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Ageism is frequently viewed from the perspective of how we treat older people. It is, however, far more wide reaching and complex. In this episode Erik and Aicila explore the question of Millenials and how they are perceived.
BiCurean takes typically combative topics and teaches them to play nice. Our view is the mainstream reactionary rhetoric divides us and only helps those invested in the status quo. We seek to find answers beyond the most obvious.
Join host Aicila as she digs into topics ranging from social and political to geeky and fun. Aicila is looking for the "BiCurean Moment"- the point where contradictions meet or are embraced.
BiCurean was conceived of in 2011 by Aicila as a podcast and originally created as a blog. On hiatus since 2021, she's been eager to start back up, and 2025 will be the year she does. Watch for new episodes, a new format, and just her as the host.
https://bio.bicurean.com for more info
Welcome to the BiCurean Podcast! This is Erik and I am Aicila and this week our topic is What's With Millennials Anyway? So I think we want to open this one with a quote. Yes. Alright I'm gonna read a quote. The world is passing through troubling times, the young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything. And what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls they are forward, immodest, unladylike in speech, behavior, and dress. Oh. Who said that? Was it like I don't know, Ivanka? No. So this is Peter the Hermit in A.D. 1274. Whoa. I felt like he was maybe talking about Millennials. So here's the thing I think in researching this show topic what I have learned is that everybody at every point in every point of history has probably had this conversation. About ageism; about the younger generation lacking respect; about the older generation not getting respected for their wisdom and their experience. And it's really just all the same old story. And it's been going on forever. So the show's done, we're done. You know that's a great well or we can talk a little more. So %HESITATION was so I looked up, well let me start with I've been thinking about ageism like you do just cause. And and I was actually thinking about it from the perspective of older people and then - You're giving away that we're older people. Cause that's the point of course we're thinking about it from the perspective of older people. Mostly I was thinking about my mom but you're right I'm also older. Not older like her though, I'm younger because she's my mom. But we should we should clarify a couple points. We are older than the millennial generation. True. I am in a generation that I recently saw defined between the years of 1974 to 1982 that are neither Gen X nor Millennial because in the gap of years that I was born. I'm in that gap of years. You are in it depends because it's some say it's 1976 1974 but in that gap of years we and you had this experience regardless, grew up with things like corded telephones. It's true and we did not have the internet I did not have and I went to college a cell phone was something I first heard about in my early teenage years. Wasn’t it on like that show Dallas? I feel like it was on a soap opera the first time I really saw it. The first one I ever saw was a car phone. You see it had to be mounted in a car. It was too big of a brick to fit in your pocket. So it was really a phone in in the glove compartment of very fancy cars. My uncle had one and so the concept of being able to drive and talk- and it was still a corded phone plugged into the dashboard it just happen to be broadcasting wirelessly outside of the car right. Okay. But it had a cord. Right right. And over the course of my teenage years and into my twenties suddenly I was one of the first kids on the block to have the internet. I remember when as a very young adult but living out on my own I made the conscious decision to no longer have a land line and switch over to only being on a cell phone. Which seemed like a huge step. I mean how would people you know get a hold of me consistently oh wait I'll actually have a phone in my pocket. It was a new concept. Well and to be fair and does anyone really use their phone as a phone anymore? Right, so texting like that was a new concept to me. So so the point there is is that I I find myself in this weird mix because people talk about Millennials and I'm very aware of the experience they've had. They haven't known anything in some cases other than cell phones and internet and all of that. And then I obviously have friends you know friends that are slightly older than me that are full on Gen X'ers and did not maybe get a cellphone until their late twenties. Right. And that that definitely shapes how you perceive the world and the way that things are %HESITATION presented or even just what you think about automatically about how information works. Right. Like I remember I used to have to ask my uncle things and now I ask Google things. Right, exactly. And they're people who don't who don't have that %HESITATION so I just wanted to clarify for our listeners are our perspective because to represent ourselves as talking about millennials if we were millennials or not doesn't matter I I think that's a point there I'll transparency mall about so yes I think about it from this perspective of age like ageism and and the and some of that is because ageism, I mean the actual definition of ageism is very broad. It's prejudice or discrimination on the basis, and I would say or the perception of a person's age. Very simple, right. However legally in the in the employment act from the federal government age discrimination is only for people who are age forty and older. So if you're under forty technically you are not, age discrimination is not something that you're protected from. You can be protected from other types of discrimination, however, not age discrimination. Interesting so ageism only goes towards people who are older. Yes so it in that and that's the and for me that was a really interesting distinction. Actually something that I learned a few years ago when %HESITATION someone that was close to me who was young was discriminated against because of their age. And being the %HESITATION civil rights and social justice person that I am, I called the civil rights commission