But here's the way I'd look at it. The claim that "they" are full of themselves and have been taught that the are so wonderful... I don't know if this is true. I don't happen to see it in the 20somethings I work with...
But let's say there's something to this overly high self esteem bizzo.
My guess is that it is precisely the kind of thing that was functional for an economy understood as... what do they call it? "the business of me"? That is, it's precisely the kind of attitude you have to have if you are going to be doing what they tell you must be done: constantly looking for work, constantly changing jobs, always preparing yourself for the next job since this one may _ poof! _ vanish.
But you may object that it makes no sense to have such high self esteem in world filled with rejection. But lo! No! That is exactly exactly how sales people live and are always taught to live. A sales person gets shot down 99% of their day. I used to laugh at all the self esteem building rah rah crap our sales people would engage in. Then I learned that, for every 100 calls they make, only 2 or 3 of them will result in a yes.
Hence, the need for motivational posters, for constant self-esteem building exercises in the face of a world that is constantly telling them no.
but one important thing to remember about the narratives we read, where we are reading people sending messages to the rest of the world: remember that the most important thing about those narratives is that they are crafted not to necessarily reflect a most important truth about the speaker, but to resonate with the audience. You can see this MOST clearly in the narratives written on the "we are the 1% standing with the 99%" tumblr site. But it is evident on the we are the 99% tumblr as well.
So, when we hear all these stories of people indicating that they are pissed of and angry because unable to find a job or whathaveyou remember that they are constructing that story in a way that they think will be plausible - legitimate - convincing to others. It may not necessarily fully reflect their experience.
I mean, you have to understand this since the turning for a "they" to a "we" is a rhetorical device just as they folks you're writing about use rhetoric to write messages to "you". :)
> My parents were definitely not promised anything. They immigrated with
> four
> kids, one of them ill, and my mother pregnant with me (and no money) a
> couple decades ago. The few comforts I enjoyed were courtesy of the
> remnants
> of the welfare state.
>
> In the editing process sweeping "*they*s" were turned into "*we*s" to
> soften
> things...
>
> But what about the "new economy" boom of the 90s, didn't that seem
> offer
> something, no matter how fleeting, to college grads?
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 5:31 AM, shag carpet bomb
> <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
>
>> quibble - of course your parents were never promised the dream
>> either.
>> Reagan and the depressions of the 80s broke it, and it was
>> definitively broken in the early 90s with the white collar layoffs
>> that finally sent the message that no collar, blue or white, was
>> safe
>> from a good and proper "rightsizing".
>>
>>
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