Teens, Texts, and the Marshmallow Test

Introduction

I’ve blogged before about the nexus of parenting, dopamine, and social media, but have come to realize the problem is worse than I originally thought.  In this post I look at how social media and the popularity of cell phone text messaging are reshaping not just our behavior but aspects of our psychology.  In particular I’ll examine how the influence of electronic socializing may be significantly undermining the prospects of the next crop of adults.

Evolution of phone use

In the beginning we just had phones, one per household.  You reached your friend if a) he was home, and b) nobody else was using the phone.  So often the phone just rang and rang, or you dictated a message to your friend’s little brother, who most likely only pretended to take it down.  There was no expectation of recourse if your phone call didn’t reach its target.

Then we got call waiting  and the answering machine, which meant that if your friend’s little brother didn’t simply ignore your waiting call, or somebody didn’t accidentally delete your voice-mail, you had a pretty good chance of getting a call back sooner or later.

And then we got the cell phone.  For the first time in history our friends could expect to reach us at any time.  The phone wasn’t a household device anymore, but a personal device, so we could now hold our friends directly accountable for not answering or returning our call.  Sure, this device brought us freedom—from having to be organized, from waiting around at home for a call—but it also brought the shackles of greater accountability.

Finally, we have reached a saturation point with modern cell phones and smartphones:  our friends can now expect a response even when we don’t have time to talk.  Text messaging is tremendously handy for the person initiating the dialog, but can create a social burden for us when we receive a text.  Why?  Because somehow our ever-connected society has evolved to expect an immediate response whenever we send a text message.  The personal cell phone has become like the red phone in the White House.

Is this even true?

Okay, that’s a pretty strong generalization I’ve just made, and you’re right to question on what basis I made it. 

First, I have my own experience:  over the years I’ve received an increasing number of text messages even though I almost never respond.  I’ve had to train friends and colleagues not to rely on this mode of communication, by telling them flat out, “I never look at texts.”  They have come to accept this idiosyncrasy, much as you’d accept a friend being lactose-intolerant.

Meanwhile, we’ve all seen people, particularly teens but adults too, pausing in the middle of a face-to-face conversation to answer their cell phone or return a text.  Sometimes while texting they’ll pretend to still be listening to you while clearly losing the thread of what you’re saying.  This phenomenon has made it into a “New Yorker” cartoon, and my kids’ babysitter even committed this rudeness, seeming to forget I was her employer.

Of course such anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, so I turn to the testimony of a thought leader in this space, the YouTube artist sWooZie, who has created a video called “Textually Active” (subtitled “The art of text messaging and how people mess it up!”).  In this video, sWooZie codifies the impatience I’ve been talking about:  “You know what’s annoying?  People who take hours to text back, especially when they hit me up in the first place…  If you get busy, just say ‘In class - brb,’ or ‘@ work - brb.’”  (Thankfully, he doesn’t include “Driving – brb,” though many teens cite “not wanting to be rude” as their rationale for texting while driving, as described here and here.)

More insight from sWooZie

Poor response time isn’t the only issue sWooZie tackles; he also airs his grievance with replies that are too brief:  “The letter ‘K’ is only acceptable when somebody is stating a fact or looking for confirmation.  For example, ‘Hey, I’m in your driveway, let’s go,’ or ‘Hey, I’m on my way...’  If you text me the letter ‘K’ for any other reason, don’t be looking all confused when I show up in my Goku outfit ‘bout to bust a Kamehameha up in your grille!” 

But sWooZie’s greatest gripe is with people who don’t respond at all to a text: 

And then there’s those times when you’re sitting at home relaxing, checking your Facebook, and you see your friend update their status, like, “Ohh my gawwww!  Powerpuff Girls marathon on Cartoon Network!”  And instead of commenting on their wall you text them, because you’ve got special friend privileges, unlike their other 90 billion Facebook friends, and like two hours go by, and you ain’t heard jack, and you start thinking:  You know what?  I don’t even like stupid Powerpuff Girls!  Why’d I text them in the first place?  I seen you update your Instagram like two minutes ago.  Oh, you’re just gonna totally ignore me, like I don’t even exist.  Now I’m in a bad mood when I go to watch “Glee.”  My night is ruined.

