I follow a local doctoral student on Twitter. Her comments got me interested in the Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot. She said that the challenge had gotten her reading in areas and authors different from her usual. Then, this morning, she had high praise for this article by Anne Helen Petersen:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work
The linked article is long and makes for somewhat uncomfortable reading. The tone, the drive, the goals of "productivity", "optimization" and the general frenzy to make zero errors reminds me of students who have swallowed the idea that only a perfect record is acceptable, ever. School and school grades, plus various honors and trophies if you want to throw them in, can be taken as the highway into life, THE road from which there can be no deviation without an immediate and irreversible slide straight to hell.
The author gives strong praise to the book "Kids These Days" by Malcolm Harris and she mentions other observers of the generations and the anxieties of younger people today. One of the sources of worry and shame is one's age. A person over 30 years old, certainly over 38 or so, is not a child or a kid. By that age, the idea is that I should have earned more than my parents did at that age, that all my debts should be paid, and I should be happily situated in a "good life." Again, I should have all A's, whether or not the grades are vague or arbitrary or short-sighted or wrong-headed. For those who genuinely and lovingly seek their parents' approval, even if that approval has to be inferred for a missing or deceased parent, it can be a torture to steadily sneer at one's own pace and accomplishments.
