An interesting article sent to me by my son: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy. And it starts with an equation of sorts:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

Ah, as explained, Gen Y is in deficit compared with us baby boomers who are in a major net surplus, as shown in the chart above. And it begins the assessment of us with this: “after graduating from being insufferable hippies . . .”. Having been literally one of those insufferable long-haired hippy dropouts – life in the communal settings of Vancouver, a year and a half as a gardener in London after finishing my Masters, living in a garret in Paris, dishwasher at Honest Ed’s Ice Cream Parlour, before I finally snapped out of it.

And there were two parts to it that may seem contradictory but are not. The first was that I felt I was on a conveyor belt towards a future that was pre-determined and not my own. The job I didn’t get in Ottawa – the one my Mother always thought back on wistfully before I went off to Australia – I missed out on because the mailman came that day after 5:00 pm. So I took off instead, and aside from the pain it caused my parents, which is not a small consideration, I lived a very different life from the one they had thought I should.

The second half is that I felt a kind of fear that I would not measure up to the requirements of the adult world. It is not obvious when you are twenty-odd that you will be able to move up and along the career path towards higher levels of responsibility. Maybe you have it and maybe you don’t but failure is unpleasant, and the fear of failure stops many taking even those first few steps. Anyway, it was only after I had been promoted to Assistant Charge Hand for the gardening crew I was part of for the London Borough of Hammersmith that I began to feel a kind of confidence in myself that getting an A on an essay never could quite provide.

But the difference for me is that I was taught by and lived amongst members of that Greatest Generation. You have lived amongst and been educated by those despised hippies. They were your teachers, or your teachers’ teachers. And what a difference that has made, and you do have my sympathies. The worst generation and you have not even begun to see just how destructive we have been.

So let us see the first part of the false narrative of my generation that is supposedly believed by this GYPSY generation:

The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security. The fact is, a green lawn isn’t quite exceptional or unique enough for a GYPSY. Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.

If you don’t think this is a hippy ethos, you were not paying attention. We were dropouts of a society that was a good deal more together than this one, and we were bored by it. But only a comparative few of us did the dropping out, and what we found was how unsatisfying it was. We tried it, and there is nothing there, which is why there are hardly any of us left leading such empty lives.

Everybody wants to fashion their own life to suit their own personal ambitions. No one even knows what these personal ambitions are until life begins to tempt us into our different directions. Until the moment comes, it is all just sampling and grazing. We are wealthy enough as a civilisation to indulge our young in an ability to mess around like this. The disdained hippy generation was perhaps the first ever to be part of a civilisation wealthy enough to allow large-scale indecision before most of us settled into a life-time pattern, although it is possible that the 1920s was also something like that as well, cut short by the Depression, then war and then the restoration of a hardened centre.

The apparent disdain for “secure” careers shown in the article is merely an artefact that there is no sense of insecurity felt by the young. And that is because, if you ask me, they have not yet felt the possibility that their entire lives may end up wasted in purposeless frivolity, an aimless path of no consequence in which nothing was achieved and life just petered out.