Significantly, the ignored message that we see sWooZie send his Facebook friend is of a trivial nature:  “Lol. saw ur fb post. Bubbles FTW!!”  The content of this message isn’t important; what matters to sWooZie is what the exchange (or rather the lack of exchange) says about his social currency.  Each text he sends is a social overture, and each lack of response becomes, for him, a litmus test of his social standing.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sWooZie.  Actually, “Textually Active” is a funny, clever movie, so much so that I almost wonder if sWooZie is doing something sly with it—a satire, perhaps, of the insecurity bred into us by this texting, social-media-obsessed culture.  Even if it is, the viewer response seems sincere and earnest.  To date, the video has received over 7 million hits, with over 100,000 positive comments and fewer than 2,000 negative ones.  A lot of viewers commiserate with him:  “SO TRUE MAN,” “We all been there,” “I know how you feel this happens to me and it SUCKS.”

One viewer comment on sWooZie’s video presents a compelling counterpoint:  “My texting peeve is when people over-exaggerate the emotional worth of a text and get all pissy when I don’t text even though I tell everyone that I don’t like texting especially when I am playing a videogame.”  This is a tricky matter, though, isn’t it?  Who is the ultimate arbiter of the emotional worth of a text?  And how is sWooZie supposed to know when his pal is playing a video game?  (Oh, right … Twitter.)

Texts as tokens

Ultimately, messages of 140 characters or less—unless written by a master poet—aren’t all that eloquent, and the rapid-fire, ultra-casual nature of the medium isn’t normally associated with deathless prose.  I’m no Facebook expert, but I gather it’s a pretty informal medium as well, with most of the value coming from immediacy, not eloquence.  All this social commerce, then, seems to emphasize the act of texting—the gesture of the text—above the content.  In other words, each text is more like a token, like social currency, than it is a real communication between two people.

A friend of mine had a reunion recently with a bunch of high school friends.  They all went out to dinner, and several of them were texting and tweeting and Instagramming throughout the evening.  Two of them posted the same photo of their dessert to their Facebook pages, and then one got all sore because her friend’s photo got more “likes.”  Later, the friend with the higher number of likes started to freak out because her cell phone battery was dying.  She eventually talked a bartender into charging it for her.  And for what?  Wasn’t the point of the evening the old friends who were right in front of her?  All these likes and texts strike me as the social equivalent of a morphine drip:  continual social affirmation, little bursts of dopamine, that become practically addictive.  The smartphone, though cordless, is like an umbilical cord.  Even when you’re in the presence of friends, the phone is a hedge against loneliness and obscurity.

And thus, modern socializing of the electronic sort becomes a matter of quantity over quality, with an emphasis on immediacy and ease.  People used to write letters, which were a lot of work, and which didn’t get a very quick reply, but these were deeper communications, and documents you might feel like keeping.  Now we have texts and tweets that are dashed off quickly, read in seconds, and then forgotten.  They’re the social equivalent of fast food:  no waiting, little cost, but not particularly nourishing.

So what?

By now you’re tired of this, and I realize I sound like a scold, and anyway what’s wrong with being impatient socially when our social media and texting technologies do seem to give us what we want?  Isn’t a wide network with casual shout-outs better than moldering away by ourselves somewhere, reading a fusty old novel, or knitting, or (gasp!) blogging?

The answer is, this widespread social impatience starts to look like a real problem when considered from a certain perspective.  I’m thinking of a psychological test performed over several years at a nursery preschool on the campus of Stanford University in the late 1960s, and described in detail in a “New Yorker” article from 2009.  As you shall see, this study considered a link between behavior and character that psychologists might do well to revisit with electronic socializing in mind.

Here’s how the test went:  a researcher would sit a child down in a chair and offer him a marshmallow, and a proposal:  if the child could sit in front of that marshmallow without eating it while the researcher left for a few minutes, the child could have two marshmallows upon the researcher’s return.  The goal of the experiment, initially, was to observe (via hidden camera) the mental processes that enabled some children to delay gratification, while others gave in and scarfed down the single marshmallow right away.

