*On Generation Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies (GYPSYs)

There's been an article roaming around about Generation Y and "happiness" or rather "un-happiness". 

The article's title is provoking by calling a whole generation: "Yuppies", so it's calling people out and basically trying to argue that this generation is "unhappy" because of this given stance of "expectation".

So who is this Generation Y or what the author calls "GYPSYs" ('Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies' lol)? I've never found these generation titles very convincing or ever figured out what they actually mean and why they're given a particular letter to denote a generation. I mean, what about the generations in between? Why don't they have a letter and a personality type? Anyway... the author is quite specific and says that Generation Y is the group of people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s.

First off, this is a huge number of people. Born between the late 70s and the mid 90s is a span of 15-20 years, and this group of people are GYPSYs - Yuppies who are protagonists to their lives and consider themselves "special" - which is a tacit attack on the neo-liberal psychology. By which I mean the attitude of "I can change the world if I work hard enough" type romanticism that tends to bleed into politics and foreign policy. I'll come back to this later on.

So it seems the GYPSY generation is somewhat of an arbitrary category of people born between a certain time period. Given that this is the Huffington Post, I am going to assume that this is really demarcating either the West or just simply the United States. Talking about the G.I. Generation, the Baby Boomers, and the economic prosperity launched by a slew of de-regulation policies implies as much. If my assumption is correct, there is already a red herring building here. The cultures and subcultures within the West and the United States is extremely diverse. People born from all parts of the world and with a great variety of various upbringing and socio-economic class and so on.

The claim is that this GYPSY generation is "unhappy". Continuing with the demographic critique, does this mean that all GYPSYs regardless of background and socio-economic status "unhappy"? Can we really lump white, black, brown, yellow, pink, purple, and blue all into a single category? Outside of being born in a certain time frame, I find it highly problematic to generalize in this way. But maybe the author is generalizing with a particular ethnocentric view: white, american, middle-upper class labeled 'GYPSY,' because it's just easier and safer to do it that way. And even still there are some issues by calling this generation, in a sense, delusional and unhappy.

So my first question to the author, and this GYPSY category, is who are we really talking about here? Are we really going out on a limb and claiming that all people born between the late 70s and the mid 90s are "unhappy" because of a generational psychology that landed them in a privelaged platform to begin life? I just don't find it plausible - platforms of all types vary. The author needs to be a bit more specific when talking about something like this. But hey, it's an article meant to provoke, bring facebook "likes" or dislikes, stir conversation and bring viewers to the Huffington Post. Not that I have anything particularly against the Huffington Post, just pointing out that it is one of many online news agencies that want to attract people.

The second thing is this definition of "happiness" and it's boiled down to a simple formula. Happiness is Reality - Expectations. Author states: "when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy. When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy."

While there is something to be said about the contrast between experience and expectation, the illusion is that this contrast is the basic perspective for why persons are "happy" or "unhappy". I find this way too static. Expectations and experiences are always changing and we are continuous in a diachronic fashion. Any kind of happiness or unhappiness is always temporary - if we stick to this reality and life and expectations dialectic. One's perspective on life is always, in a sense, evolving and changing - life and reality is dynamic. The author would have had a better argument if the generalization was about an 'attitude to life' and a persistent demand of entitlement and self-centredness, or egocentrism, as opposed to a singular stance of expectation and experience. But let's give this the benefit of the doubt and grant that this formula is meant to be dynamic and continuous. So...does this mean that when reality is better than expectation one is "happy". 'Happiness' is such a weird concept, I don't know if any one person can generalize their life as just "happy" because things are better than expected. Any dynamic consideration between expectation and experience is bound to have spurts of "unhappiness" in between. I mean, what person doesn't see oscillations of good and bad things happening in life? So what does it mean when somebody says that they are "happy" in life? It's an elusive concept and can lead into a whole different direction about existential angst, crises of meaning, and the role of emotions into a formulaic perspective of happiness in terms of expectation and reality. And I have no intention of delving into that here.

So the author goes on to attack a strawman family with a character named "Lucy" and argues why Lucy is unhappy. The basic argument is that Lucy's parents and grandparents never had it as good as Lucy. So they have a different outlook on expectation and reality, where they can draw on past experiences and say 'oh we had it really rough back then' and now things are "AMAZING" - to quote Louis CK, which is true - technology is pretty amazing. And Lucy, because her life has been sheltered, given great things from the beginning, with the nice house on the hill and the white picket fence, with a lawn, and a dog, and a cat, and a goldfish, that her expectations of what should be granted are so grandiose that they are unrealistic and delusional. So when reality comes along and GYPSYs can't get what they want and expect, they are unhappy.

Furthermore, Lucy has been raised to think that she's special and that she can "be whatever you want to be" and grows up thinking that she can be this great protagonist, "wildly ambitious" , who is going to make the world all rainbows and unicorns because Jesus loves you. (*Just by looking at the generational picture the author is painting it seems that my assumption about this GYPSY category is white, american, middle-upper class, and Christian - this is an assumption as well, but let's face it most white people of this category are nominally "Christian"). The author is basically saying that this generation of people are delusional and spoiled. Yuppies. And there is, I think truth to this, there is a neo-liberal psychology that pervades a demographic of America, which is coupled with a ridiculous sense of entitlement. Louis CK picks up on this kind of spoiled attitude that, I'm sure many of us can attest to, a lot of Americans have. For example (up to the 7:30 mark):



It certainly has not helped the image of Americans in the rest of the world. So if we take the attitude Louis is describing with Prof. Handler, an anthropologist, and his talk about the neoliberal attitude - in the creation of a global development program at Univ. of Virginia, and how anthropologists can help by critiquing culture rather than fuel the delusion that if you only know more about different cultures you can help save the world - then you have a better composition of what the GYPSY article is getting at, which is not a critique on a generational attitude but rather a pervasive and perpetuated culture that has been brewing in the west.

So, this article I think is embodied, in addition to Louis CK's rant on phones and flying, in this little clip here, and they retort an appropriate response:

 

This yuppy stuff the author is attacking actually exists in every generation. The author is detaching the values of an entire generation from the prior generation and the one before that who perpetuate this attitude. The actual critique should be directed at the notion of 'American Exceptionalism', delusional neo-liberalism, and the utter insulated self-centredness of some Americans instead of a singlular critique at a strawman generation of "yuppies". The GYPSYs did not come about on their own and not all GYPSYs are really GYPSYs and not all of them are "unhappy" - whatever that means.