More from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials!

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Embracing Your Millennialism

Congratulations, you're already being replaced. (1)

No matter how old you are right now, you’re getting older.  You may have kids.  Or your friends may have kids.  Another generation is already working its way into our global consciousness.  And look at you.  Until you picked up this book, you weren’t even entirely sure your generation had a name.

In a society that increasingly relies on snapshots of information to define identities (think of your profile on a social networking site), Millennials at first glance don’t seem to have the collective personality that, say, the Baby Boomers do.  The term “Baby Boomer” conjures up specific images of psychedelic colors and war protests and crazy hair at rock concerts.  “Millennials” probably doesn’t conjure up much of anything.  Part of that likely stems from a general inability to agree on who belongs to this generation.  Many place the starting point at 1982, but depending on the expert in question, birth dates range anywhere from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s.  No wonder, then, that this is a generation that seems to lack a solid identity.

[Because all Complete Idiot's Guides come with ample illustrative material, my outline is full of potential future imagery.]

Gratuitous royalty shot. (2)

Chart – Famous Millennials

Prince William and Prince Harry – The Studly Royal Millennials

Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan – The Train-Wreck Starlet Millennials

Heath Ledger – The Gone-Too-Soon Millennial

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian – The Why-Are-They-Famous Millennials

[...]

Applying for a Job

When applying for a job, one must approach the process as one approaches a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Do you intend to pursue a career in the field in which you majored?  If yes, congratulate yourself on being more self-aware than most of your peers were when choosing a major.  If no, proceed to the next paragraph.

Unlike in previous generations, today’s job applicants can expect to hop from job to job, even from career to career, over the course of a lifetime.  While there is much admiration to be given to those of us who “find their calling” early in life, there is no shame in feeling lost and/or deciding after graduation/mid-interview-circuit/mid-career that what you thought you wanted isn’t working for you.  In addition to being tech-savvy and self-confident, we are also a generation of choice.

Some people have all the luck. (3)

Remember the good old days (medieval Europe) when you grew up knowing you were going to be a shoemaker because your dad and your dad's dad and every other generation of your family were shoemakers?  

And then your job had purpose because you were the only person in your village who knew how to make shoes?  No longer!  The complicated world in which we live has necessitated into existence lots of jobs that are boring and/or stupid.  Sure, now we've got that whole "free will" thing going for us, but with all the options out there, how could one possibly choose? And really, what could ever compare to the satisfaction of dressing the feet of an entire community?

Nowadays, there are lots of ways to make money that don’t have any real significance in terms of contributing to society.  And there is a trend in millennialism for Millennials to make other Millennials feel guilty about the ways in which they earn their income.  But let’s face it:  With 7 billion people on the planet, not all of us are going to be doing something for the common good.  Focus on what makes you happy (as long as what makes you happy is within legal boundaries).

[...]

Online Fame:  How It Both Is and Is Not Like Actual Fame

Now that you’re blogging and tweeting all the time and have your own Facebook fan page, you may have attracted a following.  And it may have gone to your head.  And you may be filled with feelings of triumph because for a Millennial, fame is the ultimate currency of success.

You live in an era in which the thrill of fleeting fame on the internet is more attainable than ever.  But just like fame in the real world, the key word is “fleeting.”  It’s much more common to be a one hit internet wonder than to launch a fulfilling career from your online notoriety.  Not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s best to have realistic expectations of how far your fame will take you based on what it is you’ve become famous for.

[What happens next?!  I don't know, because I never wrote it.  And to be entirely honest, I never wrote it in part because I was a little bit too right about the worthless nature of online fame and also that part about having to work for money even if, in doing so, you're not really contributing anything.

How ironic that The Complete Idiot's Guide to Adulthood for Millennials was never finished because the Millennial who was writing it had to continue living her adulthood exactly as she was trying to describe in the book.]

(1) Baby pic from lpaustin.com.
(2) Princes from usmagazine.com.
(3) Serf doing hard labor from this blog.