about how to report this. And they said oh well actually it is only illegal if they're older. I didn't recall the age so I had to look it up for this show. And that kind of shocked me. Because I had always thought that not being able to discriminate against someone based on their age, or perception of their age, would mean what the actual definition is. This is actually kind of blowing my mind I hadn't even really thought that ageism was limited only to people in an older age bracket. That's- Legally it is only limited to people who are older. Wow. Yeah and and it and it was shocking to me that %HESITATION that that would be the case. Because anybody who has experience recognizes that age discrimination is something that occurs to a variety of people for a variety of reasons and it is not just because they are older. I mean I've been in the work place long enough to know that I have seen several times when a candidate was picked because they seemed to have more experience ie they're older and more work experience and stuff. And I mean I guess I always assumed that that was just we're not going to talk about the fact that he he was younger and that's why we didn't hire him. You know? But apparently we could actually have just said, "No you're twenty two we don't want to hire you because you're twenty two." and been totally clear. Legally that would be fine. Never knew that. So boy interviews at your work are going to go differently. Well and you know it's funny because I so I work in the tech industry. And I think this is you know A- you want a dose of the Millennial idea going on right now. The tech industry is an industry that didn't exist in its current form until the late nineties. And it's considered to be very dominated by Millennials. It is I mean it was started by people when they were eighteen. And yes there was tech going on in the eighties and stuff and apple computers and HP and all of that. But the modern version where the term "start up" had meaning and you know an eighteen year old kid with an idea could just go and make any kind of you know crazy thing happen. And that was that's what the tech industry became in the late nineties. And so you know to this day I think you can look at companies like Google and all of that and look at the people that they're hiring and they're trying to hire these young kids with brilliant ideas. And that's what they've that's with that's how they were founded and that's what they've been based on and that's how they've operated. So me myself working in the tech industry, first of all I switched to the tech industry only a few years ago, in my mid thirties after working in a lot of other industries for years. Um I see really smart older people really smart younger people um coming and going but there is definitely a young hip vibe to it. And so I made the joke about telling a twenty two year old they were too young to get hired but in the industry that I work in which would be much more likely to hire the younger kid because of their motivation and potential ideas and ideals and all of that. Well and one of the things that I think it's really interesting my daughter was in school for computer science and she said that they've been doing this thing called badging. And badging is when you can go somewhere and you can like take a little test to show that you have learned something. And a lot of companies are valuing things like I learned it on YouTube over certification processes because the - well and it's because the tech industry is changing so much. I go get a degree in computer science and they teach a class - now it takes at least a semester to put a class together, probably more than that. So I learn four years ago some basic programming thing which is probably by the time I graduate somewhere between five and seven years old- pretty much outdated. And it is significant most people so there's coding boot camps now. And they're the preferred hiring ground for Google and a lot of other big companies because they accelerate several years worth of learning into an extreme amount of learning over the course of like two months. And it shows that the person is self motivated and can work autonomously. And has the possibility of innovation like these are all the skills they're looking for. And the older generation, obviously you know, they're about certifications and they're about %HESITATION graduation and degrees. And these things are also valuable however in the tech world they are actually counterproductive in terms of how quickly things move and exactly the kind of brain they're looking for. So I feel like some of what we run into in terms of the Millennial %HESITATION I'm gonna call it prejudice that we have is they are more suited to this particular environment because they were raised more comfortable with all of this. And so yeah. So and you brought it up in I think it kind of brings up the next point because you just used it Millennial prejudice. You were you were talking about it and and being prejudice against that. We can look at you know the tech industry and it's not- but other industries are. But I think culturally is where we're really seeing this is not necessarily in the job sector. Um yes certainly there are more opportunities for a twenty two year old to be the boss over a fifty year old but realistically those don't seem to cause the ire that just you see on one of our favorite subjects, Facebook. Oh it's really true. Well and there's a way in which it is not problematic for a lot of people to be %HESITATION mean and discriminatory about Millennials. Like it's okay call them names, in print, and to dismiss them as like competent people it without ever really trying to understand where they're coming from in terms of what like their skills and their awareness. And something you mentioned before we started recording come from being a generation that was raised with one of the largest advances in you know the informati- information available to us %HESITATION the in terms of the internet and accessibility. Right, like you know more encyclopedias after the internet came out. I looked at my research papers in in when I was younger in school and I looked them up in the encyclopedia. Yeah as I grew up suddenly I was looking them up on the internet and at the time there wasn't much information on the internet. And