess.

Except the people/person behind it have a business as 'startup-consultants' for a fee will do marketing for your startup. Guess where that marketing goes?

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

First front page article in a while that made me wish for article downvote mojo.

I've always been baffled by the tendency to use "YOLO" as a justification for ignoring risks.

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