“I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work,” actor Ashton Kutcher said during his acceptance speech at the 2013 Nickelodeon Teen Choice Awards Sunday night.
The “That 70’s Show” actor continued on in his speech to recount several menial jobs he held before becoming famous, commenting “And I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a stepping stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job.”
In the days since Kutcher has become a welcome, albeit unexpected, role model for a generation that has at times been written off as a bunch of deluded narcissists. Unfortunately, many Millennial-haters are spot on in their critiques.
Academically, younger Americans have been bred to believe that they should be rewarded handsomely for doing less and less work. Grade inflation in American high schools and colleges is rampant, despite the fact that students today spend significantly less time studying than their parents or grandparents. Many students now believe they deserve an “A” so badly that their immediate inclination upon receiving a lower mark is to squabble with their professors rather than double-down on studying the following semester.
Professionally, multiple surveys have found that Millennials suffer from a debilitating sense of job entitlement. It’s difficult to take the generation seriously when younger Americans expect both higher pay and steady bonuses coupled with flexible work schedules and more vacation time. They’re unhappy that six-figure salaries and big promotions aren’t handed out like the little-league participation trophies that flood mom and dad’s shelves back home.
Politically, the most visible movement dominated by young Americans the past decade has been the almost cartoonish Occupy Wall Street protests, in which internet-savvy iPad users tweeted their demands – a laundry list of “free” items like free health care, free college and across-the-board debt-forgiveness. Most young activists actually believed they could influence an election by simply camping out in filthy public parks, skipping the time-consuming work of grass-roots organizing (an activity in which OWS’s older, and infinitely more influential, Tea Party counterparts excelled).
Some would even argue that the Millennial generation is really only guilty of possessing a healthy over-confidence about life, as opposed to a hyper-inflated sense of self-worth. Perhaps, but Millennial’s broad belief that they should receive free contraception, ever-increasing student loan tax subsidies and the right to stay on their parents’ healthcare plans almost a decade into adulthood looks more like a sense of entitlement than optimism.
In the age of reality TV and inflated expectations, where instant fame or effortless success seem like feasible options for Millennials, it’s incredibly refreshing to hear a figure like Kutcher remind teenagers how he paid his dues mopping floors and washing dishes before becoming a celebrity. But what are the odds that “opportunity looks a lot like hard work” replaces “YOLO” in the youth lexicon any time soon? Not likely.
