No not this article. Hold your horses. I'll get there.
On my way out to visit my brother at Northwestern this weekend, I picked up the most recent issue of New York Magazine because I was intrigued by the promise of an article on "coming of age in post-hope America." I've always been interested in people's efforts to attribute certain far-reaching characteristics to our generation. I couldn't tell you why, except that the idea that some broad set of shared social conditions could result in millions of people sharing specific personality traits is pretty far-out. The fact that I almost always find such explanations to be flawed (or just plain wrong) only increases my interest in new attempts.
Part of the problem with the previous explanations I've encountered is that they're usually put forth by middle-aged sociologists who probably still text their kids in all-caps. The phrase "it takes one to know one" comes to mind, and Noreen Malone, the author of "The Kids are Actually Sort of Alright," is one of us. She does a pretty incredible job of describing our "screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, and surprisingly resilient generation," and manages to come out of the project with a bit of optimism about where we're headed. I'm big on optimism (at least when I'm not feeling misanthropic).
