I’m going to use this comment over at the Grandad’s place as the introduction to this post, but I could easily have taken the same sentiments from elsewhere:
As for the Selfie Generation, they see themselves as “empowered” and “enabled” and like all spoiled brats they throw a tantrum when things don’t go their way.
“Generation snowflake” is another term used to describe those who revert to infantile behaviour every time things don’t go their way, as is “millennials”. The problem I have with that term – not that I think we should stop using it, mind – is that the behaviour is not limited to college students, youths, and people born in the 1990s and after.
A browse of Facebook or Twitter and, embarrassingly, a look around myself in real life will turn up plenty of examples of grown men and women well into their thirties, forties, and fifties – people with mortgages, kids, and (in theory) a grip on the world – engaged in childish posturing, adolescent virtue-signalling, and expressing irrational, ignorant, and often contradictory fears over what is going to happen now Trump has won.
Social media comments along the lines of “Oh my God!! I literally cannot stop shaking right now, I am fucking scared to even go outside!!! How is this happening?!!” are not the preserve of naive and idealistic youngsters who may be expected to grow out of it, and those hitting such outbursts with a hundred-plus “likes” are not a bunch of teenagers. As fellow blogger David Thompson has pointed out numerous times, Generation Snowflake is behaving like this because the adults not only allow them to, and not only encourage them to, but they behave in exactly the same manner themselves.
I think it’s a bit unfair to lump all young people in this category while giving so many infantile adults a free pass. There will be plenty of young men of 19 or 20 undergoing Ranger selection in the US right now, and plenty of young women who will be knuckling down to some hard graft in order to pass exams and have no time for protests or other SJW activities Generation Snowflake is a subset of the middle-classes, and age doesn’t have much to do with it.
But snowflakery is like the Spanish ‘flu: it particularly affects young adults. Though obviously we need a new term rather than “adults”.
Received this email yesterday morning from a 52yo man.
“Lads this is not the problem here . The problem is the line will be Jammed (stopped can’t move) I been preaching this all week and have been told the last load will be here today /. Tomorrow.
THIS IS A DISASTER”
The worst is that he sent it to me knowing the time difference would mean that I would read it first thing on my Saturday morning and wouldn’t be able to talk to him about it until about 4pm my time.
You are right, Tim, that plenty of young people — outside the spotlight of lefty approval — are getting on with learning things, achieving things and making an effort for the future rather than merely sitting in their own self-inflicted puddle of Faceberg. I can’t even pretend that the ‘snowflakes’ are contemplating their own navel; the object of the game is to wave bigger signals than one’s electronic (and in a few cases, real life) friends.
That the young are giddy, emotional and not especially aware of life’s complexities is nothing new, or hasn’t been for the last fifty or so years. When I was at school in the early 1960s, kids as young as 15 were leaving to start work, but over the years society has managed to postpone that responsibility and encourage the young to chase pointless things like ‘studying’ courses that of no earthly use to them in brand-new ‘universities’ where words are cheap.
The snowflakes are encouraged to examine their own emotions as a priority. The lads who once at 15 went to work on building sites soon learnt that no one gave a flying damn about their feelings, and cared less about their opinions. But then the only people who could hear them bitch would be the bloke next to them laying bricks or shovelling mud. If I had told them that one day, incredibly, there would be a way of telling lots and lots of people how hurt they were about an election in an another country, they would have laughed and probably clumped me with a spade. The only snowflakes for them were the ones that stopped them working and being paid.
Re Dearieme’s comment: as they are not adults in any normal meaning of the word “Grown-ups”, how about Thrown-ups? Their puerile (& puellile?) obsessions and recycled edu-garbage make me sick anyway.