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Welcome to Pushback

By Rob Anderson - Jun 1st, 2008 at 4:11 pm

A lot of people think they know a lot about my generation. Take, for example, Morley Safer, who in a segment on 60 Minutes last year labeled us “narcissistic praise hounds” who need to be coddled to get work done. Or Robert Lanham, who wrote a “call to arms against Millennials” in Radar magazine last month. “They think updating a spreadsheet while simultaneously posting to a Twitter account about the latest gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill,” he explained. “And,” he added, “they’re always doing stupid shit, but rarely getting called on it.” And then there is Jason Mattera, the young conservative activist who likes to argue that America’s young ones are “instinctively conservative.” People my age may be a lot of things, but we aren’t narcissists, we aren’t dumbasses, and we certainly aren’t conservatives—collectively speaking, at least.

I’ve come to distrust anyone who claims to have created the definitive book, article, or study on the Millennials. How could they have? We’re an amorphous, shifting bunch that’s still in the process of defining itself. In reality, you can’t tell a generation of Americans what it is, or what it is destined to become. Those who make up the Greatest Generation didn’t become war heroes because pundits told them about the sacrifices they would one day make. And Baby Boomers weren’t Baby Boomers—at least in the way we understand them now—by age 20. Creating a generational identity takes time. It happens through doing, not telling. And it should unfold on the terms of those who are being defined and not in the language of a bygone era.

When it comes down to it, that’s what Pushback is all about. You won’t see many posts on this blog claiming to successfully characterize millions of young Americans. What you will see, though, is a collection of posts on everything from politics to fashion written and edited by a diverse group of young people. These posts will record in real time the developing thoughts and ideas of a cross-section of Millennials. And maybe, just maybe, at some point in the future the sum of these posts will begin to look like a first draft of a working definition of what our generation “is.”

In a way, Pushback is sort of like MTV’s reality show The Real World before it got really trashy: an experiment in which we jam strangers into a confined space and ask them to share with the world their thoughts, their ideas, and their work. I don’t know exactly what the sum of our posts will say about us, but I do know what they won’t say: that we’re narcissists, conservatives, or dumbasses.

That’s the hope, at least.