A Majority of One (We're Fucked Edition)

"You're just another of those disconnected, easily-angered zombies who haven't really worked a day in their lives. Always eager to tell other people how to live and what to say. Posting pictures of their food every single day because that's a fucking achievement for them. Preparing a meal. You know, that thing you're supposed to do so that you don't starve to death." -- Caspar Vega, Hayfoot

If there's anything the Overlord hates more than being dragged off to another doo-wop show by Mrs. Overlord, or liberal democrats, or an afternoon in the dentist's chair, and perhaps maybe even a battery acid enema, it's a fucking millennial.

Before I go any further, I want to tell all of you people out there that have children round about the ages of 20-25 that it is my considered opinion that you are both genetically defective and guilty of a crime against humanity.

The evidence is as such:

1) you have created a generation of people so truly dimwitted and depressing that it could only have been the result of a deliberate attempt to destroy the human species by degrading it's future breeding stock.

2) your bundle of expensively college-indoctrinated douchebag, mentally prepared by a lifetime of getting trophies for coming in last, confused by an educational system which elevated their fucktarded feelings over their critical thinking skills, raised in an environment of fear in which Mommy told them everything in Creation would kill them, abduct them, or give them Autism, hovered over by Safety Nazis who would put a seat belt on a spoon and install a roll bar on a toilet, if you let them, are absolutely HOPELESS.

Now, I may exaggerate just a tad. I'm sure there's at least ONE twenty-something out there who could find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight -- on a good day, assuming he managed to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, the Wi-Fi signal was good enough to locate it with Google Earth, and there was a Starbuck's on the way -- who would blow my entire theory to smithereens.

But I haven't met one yet.

Let's back up a bit, and let me regale you with the sordid tale that is my professional life, and introduce you to The Next Generation that is supposed to bravely and fearlessly lead us into the 21st Century.

Have a box of Kleenex handy, because by the time this is over, you'll be crying.

If there's one thing this Galactic Dictator has learned in 52 years and some-odd months of existence on this spinning insane asylum we call a planet, it is that the only constant in the universe is change. What this means, professionally, to someone like me is that people who have many years of much-needed and very valuable experience get old and they retire. They need to be replaced, more often these days, and the only supply available is The Young.

Your Beloved Despot is a hard taskmaster. This is not due to any inherent asshole-like traits he may possess, but a result of experience. When I came up through the ranks -- upon the IT battlefields of the Financial Sector, where shit gets serious all the time -- I was managed and directed by very stern and sober people who enforced very high standards, demanded excellence, and who rewarded mediocrity with a one-way ticket to the Unemployment Office. They did not suffer fools -- they could not afford to, both professionally and financially -- nor did they accept excuses.

My tuition in these lessons was often harsh, and Your Esteemed Tyrant was on the receiving end of the sledgehammer more than once. I entered this world at the age of 18, having barely been taught how to adult by parents who represented the worst of the Hippie Generation in terms of their overall philosophy towards life. For example, My Mother's (yes, I have one) great contribution to my upbringing was to tell me, repeatedly, the following (paraphrased):

"I don't care what you do in life. As long as you're happy doing it then I'm happy. But don't embarrass me: I don't ever want people thinking that I was a bad mother."

Suffice to say, I was raised, for good or ill, inside the office. That meant discipline, attention to details, professionalism, a work ethic, teamwork and competition.

All qualities the Millennial seems to lack. Unless we're talking video games.

Unfortunately, as I've said, people leave the business due to retirement, a desire to do something else with their lives, and unfortunately worse circumstances, like cancer and heart attacks.

Which means I have to find replacements from a pool of younger people. I know this going into the interview process, and this is one of the few times where the Universe is resistant to change; qualitatively, these youngins leave much to be desired. This is to be expected: for even if they go to the most-expensive school in the Solar System, they still haven't "done it for real". I know before I even select one that s/he is going to be essentially useless to me for a period of perhaps a few years. They have to be retrained; there is a difference between the theory taught in a classroom by a guy who probably hasn't been "in the field" for a decade while banging coeds in the Ivory Tower, and real life, where techniques have advanced, technology has changed, and repeated necessity has driven the creation of new tools and methods.