The real discovery of the experiment came when the man running the experiment, Walter Mischel, revisited his test results many years later, and compared them to more recent information about the subjects.  He “sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school.  He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to ‘cope well with problems’ and get along with their peers.  He also requested their S.A.T. scores.”  

On the basis of the responses he discovered that those who as children failed to hold out for the second marshmallow—“low delayers,” he called them—were “more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home.  They got lower S.A.T. scores.  They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships.  The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”

Comparisons

According to a CTIA Wireless Association website, today’s average teen sends 60 text messages a day; the average teen girl sends 100 text messages a day.  Research reported here states that the average smartphone user checks his phone every six minutes, or about 150 times a day.  This compulsion, needless to say, is a learned behavior; after all, a generation ago there was no texting, and smartphones didn’t exist.  Modern technology is shaping our behavior.

Similarly, the behavior of the marshmallow test subjects was shaped by their circumstances.  For example, “when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto.  ‘When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,’ he says.  ‘And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself.  You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.’”  Sure enough, he and his researchers were able to teach these strategies to children and greatly increase their marshmallow delay time.  In other words, children can be taught patience.

Synthesis

Of course teaching children patience isn’t a new concept, but why should we even bother if we then give them smartphones and social media access that seem to be systematically teaching them impatience?  How can we expect teenagers to sit down and focus on their homework, their piano practice, or even their daydreams if they’re stopping every five minutes to check their smartphone or send a text?

For a lot of parents, it’s probably too late to intervene.  Trying to take away a teenager’s smartphone and Facebook would work about as well as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  But parents with younger children and preteens can take important steps now to prevent them from one day becoming slaves to their smartphones.

A few recommendations

For one thing, we can set the right example.  All the lecturing in the world won’t help if you’re tuning out your kid every five minutes to fire off a text of your own.  (And no, engaging in such behaviors doesn’t make you seem young and hip.  Your kids still think you’re a dork, and they’re right.)  I don’t text, and I don’t automatically put face-to-face interactions on hold just because my phone tells me to.

If I’m trying to write, I will tell my kids to leave me alone so I can concentrate.  (In a bit of wonderful irony, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston—from whom I once took a writing class—has admitted to once giving her young child a whole bag of marshmallows just to keep him out of her hair so she could write.)  Do my daughters follow my example?  Well, they aren’t begging for cell phones, and they love to write too.

Another thing we parents can do is to work extra hard on teaching our kids patience now, to try to ingrain it in them.  I’ve done this all my kids’ lives simply because a) kids are whiners, b) whining can be terribly effective, and c) I’ve always sought to keep the balance of power in my favor.  Years before reading about the marshmallow test, I accidentally developed a version of it myself.  At potlucks and barbecues, my wife and I set limits on how many desserts the kids can have:  they’re allowed one small and one full-sized treat.  (I know, this is probably too much.  I’m weak.)  Well, early on one of my kids had already selected her two treats when something even better came along, brought by a potluck latecomer.  On this basis she asked if she could please, please, please have a third treat.  DENIED!  I let her cry for awhile before taking the lesser dessert off her hands so she could get the good stuff.  (As an adult, and a scrawny one at that, I have no dessert limit.)

At the same time, I set an important new rule:  going forward, the kids had better wait awhile before making their selections, because when something better comes along there’ll never again be a Dad-fostered substitution.  This rule puts a special strain on my daughters’ delay capability, because there’s no guarantee of a better dessert later, nor that the current front-runner will still be available.  But my kids tolerate this policy, because they have no other choice.  And it’s remarkable how long they’ll wait around for a better dessert to show up.

My third recommendation for avoiding the crevasse of electronic socializing is both the easiest and the hardest:  don’t let your teens have cell phones or social media accounts.  The hard part here will be convincing yourself and your spouse that this is a reasonable policy.  My earlier post on this topic makes a case for this, so I won’t repeat myself, but I’ll add that the Ph.D. child psychologist whose lecture inspired that post doesn’t let her kids have cell phones or Facebook either, and I’m sure more authorities will come out against such enslavement as time goes on.

I don’t kid myself that this policy will go down easy with my daughters.  Sure, I’ll discuss it with them, but they won’t have an easy time persuading me.  The most predictable argument—“All my friends have them!”—will get them nowhere.  After all, the CTIA says that only 77% of teens 12-17 have cell phones.  That leaves 23% who don’t, which is a very spacious minority for my kids to occupy.  After all, our household doesn’t even have cable TV.

