Friday, October 29, 2021

Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie on the trouble with millennial students

  • FILE UNDER: I'll just leave this right here for eternity... CONTEXT: A few months back Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie wrote an essential essay on her personal website but I can no longer find it... Anyhow I did manage to copy a snippet - her issues with some of her students is just sooo spot-on - here is the except I preserved: "In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.
    I find it obscene."
    Another dear friend of mine whom I have known for decades runs a sucessful business in California - he is approaching his mid-40s and when the topic came up of millennials in the workplace, he said simply: they don't know how to pay their dues.  
    I think for the Gen X crowd this in an ongoing, deeply frustrating saga... which is not likely to improve.
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