Gen Y

Recent ABS figures showed marriage in Australia is becoming more popular, while divorce rates are falling. They also showed the average age we’re getting married has increased to 29.6 for men and 27.7 for women.

For this to be the average, plenty of people are still getting married in their 20s or even late teens – but it’s not for lack of people telling them they’re making a mistake.

It’s rude to tell people they’re making a mistake when they’re buying a house, changing careers, or deciding to have kids. Why, then, is it OK to berate people for getting married when they’re young and in love?

Continue reading "Call me old fashioned, but it’s OK to marry young" »

In a speech to Young Labor seven months ago I said that generations were often unfairly criticised by the ones which preceded them.

The young adults of Generation Y are often generalised as being plagued by apathy and indifference.

They’re sometimes called lazy and ungrateful for the many perceived advantages they have over earlier generations.

Continue reading "My speech on Gen Y was about tough love" »

When I was 19, I started mapping out my career plans. I was in my second year of university when I decided to volunteer as an unpaid intern for two full days per week at a magazine publishing house. My baby-boomer father never understood how I could do it for two years without pay (while working weekends in retail, where yes, I dealt with the worst customers imaginable and cleaned up kid vomit from the floor of my store), but I had faith in the fact that it would one day pay off.

One day was not this week, because this week, Employment Minister Mark Arbib is urging Gen Y to readjust their ideas about work and employment, stop the “snobbery” associated with certain means of work, and take whatever jobs they could get. For someone whose attitude to work has more to do with paying university fees and funding my internet bill than snobbery and a class act on the career ladder, Senator Arbib’s comments did not go down too well. And I was not the only one to notice.

Generation Y has long bore the brunt of the attention-seeking, lazy, power-hungry generation that refused to put in the hard yards for their future, something which the Senator might have capitalised on in his address to a young labor conference last week. What he failed to recognise is the fact that Generation Y has suffered long enough as a result of this stereotype, and as such, was ditching conventional forms and methods of work in favour of something that works for them.

Continue reading "Gen Y is picky? You call it snobbery, we call it tactic" »

[*Ed’s note to Gen Y: that isn’t a typo in the headline. It’s a cool joke, and Lucy explains it further down.]

I think I realised I was different when I corrected the grammar of my extremely attractive barista. 

It was a Monday morning; he was frothing milk as we chatted idly about the drunken antics of our respective weekends.  All the usual stuff - the people we knew in common, the places we had almost run into each other, the quality of the cocktail jugs at various Sydney locations.  He might have been carefully watching the temperature gauge rise on that little jug of milk, but we both knew where the real heat was.  Just as I was about to casually invite him to a rock gig he dropped a clanger.

‘Yeah I like World Bar.  Dave and me were there last Thursday.’

Continue reading "Mind your language if you’re making a parse* at me" »

Barack Obama is so Gen Y, even though he’s 47.

Just this week he was copping a grilling on American station CNBC about government economic intervention when he stopped for a second, eyed off an annoying fly, and obliterated it ninja-style. “Now, where were we?” he asks the interviewer. What a chiller.

Pan left for a second to Kevin Rudd, 51, who when put in a similar situation, pulls out the painful to watch sauce-bottle-shake chat in a desperate attempt to appear “with-it”. With added cringe-benefits.

Continue reading "Tips for pollies wishing to connect with Gen Y" »