My "Complete Idiot's Guide" That Never Was

In February of 2011, I went to the Complete Idiot's Guide website and saw that they were soliciting book proposals.  Thrilled beyond words (at the time, I could think of nothing more exciting than seeing my name under the words "complete idiot" on a book cover), I asked my friends and family, both in person and on Facebook, what topic they considered me an expert on (i.e., what topic I could most swiftly and easily churn out a book on).  Of the many suggestions I got (and of those for which guides had not already been written), I narrowed it down to two:  social media etiquette (huh) and "Adulthood for Millennials."

I quite earnestly started both books and equally earnestly abandoned them after deciding I was perhaps not a true expert on either.  But here is a tiny taste of one of the two, in what might have one day become The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials:

(Complete Idiot's Guides always start with a letter to the reader.)

Dear Twentysomething,

Well done!  You have survived into your “early adulthood” in the modern world.  Much has been made in recent times about the Millennial Generation, those of us born sometime roughly in the eighties or nineties and coming of age roughly around the millennial mark.  If Generation X was all angst and grunge and inner turmoil, then we Millennials are defined by our relentless optimism and

hopeless fascination with fame and technology.  We are the “Me Generation,” raised to value our personal happiness and to celebrate our individuality.  And we are coming of age in a world that is full of people who weren’t raised the way we were.

This book approaches the topic of “growing up” from the practical standpoint that in the modern world, no generation can be defined by the generations before or after it.  Our parents didn’t need to know how to make a LinkedIn profile after they graduated from college any more than the next generation will need to be taught basic computer skills in school.

As a member of the Millennial generation, I’ve found that the transition from adolescence to the “real world” hasn’t been all it’s cracked up to be.  And amidst all the self-help books and generation-deprecating memoirs out there, there weren’t any practical guides to basic Millennial issues.  Getting a job is one thing…but how do you handle older co-workers who are constantly asking you for tech advice?  And while we’re bombarded with ads warning against our future wrinkles, no one thinks to prepare us for the moment when our childhood icons start showing up as “vintage characters” in trendy clothing stores.  And, really, how are you supposed to pick a grad school (or career) when society can’t even settle on a social networking site we all agree on?

Some of the advice in here is given with the understanding that there are plenty of books out there that offer endless advice about major issues, like jobs and relationships, though those topics are covered here too.  But mainly what I wanted to present was a guide to the things that only Millennials have to deal with.  We are, after all, a generation first and foremost concerned with ourselves.

So revel in your uniqueness! And enjoy the read…

Becky Heineke

  

Introduction

Congratulations!  You are now old enough to be considered a “responsible and self-sustaining citizen” by the unsuspecting public.  Now what?

No doubt you’ve spent your formative years being told that a college education is all you need to succeed in this world.  Unfortunately, a bachelor’s degree isn’t what it used to be.  And neither is your infantile adulthood.  Many obstacles face you before you can truly call yourself a grown-up:  employment, maintaining friendships via the prickly world of social networking, pet ownership...  Luckily for you, there are lots of books already on the market that deal with many of these challenges. 

Unluckily for you, they’ve probably been written by people much older than you who have had far different life experiences than you.

So first, we must determine whether or not you are a Millennial.

The millennial generation, aside from being ultra-hip and pop-culture forward, has a couple of defining characteristics:

Mashable.com stock photo of The Millennial Human

- Millennials grew up in the “can do” era.  Remember the participation ribbons you got just for showing up to track meets once a week?  Remember the Reagans telling you you could be anything you wanted to be when you grew up?  Your Baby Boomer parents didn’t get that when they were kids.

- Millennials are the first generation in history to grow up as “digital natives.”  We’re also the last generation in history who – barring a cataclysmic technological breakdown - will be able to remember a time before the internet was part of our daily lives (though for some of us, remembering back that far might be a little hazy).  The people who study these sorts of things liken it as similar to learning a language as you grow, as opposed to picking it up much later in life.  Your parents, for instance, probably find computers to be less intuitive than you do.  They learned the ins and outs of computing long after they were already adults, whereas Millennials grew up with and around advances in technology.

Though we have yet to see the impact on the next generation, who is being born into a world more wired than ever before, what that generation won’t have is the perspective that Millennials do in terms of how quickly things have changed.  You may have grown up staring at screens, but you also remember how much those screens have changed over the years.  Each of you can probably remember the first time you got on the internet, what it was like to make the switch from dial-up to broadband, and how people communicated before everyone had a cell phone (remember car phones?).  Touchscreen navigation may make perfect sense to you, but you also remember that there was a time when Mario was two-dimensional and pixilated. 

That inherent talent for technology, combined with an appreciation for what life was like before it, makes our generation truly unique.  And if there’s anything to be said about being unique, it’s that other people don’t always understand where you’re coming from.

[Twelve pages of outlines (on topics as diverse as "Fictional Icons of Our Childhood" and "Common Office Personalities and How to Deal with Them") and a section on job advice later (yes, for some reason I was giving job advice)...]

Blogging

There are few activities as wholesomely ego-stroking as delivering a good blog entry.  Though blogs exist on nearly every subject

imaginable, the personal blog – one written about the author’s life – remains a popular way to convey detailed information to family and friends.  Lacking the word count limit of Facebook or Twitter updates, and allowing the author to post pictures within the body of the text, a blog is like a memoir that’s being written and published in real time.

Consider blogging if you are: 

1. Wordy.

2. Excessively narcissistic. 

Consider Facebook if you are:

1. Alive.  Let’s face it.  Everyone’s on Facebook.

Consider MySpace if you are:

1. Stuck in the past.  Let’s face it.  MySpace is dead.

Consider Twitter if you are:

1. Unable to punctuate and/or spell. 

2. Enjoy hashtags.

Consider LinkedIn if you are:

1. Boring. 

2. A nerd.

3. Legitimately looking for a job.  (Unlike most other networking sites, this one does have an air of professionalism about it.) 

[And then there were some more pages, with topic headings like "The Perils of Facebook," "Emoticons:  As Complex as Real Emotions Nowadays," and "Online Fame:  How It Is Both Like and Is Not Like Actual Fame".  I may post more of this in the future.  I really wish I'd known enough to write this book because I'D KIND OF LIKE TO READ IT, MAN.]