Generation gap

I generally don’t favour washing dirty linen in public, but there’s an observation worth sharing with the readers. A family quarrel gives the opportunity not only to exchange pleasantries such as: you always…, you never…, you don’t care…, you don’t give a shit…, I wish you would…, etc., but also to rediscover some truths about society. Those short musings below are only generalisations, but I suppose there’s more than a grain of truth in them.

The generations of my parents and mine both in general think they deserve something. The older tend to claim what they deserve from the state – they believe the government (an imaginary body) has a duty to provide them with job security, (lifelong) unemployment benefits, decent pension benefits (when they are too tired of working), health service and some other privileges, for free. Those people, born and brought up in the socialist country often have little notion of economics and its principles. The belief that the state is responsible for their fate was built up in the years of communism, the times when the myth of omnipotence of the state was spread. Meanwhile they do not wonder where the state gets the money, they’re claiming the government is dirty bound to give them, from and gripe about the bad state when it collects taxes. They see no link between revenues and expenditures of state budget as if they believed in a piggy bank which can be broken whenever the trade unionists, unemployed or pensioners demand more money (in the US uncle Ben has a machine to print money, fortunately in Poland it doesn’t work). The sad truth is that the biggest link is between what you produce and what you get. The other story is that in many cases employees are not remunerated fairly (in a relation to how they contribute to company’s profits or overall welfare) – they may be both under- (usually private sector) and overpaid (usually state sector).

The older generation ware spoiled by socialism, the younger one begin to be spoiled by affluence. Their economic views are more liberal – they don’t expect the state to help them in life but only to make their lives easier. As they (or we?) have grown up in the new reality, they demand more from their parents, from others, from life. They often get for free what their parents had to work hard for. Their parents in their age or when they were older would dream about a black&white TV set, a voucher for a car (Fiat 126p probably), or a pair of jeans from Pewex. Most of today’s teenagers and my peers get it without any effort. Trips abroad, new iPhones, cars, brand clothes – they take for granted they should get all of this. “These are my best years, I should have fun, someone else is going to pay for this” – this kind of reasoning is still not alarmingly common, but I see it more and more often around, mostly among people younger than me. Then you may see a string of comments posted by some frustrated adults under an article like the one about a next studniówka whim. I read almost all 311 comments, one reassuring conclusion that emerges is the frequent opinion that you are adult when you earn money and can take responsibility for your deeds, not when your parents give you a few hundred zlotys to rent a room in a four-star hotel to shag your girlfriend after a school ball.

Thank God the two stances above to not apply to my family, but somehow infect us and our perception of the world. There’s no catch-all solution on how to live to be happy. My parents’ friends gave their children everything they thought they deserved: private English classes (needless to say they speak English much worse than the author of this blog, who has learnt mostly on his own), at least two holiday forays abroad in a year, when they grew up they bought them cars and even flats (quite affluent the were indeed). They were breaking their backs for years, working from dawn to dusk to give their children everything that could make their lives more comfortable. Now the children not only don’t show any gratitude for what they were given but also hold out for more and are too lazy to work and earn money. “Why, if the parents will give…?”