As I have made abundantly clear, I cannot get on board with coddle culture or new-age parenting. New-age parenting has effectively created a society of young adults who cannot come to terms with reality because they have been coddled their entire lives. But it’s all they have ever known. College campuses are full of students who don’t have any idea what hard work is and they walk around actively pursuing victimization, as oxymoronic as that seems. Not only do I not support coddle culture, but I also speak out against it. However, what I do support is coddle-cultured kids entering the real world. When these kids are met with reality and forced to leave the made-up world they’ve been living in, I predict they will develop more conservative principles. All it will take is their past and all its beliefs crashing down around them as they get hit with a tidal wave of reality.
Gen Z has taken to TikTok to speak out about facing reality, and after listening to what some of them have to say, I stan Gen Z. Take 25-year-old Alison Johnson (@fitnesswithalison), who lamented her marketing degree since it’s gotten her absolutely nowhere in corporate America. Where it has gotten her is $80,000 in the hole of student loan debt. On top of that, she’s discovered she doesn’t stand a chance of landing a job that pays $150,000 because the degree, as it turns out, isn’t enough. She doesn’t have any experience, as is required by all jobs in that pay range. Watch HERE.
Marketer here. Made 30K in first role. Lived in a tiny apt where nothing worked shared w/friend met online who was also broke at the time. One of most fun times of my life tbh. You don't make 200K at your first gig. That's fine. Money will come, kids… pic.twitter.com/fv7Y3MWrv8
— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) October 18, 2023
This TikTok is just comical. In her defense, Alison was told to go to university, have some fun, and everything will be great. Alison has “her literal business marketing degree.” How is she not making $200,000 a year by now? That is stressful for Alison, she is frustrated, and I feel Alison’s frustration — because these kids are deluded. They have been made to believe that life is just going to be really easy. They’ve been told all their lives to follow the right steps: go to college, get a degree, and watch your life fall into place. They don’t want to work hard. And why should they? They’ve never had to.
Situations like this always remind me of a young woman I went to college with. She came from an extremely wealthy family, and her parents paid for absolutely everything — while I worked a full-time job as a full-time student because my parents paid for nothing. They didn’t have the money to send me to college, so I worked and took out student loans to be able to go. This friend and I became fast and best friends back in my liberal days. We moved into the city after graduation, and we had both started working.
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Neither one of us had in money, but her parents were paying for her apartment in Manhattan, until she they called her one day to give her an update on their future payment plans: For six months, they would continue to pay for everything in the city; after six months, they would begin weaning her off, only paying for 75% for a few months, then 50%, then 25%, until they would stop paying for anything at all. I was at the apartment after she had this phone call, and as we sat and talked it over, she cried and cried. She was devastated but she was also angry at her parents for doing this to her. (“Doing this to her” was how she viewed it.) I will never forget what she said to me: “If they wanted to teach me responsibility, they shouldn’t have gotten me an f-ing pony when I turned two.” I felt bad for her because she had a point. How could they expect her to understand the real world when they had gifted her a pony at two-years-old? Whereas I was a little rough around the edges, so to speak, I’d had a job since I was 15. And I was much better equipped for the real world.
When it comes to some of the Gen Z videos on this topic, your instinct may very well be to laugh, and you may have to stifle that laughter while watching Brielle (@brielleybelly123). In one of Brielle’s TikTok, she is crying because she is finding that working nine to five is quite a bit harder than she expected. She admits she is probably “being so dramatic and annoying,” but she is in her first full-time job after college, and she is commuting to the city which “takes forever to get there” but there is no way she is “going to be able to afford living in the city right now, so that’s off the table. Like, duh!” She says she gets on the train at 7:30 a.m. and doesn’t get home until 6:15 at the earliest because “you don’t get off at 5:00 … but like, I literally get off, it’s pitch black, like I don’t have energy.” She doesn’t have time or energy to workout, cook, or see friends, and she definitely doesn’t have time to meet a guy. She gets home, wants to shower, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Watch HERE.
#4HL pic.twitter.com/EgjT8KDWdA
— cold 🥑 (@coldhealing) October 24, 2023
I would actually like to give Brielle a hug. I can sense her sincerity. We make fun of Gen Z, but it’s our fault we are producing a generation who cannot handle the real world because we made everything so comfortable for them. They aren’t prepared. Long gone are the stories of our grandparents who told us they walked to school in the snow uphill both ways. My grandfather got up before 5:00 a.m. to work on the farm. Brielle is having a hard time getting to the train by 7:30 a.m. for her commute to work. She feels like her life is over because she actually has to work, and we have conditioned her to this. So we can laugh all we want, but it’s not her fault. It is the generations before Gen Z who have produced these individuals who have just been weakened to the point they have no sense of reality.
But I believe if we give these people some time to meet the real world, to get acquainted with it, and to suffer in it, the things we conservatives are saying will sound much more appealing to them. They will eventually come across a podcast episode and realize that had they been realistic with their degree and debt and what that would mean for them in the world, they might have chosen a different path. Soon enough, conservatives who sounded so harsh are, instead, going to sound like people they should have been listening to all along. We will have people we can convert. That’s my opinion and prediction.
Give them some time in the real world, and they come around to see our perspective.