if it was on the internet it had to be true back then. There was not a healthy skepticism about any of it. It was different. Right my you know my family invested an encyclopedia. And and we we had that available and I spent time in the library when I wanted to find something. And now well I still do that type of looking, I look at actual books. I also do a lot of research using my internet and some of it's also social, I don't call people as much, I get on Facebook. Which is one of the things that really flloored me right like I was telling you. I put up on my page. I'll put him on my Facebook page questions about stuff that we want to do for the show. Yes and you know we've done guns and sex work. We've done transgender rights and the binary and gender bias and all of those topics - totally civil conversations. Got a really lot of great information, a lot of input. I put up age the question I put up was: So age ageism tell me your thoughts and experiences I've been ruminating on this topic and want to do a podcast episode on it. We got no responses right? Oh no, I read the responses. I know what we got. It was unbelievable. I have never seen people devolve that quickly into like real meanness. There was - there was some And so here's the thing just just as a as a note to our viewers, we do invite you to put your comments into our Facebook channel and into the the posts we make however if you start name calling people, we might have to delete those posts. I will. And and it's not - it's completely appropriate to say I don't agree and back it up. This was ire. It was anger and mean in a way that I did not think um the subject would bring out. Of all the topics that were gonna bring it out this is not the one. And and so I actually talked to a woman who is working on an initiative around ageism in our in our state. And one of the things that she brought up that I thought was really interesting is she said %HESITATION Let me grab her quote. She said, We all have in common that today is the day we are the oldest and the youngest we will ever be." And how we talk about aging ageism and aging %HESITATION is very fixed at this time. And and kind of we don't really talk about the fact that we all actually share that experience. That right now I am both the oldest and the youngest I will ever be. And in that conversation with her I kind of got a little more clear that the difference between all these other topics and aging is that aging is actually very personal we are all dealing with it. And we are all dealing with it in some way. And maybe the technological revolution is part of what makes it more sensitive. Like we're a lot more consistently aware of how outmoded we are. Well this is a point when we were discussing the topic you know to to get set up for the show that I was trying to make is that it is very personal. But I also feel like we're at a time when people's personal experience is drastically different. I grew up I could stay out pretty much as late as I want. I had the rough expectation to be home not long after the sun set. I ran all over the neighborhood with my friends, couple parks and playgrounds we'd go to. And I'm talking is this is as a sixth grader. Yeah. Like and at some point not long after I was that young something changed in parents and parenting. And helicopter parenting began. And the world we live in um of of of participation trophies and all of that shifted. I mean I still grew up in a time when you know winning the state championship and getting that trophy meant something. And the losers went home and you know. And they knew they were losers. They cried in their Kool -aid and -- oh those days were so great. Right and nobody really lined up and said anything other than good try good effort. So I will put up as a note in there that you know I love the Hidden Brain, we love the Hidden Brain, and they have an episode on parenting where they talk about what what you're referencing, one of the changes. Which is that %HESITATION that generation of parents grew up with fewer siblings. So prior to that most parents had had some experience raising children in some way and that particular generation approached parenting kind of the approach they way they approached learning anything else. And so they would go get a book. Yeah, Doctor Spock. Exactly. And - and in that episode he kind of talked about the difference between being a gardener and a carpenter as a parent. And the carpenter's more the helicopter parent where they've got their list, their checklist of how things have to go. And they're trying to make a certain outcome versus the gardener parent was kind of more like what you had, where they're cultivating opportunities for you to figure out how to live your life. And each of those has some benefit however %HESITATION the the downside to sort of the carpenter approach is that there is very like intense oversight that doesn't allow for a lot of room for self discovery. And and the the way that that has impacted this generation and how they engage in is it is very interesting. So I recommend that %HESITATION episode for more on what you're talking about. But it does bring up you know a lack of shared experience. We're not just talking about you know back in my day such and such was this way or whatever. We're talking about drastically different from people that are ten to fifteen years younger than me you know and just entering adulthood. They had a drastically different childhood and a drastically different experience. And that is where I think this separation is happening now. And you know what I read that quote at the beginning and so we can say this has been going on forever. It's not new. But something about this, at least to me, feels significant because I feel like this technological revolution that we're going through right now is going to be on par with the industrial revolution. With the you brought it up earlier, the printing press, a massive shift in thinking and we just happen to be a couple of different generations living through it. Yeah we I mean we're bridging that we're bridging that span. I think you know when you brought up the industrial revolution. And I - I really see that and and for me that the- the information part of it is one of the biggest like and that was a huge step with the printing press. The decrease in what was