Just the other day my older daughter asked when she’ll get a cell phone.  (“I’m just curious,” she added diplomatically.)  I replied, “How about never?”  (Obviously “never” isn’t a straight answer; of course she’ll have a cell phone as an adult.  Maybe even sooner, if society evolves beyond its current phone-induced OCD.)   I challenged my daughter to make a case for a cell phone.

“Well, it could lead to greater freedom,” she said.  “I could go to more places by myself, and you and Mom wouldn’t have to worry.”  I told her that our merely knowing where she is won’t keep her out of trouble, and added, “Besides, if your parents can reach you whenever they want, that’s not really freedom at all.  Freedom is having enough trust that we don’t need to know where you are.”  The conversation continued for a good while, and I was pleased to see my daughter making good points and not just gagging on my Kool-Aid.  And the best part?  We had each other’s complete attention.  Nobody was dinking around with a phone.

2012 - The Year in Review

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

There was an awful lot of news in 2012.  In my opinion, far too much—I’m actually kind of relieved I won’t be getting “Newsweek” anymore.  (I canceled because they’ve gone to an online-only format, but would have probably canceled anyway because they started running cigarette ads, which for me is automatic grounds for a lifetime boycott.)

If, like me, you did a halfhearted job of staying on top of all the news last year, you’re in luck:  in this annual post I recap the most important stories, and as a special bonus show how I’d actually already covered them in an easily-digested and (I hope) humorous way in the pages of albertnet.  As usual, I’ve had to stretch here and there to make this work, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll giggle at one or two of my gyrations.

January

Of course the really exciting story for January was the sinking of the huge cruise ship Costa Concordia, and the subsequent arrest of the captain, who abandoned ship early on.  It came out that he’d crashed it in the process of showing off, taking the ship in close to shore as a salute to some pals there.  Not surprisingly, he’d been drinking.  But not only that, he’d been drinking wine, and with a beautiful woman!  Every article I saw emphasized these things.  The Guardian wrote, “The captain who steered his 114,000-tonne vessel into rocks off the Italian coast last Friday was drinking wine at dinner with a ‘beautiful’ woman minutes earlier, a witness has claimed.”  The Daily Beast wrote that a “passenger told an Italian newspaper that Schettino had been drinking with an attractive blonde at 8:35 the night of the accident.”

Wine and fancy women … what could be more unbecoming for a ship captain to indulge in?  I have a strong feeling that he’d have gotten off easier if his drinking had been, instead, a couple cold beers with some guy friends.  Plus, he’d possibly have had more luck modulating his intake.  My “Ask Dr. Beer” post in January, which ran two days after the wreck for maximum timeliness, was designed to suggest all this without, I hoped, alienating the wine-loving readers of albertnet.  I all but openly scolded the Concordia captain:  “Ads for good booze always say, ‘Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.’  That’s a good start, but why should people who can’t appreciate quality be let off the hook?  They should behave responsibly, too!”

February

The important and exciting news event in February was “The Artist” winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and being the first silent film to win since 1927.  It’s important to acknowledge that “silent film” is really a misnomer, because “The Artist” also won the Oscar for best score.  To demonstrate my uncanny ability to predict the Oscar winner, two weeks in advance, I blogged at length about another “silent film” that should have won Oscars in these two categories.  Surely you already know what movie I’m referring to, and caught the sly reference right away when you saw my pre-Oscar post last year.  What?  You’re lost?  I’m referring, of course, to my two February posts about the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall” (here and here).

Maybe you haven’t seen that movie in a long time (in which case it’s time to find out which of your pals has the best home theater and go rent the DVD), and you don’t immediately recall that it’s a dialog-free movie.  Well, it is.  The main character, Pink (Bob Geldof) does have one line, but this line is the exception that proves the rule.  In fact, he manages to flub it.  What the audience hears—“Take that, fuckers!”—is not what his lips say, which is “Next time, fuckers!”  Maybe this glitch is what cost this fine movie the Oscars it so richly deserved.  (Best Picture that year went to “Ghandi”—yawn—and Best Adaptation Score went to “Victor/Victoria”—like anybody remembers a single note of that movie’s music.)