The trick is to find one that appears the LEAST stupid and somewhat enthusiastic. And even this particularly low hurdle can be difficult to clear for a variety of reasons that all have to do with the peculiar mindset of the mess some middle-class genetic defective fermented inside her womb for nine months and then terrorized into near-insanity and emotional instability for two decades with her Helicopter Mommy routine.

This routine, itself, is a by-product of morning talk show blather, poorly-researched magazine articles, and the Motherhood Bush Network of cackling hens reinforcing each other's dumbass on "play dates" and PTA meetings, at Little League socials and Dance Recital After Parties, not to mention the goddamned Internet. That only allows the stupid to more-easily find more stupid so that they can all wallow in their Super Stupid.

The parents of these kids, for the most part, left the job of actually raising them to someone else. The taxpayer-funded-Day Care Center school where they spent 10 hours a day while Mommy found "fulfillment" in her quest to achieve the Comso-approved "Work-Life Balance", where no one is judged by objective criteria (because self-esteem, which is handed out in the form of a certificate after the puppet show) and where teachers and administrators are happy to pass even the Irish-Setter-Fucktarded from grade to grade and continuously invent new ways to game the Standardized Test System for financial gain (to make it appear as if the intellectually-inferior are getting the same quality education as the kids who (might) have a clue).

Eventually, these little turds show up on a college campus, where they've learned to be intolerant of anything they can't understand, become sensitive to the point of absurdity, are force-fed a steady diet of bullshit social theory disguised as scholarship, mollycoddled by an administration that is more-interested in handing out easy A's so as to pack in even more assholes armed with a government loan, marinated in binge drinking, liberal drug use, and gratuitous pandering, all on a campus that more-and-more begins to resemble Club Med with a football team than an institution of higher learning.

Now armed with a piece of paper that indicates that they successfully and faithfully parroted everything Professor Dipshit spewed at them for a period of 4 to 7 years, without understanding any of it, and burdened by a King's Ransom in unpaid debt, they embark upon a quest for gainful employment, further burdened by unrealistic expectations (because everyone told them college would make them rich without having to work).

Their employers are obliged to step in where parents, teachers, and college professors all abandoned their responsibilities and left what, for all intents and purposes, is an empty shell of a human being with a variety of complexes and issues -- they're confused about sex, their gender, which bathroom to use, what pronouns are acceptable. Everything is racist; everything is sexist; everything has a "-phobia" attached to it.

They can't tell time, they can't spell, they can't do math, they tend to cry a lot, they have been raised to believe that their subjective feelings give them power over time, space, matter and energy.

They get highly cantankerous when you return a memo or report to them full of spelling and grammatical and arithmetic errors for corrections, and feel slighted when you ask them how they managed to turn in such sloppy work when they're using a word-processing program that has built-in spell- and grammar-checkers and a calculator on the desktop.

These little bastards hover on the verge of suicide when you question why they thought it was necessary to decorate their work with different colors and unique fonts and lots of emojis.

They argue with you when you tell them "a lot" is not spelled "alot", or that "cable" is not spelled "cabal", nor is it spelled "cabel" (they've spelled it that way for decades and no one ever corrected them, so it must be correct!), that there is a difference between "They're", "Their" and "There" and the words are not interchangeable.

Present a millennial with unmistakable evidence of their fucktard and you get one of three responses: it fails to register, they go on a tear-filled jeremiad about how it doesn't matter how smart you may be they at least have compassion for other people, and that makes them better than you, or they attempt to ignore the correction with an "okay-ing" you to death (no, it's not okay, you moron!).

They literally can't tell when they're being stupid because their means of comparison -- what other people are doing or saying online -- is skewed by the fact that those people are fucking stupid, too. Literally everyone they interact with is an idiot, so that jackass has been normalized and accepted.

They can't get, in fact they don't do, context. No one ever told them what context was. Hence, the threat to get a lawyer when they overhear the word "black" in a way they don't like, sensing intolerance and racism, when you're just ordering coffee from the deli. They get uppity about the use of "male" and "female", Gender is A Construct, you Fascist!... and we're talking about cable connectors.

