Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
out of all the aspects of millennial-bashing, i think the one that most confuses me is the “millennials all got trophies as a kid, so now they’re all self-centered narcissists” theory
like— kids are pretty smart, y’all. they can see that every kid on the team gets a trophy and is told they did a good job; they can also see that not every kid on the team deserves a trophy, and not everyone did do a good job
the logical conclusion to draw from this is not “i’m great and i deserve praise”— it’s “no matter how mediocre i am, people will still praise me to make me feel better, so i can’t trust any compliments or accolades i receive”
this is not a recipe for overconfidence and narcissism. it is a recipe for constant self-guessing, low self-esteem, and a distrust of one’s own abilities and skills.
where did this whole “ugh millennials think their so-so work is super great” thing even come from it is a goddamn mystery
what fucking kills me is, yeah, maybe we got the trophies, but who gave them out
this is not a recipe for overconfidence and narcissism. it is a recipe for constant self-guessing, low self-esteem, and a distrust of one’s own abilities and skills.
It’s also what I observed happening as a singing teacher: the older kids literally would not believe a positive word I said until I had proved I would tell them they screwed up/had done badly/etc. I did so in as useful a way as possible (“So this passage. We really need to work on this passage. A lot. This passage is not good yet.”), but with almost every adolescent I taught I had to prove I would give them straight-up criticism before they would parse my praise as anything other than meaningless “the grownups always do this” noise.
All of this. And then you feel like you’ll never be good enough to stand out and it fosters obsessive perfectionism that leads to procrastinating and giving up so you can get things done on time and then you’re never satisfied with anything and see everything you do as mediocre. Our generation is depressed from shallow compliments that don’t mean anything or lead to anything, it’s all empty.