March

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in March, that being the long-awaited explanation of how waves and other ocean features can actually glow at night.  “National Geographic Daily News” broke the story here.  The article states, “The biological light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of marine microbes called phytoplankton—and now scientists think they know how some of these life-forms create their brilliant blue glow.”

I paid tribute to this wonderful finding with my “Earth Hour” post.  Granted, it was a subtle tribute—Ididn’t lean too heavily on the light pollution angle, for fear of diluting my more important message about energy conservation (and the only slightly less important stuff about a three-pound gummy worm, Earth Hour haters, and grizzlies mating with polar bears). 

April

In April the business world was taken by surprise when Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a tiny company valued at only half that much.  As reported in the New York Times, Zuckerberg declared, “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.” 

Do you reckon Zuckerberg was talking about photos of brilliant bioluminescent seascapes?  Yeah, right.  More likely this acquisition was simply the fastest way to drive up sexting traffic.  (Remember Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil?”  Perhaps Facebook’s should be, “Be evil.”)

I’m glad my daughters are too young for Facebook and Instagram.  The rapper Nas describes being shocked by his own daughter’s being caught up in this:  “This morning I got a call, nearly split my wig.  This social network said Nas go and get your kid.  She’s on Twitter, I know she ain’t gon’ post no pic of herself underdressed, no inappropriate shit, right.  Her mother cried when she answered.  Said she don’t know what got inside this child’s mind, she planted a box of condoms on her dresser then she Instagrammed it.”

If you’re thinking I should lighten up about social networks and teens, then I invite you to check out my April blog post “Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media.” I’m not as well-spoken as Nas, but I gave my best shot at explaining why teenagers really shouldn’t be on Facebook and Twitter.

May

Big news—and welcome news, in my opinion—hit in May when Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning soft drinks in serving sizes greater than 16 ounces (click here for details).  As reported by the Washington Post, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association responded, “The city is not going to address the obesity problem by attacking soda, because soda is not driving the obesity rate.”  This certainly has an NRA-esque whiff of BS about it … he might as well say, “Sugary drinks don’t make people fat—fat makes people fat!”  McDonald’s tweeted, “We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them.”  Yeah, McDonald’s, that’s been working out really well.

Perhaps it seems hypocritical for me to condemn sources of empty calories, because I devoted an entire blog post in May to describing my desperate quest for sugary substances.  I lamented, “The giant handful of gels I’d hastily grabbed somehow numbered only two.  I had two bottles of energy drink but no mix.  By the time I reached the ranger’s station on Diablo I’d gone through 1 2/3 bottles of the drink and both gels.”  I went on to describe my salvation in the form of free frozen green tea gelato:  “It tasted like lotion, that expensive lotion you get at spas.  Frankly I didn’t care for it whatsoever except it was free, it had 140 calories, and as I said before I had no plan for feeding myself.”  There’s no hypocrisy here though:  like all distance athletes, I represent a special case.  Someday I’m going to write an entire post about why buying soft drinks should require a special license.

June

There was an important Supreme Court ruling in June, but it didn’t get much press; halfway through the year people must have already been tired of serious news.  ABC News came to the rescue with a classic fluff piece about Bon Jovi launching a new line of pasta sauces.  That was the headline, anyway.  In actuality, it wasn’t the singer who launched the product, but his father, whose name isn’t really Bon Jovi.  Both father and son are actually named Bongiovi, which is a great name for a pasta sauce but perhaps not the best for a rock star.  So, to recap:  a rock singer who is not named Bon Jovi didn’t launch a pasta sauce, but his non-famous father did.

Naturally you'll wonder why I didn't include anything about this in my June advice column, “Ask Dr. Pasta.”  Well, it’s because nobody wrote in to ask about it!  What?  You thought I made up all those questions?  You think “Ask Dr. Pasta,” and “Ask Dr. Beer” before it, were fake advice columns?  You think there’s no such person as Chip M of Boston, MA or Lawrence H of Greensboro, NC?  Well ... you’re right.  But if Bon Jovi isn’t really Bon Jovi, can’t I cut some corners too?