The poor waifs are continuously depressed and depressing. They hate themselves -- because deep down they understand that something is wrong, but just can't manage to put their finger on it's ultimate cause, which would be THEM, and as a result they secretly hate everyone else. We're all critics, oppressors, we frustrate them, we "hold them back" (letting them loose would probably result in a fatal explosion).

They can only communicate with emojis, and if speaking, string random words and phrases together in an attempt to explain what are really vague feelings and unformulated, unexamined ideas. Language becomes a barrier, rather a tool; you're not speaking the same one they are, and while you are quite capable of eventually learning what they're on about, they can't return the favor. Their heads are full of buzzwords and really bad social science terminology and they haven't been taught how to formulate and communicate an idea, unless it was force-fed to them beforehand. They are parrots, not thinkers.

They are easily frustrated and quit at the slightest hint of adversity.

Most will have a volcanic case of Cognitive Dissonance on a variety of subjects. For example, it is not unusual for them to speak about everyone being treated equally, but every last one has a long laundry list of reasons why they should be treated specially.

They are entitled to the nth degree. To everything. If it moves, they want it. If it's nailed down, they want it, too. If it belongs to someone else, they connive to wrench it away. They expect to be rewarded for incomplete work, to be recognized and celebrated for the barest minimum of effort. They keep score with one another, noting who has gotten whatever they didn't, no matter how insignificant, and harboring a seething anger at being denied something they often don't even know about.

They talk a good game about expectations concerning honesty, fairness, inclusivity, sincerity, ethics, morality...all the things they demand from others, of course. They are genuinely shocked and appalled (and start crying) when you apply the same demands to them. Those rules don't apply to them, because certificate of self-esteem and trophies for coming in last. They expect loyalty from everyone (especially those they call "friends") and then rat each other out at the slightest hint of trouble or an advantage to be gained.

Oh, the complaining! About everything, continuously. A generation raised in exquisite material and mental comfort, who have been over-indulged, protected from words and ideas they don't wish to hear, shielded from reality, does not know how to handle adversity, truth, or challenge. There is no sense of "suck it up and soldier on". There isn't even a sense of "embrace the suck: it will make you a better  person". The mantra is more like "this sucks, I quit".

They are never responsible. For anything. Every problem is ALWAYS someone else's fault, or a connivance of circumstance, and the best (in terms of how fucking pathetic it is) is when they start blaming inanimate objects for their failures. I'm always hearing phrases such as "systemic racism", "the Patriarchy", "power dynamics", "Consumerism", "Evil Capitalism", Every last one is a wind-up-juice-box Lenin, pre-loaded with, and ready to expel upon stimuli, really bad politically-correct gobbledogook that you know they can't even spell, and probably read on a rest room wall.

They have little to say that isn't reflexively defensive, self-pitying, snarky, dismissive, or a regurgitation of an amalgam of poorly-understood concepts and incomplete and unexplored ideas.

They are simultaneously gushingly idealistic, utopian, humanistic and seriously impractical, dystopian, and bigoted.

These doofuses assume knowledge they don't have and take offense when they're shown to be or proven wrong. They have access to all the collected knowledge and wisdom of Mankind in the palm of their hands and don't use it. They rely almost exclusively upon Wikipedia, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and anonymous morons they consider "friends" despite the fact they've never been in the same room with that person, ever, nor are they ever likely to be.

They ask Alexa to do everything for them.

It is amazing that I haven't hauled off and left a trail of bodies in shallow graves in remote places.

It's why I'm getting out. I can't take it much longer. I have to be babysitter, psychologist, therapist, pastor, Daddy, hall monitor, teacher, cat herder, and "mentor". The funny thing about the Mentor role: they all ask for mentoring (probably because they saw someone on YouTube tell them that's a good way to get ahead) but then they don't pay the slightest attention to anything you tell them.

This is what will run our world when we finally step aside. Weep for the future.

Given this reality, maybe we need more school shootings.