involved in terms of labor to get information out really changed how information was perceived. And a little bit what you were saying about the internet ironically is is similar to books. Like it used to be that there someone wrote something there was a lot of investment in it. Where as now once the printing press happened it was kinda like whatever. And now we've got this digital age where it's even less investment. I mean everybody gets to have an opinion. Everyone gets to have an opinion. Twitter is where you can read famous people's opinions but you can also read your neighbors opinion. Well and ours- we get to put our opinions out there. Anybody can do it. You know as as we record a podcast- another technological revolution you know things that didn't exist before We're on the radio just in a private, instantly accessible, on demand sort of way. Well and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was the they're a bunch of really interesting articles on like age and how different generations kind of engage with each other. And this one was talking about psychological developments and it said that Gen X'ers are in the seventh stage of adulthood which involves the conflict between generativity and stagnation. During this stage adults are face to face with the challenge between giving back to younger generations in meaningful ways or becoming complacent with their shrinking influence. And then %HESITATION they also talk about envy. This uh Melanie Klein believes envy is the feeling of anger you have when you see someone with something desirable. And this anger is often accompanied by an impulse to take away or spoil this desirable item. And the most valuable and desirable item that Millennials have the Gen X'ers don't is time. Like they've got everything ahead of them and Gen X'ers are kinda moving towards their their end result. Well and it, you know, this actually triggered an interesting thought in my head because I think one of the things that really separated it was a few years ago. Um When Gen X'ers had to watch Millennials going through that whole thing on college campuses about safe spaces and no trigger zones and things like that. It hit me. It occurred to me I was envious of that. The concept of not being offended by the world. I would love that. And frankly that whole thing swept through so fast and became such a bad scene at so many different colleges. I mean they open themselves up all sorts of liability by saying we're going to be a safe space. We're not going to trigger you. Oh- you triggered somebody- lawsuit. It it that's why it died. Because the concept it pushed that pendulum way too far. And and I mean the - the liability that it opened up. But yeah I was I was envious of this idea of a younger generation growing up and defending their right to not be offended. That nobody has that right. I'm just gonna stat it. I mean just it's not real. It's not realistic. You can avoid things that you find offensive but if the current presidential administration has proven nothing, none of us have the right to not be offended. And and I'm not even I'm I'm saying that even because the trump voters feel the same way. They feel offended by what social justice warriors are doing just as much as we feel offended by the things that are going on. We've all had to face the reality. But I was, I was envious of that generation marching around saying they had the right to live in a world free of that sort of thing. Well and -and there's an idealism to that I really admire. I'll be honest like I feel like we one of the things that I feel like youth can give to us is the idea that things don't have to be the way we see them. I mean it's one of the things I really love about what the Parkland kids were doing. They were they were done with this concept of mass shootings being acceptable. And - and to me that's a real indication of you know the situation that we're in, right? Where we've got there's kids who are affected by what we do who don't have any power and really don't get a lot of respect. Like when they start speaking up, everyone's like "Oh their parents are making them do it.". Like there's not really any acknowledgement that they have their own opinions. And and so I - I feel like that -that's another piece that we're dealing with. Where we we we sort of a in a lot of ways we have this obsessive worship of the concept of youth. However we don't necessarily treat young people like they're actually people. It's true and but there's a cut off. I mean you know these are high school kids doing that. And I think a lot of people's first reaction is "Oh, where their parents," Well yeah. "how are they marching on the state capitol? Did the parents drive them there?" Right. But then past eighteen, now they're making decisions. And whether it's safe spaces on the college campus or you know a job world that conforms to what their expectations are or all of these other things at least past that point of eighteen, now you're looking at him like well you are an adult technically so you know you have the right to think these things. But now you can actually start talking to them and thinking about it more in the way of well okay but you have to start taking some responsibility. And that's the real issue here is the kids like in Parkland are saying "We need to adults to take responsibility for this." but at the eighteen age, and with the millennial generation as it's coming up and more of them are turning eighteen and getting into the work force and even some of them are hitting thirty, now, like that's the thing. Yeah it's kind of a I mean generation is an interesting. So I want to share this %HESITATION this article I found a research paper Kids These Days an Analysis of the Rhetoric Against Youth Across Five Generations. Thi was written in 2013 and %HESITATION do you want to read the little things or should I read those? I can read them. So um we've got a quote from the Milwaukee Sentinel: They are frightful, terrible, horrible and have no manners. Yep. Which is from 1927. Yep. Next quote: What is wrong with America's young people? They expect the world to be brought to them on a silver platter. Also from the Milwaukee Sentinel, in 1941. So you know, I mean these first two quotes do bring up that none of this is new. Right well and then there's one more from the Milwaukee