We Were All "Special"
A thoughtsay on Millennials
Born in the crisp Canadian autumn of the early 1980s, a star beamed down and touched the bed upon which my mother lay. It was at that moment a miracle occurred—JJ Pryor came into existence.
Along with around 400,000 other remarkable bastions of the future.
We were Millenials. Raised at birth to be exceptional, memorable, unique, and extraordinary. Don’t try telling us otherwise, or you’ll get 6 dislikes and a blocking.
But why are we so amazing? Why is it that society deemed our generation, above even the so-called “Greatest” one, to be the special class to lead us to the future?
Writing in Generation Me, psychologist professor and often criticized author Jean Twenge has seemingly made a career out of professionally insulting those younger than her.
“We are doing kids a tremendous disservice when we lead them to believe that just because they are special to us (their parents), the rest of the world will treat them this way.”
Of course, she’s a member of Gen X, which I assume stands for eXtra saucy, so who knows?
Another psycho professor, Roy Baumeister, described an education phenomenon in the 1970s where, “the early findings showed that, indeed, kids with high self-esteem did better in school and were less likely to be in various kinds of trouble. It’s just that we’ve learned later that self-esteem is a result, not a cause.”
If this was the trend, it would certainly explain why me and my fellow two decades of cohort are such extraordinary individuals.
Were we told we could do no wrong?
Of course not. We were perfect, so how could we have wronged in the first place?
Checkmate, life.
But in hindsight, raising an entire generation of people to feel special in an effort to bolster their self-esteem might have had some unexpected side effects.
An alternate view
When I was in university, we remarkables had a special phrase—“I’m banking on the bell curve.”
Any time an ill-informed professor had the gall to mistakingly not give us a perfect score on a multiple-choice exam, we merely turned inward to our tribe.
If everyone failed, we all passed. Justice.
But perhaps this led to a never-ending form of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps it placed many of us into an expectations vs. reality trap, whereby the only way out is to have achieved the 666 in life.
6 million dollars, 6 million fans, and a 6 pack.
Not sure which one comes first, but I assure you, I’ll get there eventually. Trust me, I’m a Millennial.
Then again, I can’t help but think back to the bell curve. A shape I have come to associate with far more things in life than it was ever intended. So many facets and characteristics of everyday things can be split into the 80% vs the extremities, at least in my perfect Millennial mind.
The 80-20 rule, extrapolated and misinterpreted means 20% of our actions have the most extreme results, with the 80% in the middle being par for the course
Liberal vs independents vs conservative—most people agree on far more policies than media would have us believe (here’s proof of 150 of them), but it’s the extremes that we hear from the most
The famous (but should be infamous if you read the history) IQ test is actually a bell curve
And it’s this last point that leads to what I call the snowflake curve.
Everyone can’t be special, not in the true sense of the word. Only our expectations can be.
And if you believe in psychology theories like the expectations vs reality gap, then holy hell was calling everybody special and distributing participation awards rather than a clear winner and loser a bad idea.
At my last corporate job, I used to bring back a bunch of candy and chocolates from my business trips to other countries for people to munch on in the office. My colleague often asked me the juxtaposition:
“I thought you were trying to lose weight? So why do you keep bringing back all of these goodies?”
The answer was simple.
“If everyone else gets fatter, I’m relatively leaner.”
If my entire generation of precious snowflakes is deemed a collective failure, then maybe I’m actually sitting pretty.
You’ve now had the pleasure of reading my “special” essay. Please hold your applause.
J.J. Pryor
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The problem is that "special" means unique. So nobody can be special if everyone is....
Not a millennial but I was raised to believe self esteem came from inside. You earn it, it cannot be given to you. If you seek it from others, you will not find it.