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You know how kids just can’t do anything wrong in their parents’ eyes?

While my dad was never very successful, he grew up as a typical Aussie male.. He bought a few Holdens, got a trade, bought a boat, got married then divorced, then met my mother and sold the boat and had a family. He’d always told me how the choices that he made in life were never good enough for his dad and how he never had any support from him. On mum’s side, her mum was sick and her dad was pretty much a no show after her early teens, so she had to fend for herself from a young age with little support once again. Her dad has always given her a hard time about the choices that she has made in life too.

This seems quite common talking to a lot of  mates’ parents. Their parents would always be disappointed by them – things like what career they chose, that they didn’t buy a house early enough, got married too late and so on.

Turn it around though, and things appear to be completely different now. A considerable portion of my friends since leaving school have either travelled, and blown their cash in sacrifice of life experience, or bummed around at uni and not really achieved much, and with the full support of their parents! It’s like the Baby Boomers have learned that the way that they did it was wrong. They are almost giving us approval, or consent to go out there and just live – not necessarily find a safe job or start a family – just enjoy life.

Maybe it’s the way that we portray our lives to our parents – I know that my parents are very proud of the way that my fiancee and I are living our lives. Working now – going overseas next year. My dad is extremely proud of the way that I can go out drinking with the boys without my fiancee, and she trusts me, and vice-versa.

All things considered, the Baby Boomers seem to have faith in their kids – the Gen Y’s, despite some pretty poor decisions on our behalf from time to time.

Maybe they are just learning that there is in fact more than one way to live your life? Or have they just had such a safe life by taking their parents’ advice and getting a safe job, buying a house early and starting a family young, that they are happy to see their kids out there experiencing new things and taking some risks? Risks that they never took and now regret it?

I posted an entry called “Is this living?” not so long ago. In the entry I mentioned a motocross rider that was more afraid of working a boring 9-5 job than dying doing something that really made him feel alive.

On the weekend I had to go to work as my team was moving some servers. It was a full weekend’s work and on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed it – I enjoy the physical work for a change. Unfortunately though, one of the team members invited to “help” was just an absolute waste of space. All he did was get in the way and essentially cable things incorrectly, which I would then have to come back and do properly later anyway. Long story short he cost us time and money by being there and we would have been ten times better off if he just stayed at home.

This is a man that only wears clothes in shades of brown or grey, smells like a stale closet, and by the sounds of it the most exciting thing he has ever done was catch the bus to work when his car had broken down.

The whole weekend he’d try and strike up a conversation with anyone, but it was just never about anything important. It was always about his cats, or how he liked earl grey tea or something. About two hours into the second day of working with him I realised that he is a man with pretty much nothing else in his life than dinner and TV at home, driving to and from work, and working itself. What a sad life!

While I don’t want to come across as arrogant, I suppose it gives me a bit of a boost – my life is just so much more exciting.

It’s just further confirmed my plans for life. I just can’t do the “same old same old” that a lot of people tend to sink into. It seems to be a typical theme for Gen Y’s to need to live their life with plenty of change to the Baby Boomers in this respect, and maybe it is just our impatient nature, but to be honest I don’t really care. Life’s too short to just do the same thing over and over and over. I need to mix it up a LOT!

I write a lot on here about money and the economic situation of the world, and I’m usually pretty negative about things. Talking to those in my office, where pretty much everyone is under the age of 30, most others have the same attitude. That said, it’s only the opinion of the older generations that we are so negative. I’ll explain…

It’s well known that most Gen Y’s aren’t very loyal in a workplace sense. They are happy to jump ship after a short period of time just for some extra money here or there. Apparently the way we were brought up, we have a short attention span or something. I’m not sure, someone was telling me about it once but I wasn’t really listening… haha!

Does this extend further than just employment though? Local car manufacturer Holden is in a heap of financial trouble at the moment – being down the food chain from General Motors isn’t the best place to be in an economic crisis. Talking to the Baby Boomers, they think it would be a great loss to this country to lose Holden, but talking to the Generation Y’s paints a completely different picture. The general consensus is that Holden have been producing poorly built, inefficient and overpriced cars for too long now. Technology has moved in leaps and bounds for European and Japanese cars, but in Australia we are essentially using the same outdated technology as the yanks. It’s nobody’s fault that Holden is going under but their own, and good riddance.

In this specific example I see a crash and “the world coming down” as a massive positive. The US and Australia manufacturers will be brought to their knees and forced to produce more efficient cars and work with a business model that actually makes money rather than lose it. Lots of other people just see the doom and gloom and not the positives from it. These are usually the older generations.

Now does that make us positive or negative? Loyal or disloyal? Short term I can acknowledge that peoples lives will be “ruined”, but once again I see a positive in that. Without making too much of a generalisation about Holden employees, the meaning in their life is in their car, their TV and their Jim Beam. Now while I like cars, watch too much TV and enjoy the drink, I’d be stoked to live in a world where all three didn’t exist. Others would be literally lost, but before long find some real meaning in their life, and enjoy it for real rather than all the superficial crap that we live for nowadays.

While bankruptcy and losing your car and what not is a big negative in the short term, it offers such a huge positive in the long term.

All of this doom and gloom has enormous positives out of the other side, yet the Baby Boomers struggle to see this. Why so?

My father for one would be sad to see the Aussie icon that is Holden lost to the Global Financial Crisis, but I’m happy for it to sink. House prices crashing, banks falling, economies crumbling, exchange rates not so good. Baby boomers would faint if this stuff wasn’t sugar coated when it all happens. However what is bad for some is great for others, you just need to be able to open your mind and explore the situation, rather than just look at it with your blinkers on. Gen Y’s are able to see the positives in this situation much more easily than the Baby Boomers.

Gen Y’s are loyal, Baby Boomers just can’t see that in order for their country to become strong again they need to cut off the dead wood first.