Sentinel about youth: These selfish young adults insist they are entitled to a good job, all the money they want and the gratification of their every wish. They act as if the world owes them. A little bit more recent, that one's from 1990. Yep. So look I get it what what we feel the generation gap right now it's not new. But I think we're in for I frankly we're in a world where everybody's opinions on it can be broadcast. So we just see it more hear it more. I think that's a good point. There's a lot more opportunity for people to -- without Facebook we would've had nobody expressing their extreme anger over this subject. It was crazy still like. But you know and and you know maybe this is all indicative of the world that we live in with the technological revolution that every little issue can be as big as you want it to be because you can go read all sorts of opinions on it online anytime. You know I was actually reading a %HESITATION psychology professor talking about how %HESITATION there is this way in which the cost of expressing outrage is so much lower on the internet that people will express it when they don't feel it in the same way. Like in person I might be a lot more hesitant to express it because of the cost of the potential cost and risk. Whereas online is like a type something - I mean your screen can't yell at you back- so there's no - so that's where the troll culture has come from now. And the lower risk -people like to incite reactions on the internet because there's not any kind of repercussion from it. Other than watching the show and eating popcorn. So you know I mean it this this whole thing is kind of interesting but I think the key here is that it's going to be down to every generation's experience. I think it's normal for an older generation feel the younger generation lacks respect. And if I've learned one lesson in my age and wisdom is this: you can not tell somebody younger than you or with less experience your experience and have it mean anything to them until they have that experience themself. Yeah. So I guess we'll have to keep debating this one for awhile. Yeah I think there's more there's definitely more to look into. I wanna look a little bit more into the topic I started with which is like dealing with ageism for older people. It's just that this this is what actually came up in terms of people really having strong feelings. And and really strong anti- millennial reactions. I see it a lot. And it just feels wrong to me that you know we would dismiss a whole generation of people partially because what you said, that they grew up with such a different environment. Like we could be learning from them. We can and we are in some ways. And we accept it like tech has benefited from their creativity and idealism but other other things have not. And there's gonna be pros and cons to the interactions we have. But yeah they definitely elicit some strong responses that's for sure. BiCurean Moment: So for this week's BiCurean moment I actually have been thinking about things just based on news stories. And there's certainly a lot of things in the news that are very consistent but one thing that's always consistent is natural disaster. And it's really had me thinking in the last few weeks with the volcanoes in Hawaii consuming houses or wild fires in California or really everywhere %HESITATION occassional earthquakes that take out you know countries. Tidal waves you know and we live in a world that is full of impermanence. We expect you know the bedrock that we build on to be there. And sometimes it's not always the case. And so it's just really had me contemplating you know the reality of life and the impermanence of things. And how difficult it can be you know to to think "Oh you've built your dream home but it was a little too close to that volcano. Luckily you got out alive but your house is done." Right well and you were mentioning that and it it renewed re traumatized me maybe with %HESITATION when I was studying Buddhism and I'm in my class and one of the core tenets there's four right? And one of the core tenets of Buddhism is impermanence. And I just raise my hand to the instructor and I was practically sobbing and I'm like I hate impermanence, I hate it. In the middle of this class of very earnest students. And he looks at me, I so appreciated this moment, and he says oh me too. Thank you, I'm not alone. And %HESITATION I mean I was that kid who, when I would watch action movies and you know the car would drive throught like the mall window, I'd be so upset that they had damaged that. Like I couldn't enjoy the - I still can't really enjoy car chases because they just destroy too many things. Right. I'm like that's not okay. Somebody has to build that again and clean it up and somebody wanted that there. And so- Well and I think the main lesson is to understand two things okay One: you do have to embrace impermanence. You don't have a choice. You don't have a choice. Volcanoes are are there. It's it's it's a thing. And two: pay attention to where you build your house. Oh I like that. That's a key. That's a key one. Well and for me I started going to Burning Man, not all the time, and that whole culture is all about impermanence. And it's funny because some people can go and it's really just it's very much like it speaks to them. And for me it's actually in some ways an exercise in in meditative awareness. Because the impermanent nature of the whole situation is really fundamentally quite challenging for me. I can see that however in I should qualify have not been to Burning Man yet and I am looking forward to going to it. And I have been for probably the last fourteen years that I've contemplated it versus other things I've done on that weekend. So to me it feels very permanent it's always been there and I finally might actually attend it. Oh that's a good point. Well thank you for listening this week. And do you want to read the outro this week? You've got the outro this week. Okay, got it. Thanks for listening if you have ideas feedback thoughts please find us on social media. BiCurean on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or give us a call at 720-507-7309. It's a message line, probably won't talk to us, so don't worry about that. Or email podcast at Bicurean dot com And thank you all for listening. Yep- thank you.