July

Needless to say, the biggest story of the year came out in July:  the discovery—or possible discovery—of the Higgs boson.  The importance of this scientific achievement cannot be overstated.  In fact, it cannot be understated, or even stated, unless you’re a rock star of the scientific world.  After reading several accounts of this discovery by very enthusiastic writers with great flair for confusing the reader, I’ve decided this Higgs boson thing should be nicknamed “the Emperor’s new particle.”  (The most helpful reference I found on this is here, though the “American Voices” feature in “The Onion” was also helpful, with a woman on the street declaring, “Yeah, the Higgs boson is getting a lot of attention, but there are a lot of lower-profile bosons that are worth checking out if you get the chance.”)

Perhaps most noteworthy thing I can point out about the Higgs boson was that it was just about the only thing that is universally acknowledged to be “a thing” that I didn’t mention in my July “Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass” post, a sprawling epic docucomedventurdrama covering such diverse topics as camping, cycling, logical fallacies, missing receipts, Mono Lake, Vladimir Nabokov, paranoia, RVs, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Tioga Pass, the undistributed middle, and Yosemite National Park.  And yet, to those who actually understand boson particles, this post, upon careful reading, turns out to be a masterpiece of understatement and subtle insinuation.  The story is, in fact, thoroughly flooded with between-the-lines illumination of the true nature of the Higgs boson.  If anybody ever creates the literary equivalent of the CERN particle accelerator, I will finally enjoy the sterling reputation I have so long deserved.

August

The most exciting news in August was the Curiosity rover landing on Mars.  This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the rover were simply a remote-controlled vehicle.  The really cool thing is that it will be able to think for itself when it gets its next software update, as described here. 

Speaking of thinking for yourself, I hope I don’t need to point out the obvious tie-in between this rover news and my three-part albertnet series on Artificial Intelligence that ran in August and September (click here, here, and here).  Naturally, being more interested in Earth than Mars, I focused my investigation on real-world—as in, our real-world—applications, such as whether you can speak into your iPhone and have it transcribe the text.  As I noted in my post, the iPhone does just well enough to be dangerous:  “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4S” comes out “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4 ass.”  I hope the Curiosity rover does better.

September

I know that I could drive lots of traffic to this blog by focusing on a really splashy news item for this month—namely, the release of the iPhone 5—but I’m not going to take the bait.  I also won’t pretend that the “Gangnam Style” Youtube video was actually important news.  (I’m hoping that using the phrases “iPhone 5” and “Gangham Style Youtube” twice each will be enough to get me a lot of pageviews.)  Well-informed people worldwide know that the big news this month was the groundbreaking BYU study finding that exercise can reduce the urgeto eat.

It’s kind of a shame this article beat me to the press (by just one day!) and thus my own article, “Nutrition for Endurance Cycling,” didn’t cause as great a sensation.  Echoing the BYU article, in my nutrition post I lament the lack of appetite I have right after a long bike ride, when eating is important:  “For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this ‘glycogen window.’  So, right after my ride, during which I drank a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies."  Yuck.

October

This month brought another toss-up for top news story:  Hurricane Sandy, or Felix Baumgartner parachuting from space?  Two things have swayed me to choose the latter.  First, Hurricane Sandy was downgraded from a full hurricane to a “super-storm,” which has the hackneyed sound of a Wal Mart promotional slogan.  Second, hurricanes are becoming so routine now, they'll eventually cease to make the news at all, along with senseless school shootings.  But parachuting from space?  That’s a totally new one.

Did albertnet cover Baumgartner’s exploit?  Well, not exactly, but it covered a similarly daring and/or foolish challenge that I myself took on.  What’s that?  You don’t remember it?  Well, didn’t I do something difficult involving altitude?  Didn’t I too fall to earth, albeit metaphorically, like a modern day Icarus?  Didn’t I too fuel myself with Red Bull?  (Okay, in my case it was sugar and caffeine from Cytomax and NoDoz, respectively, but we’re still talking about the core components of Red Bull.)  The main difference between my adventure and Baumgartner’s is that his looked really amazing though it came off without a hitch, while mine would have looked pretty boring and yet went horribly.  Oh, yeah:  and my brain, not Baumgartner’s, was a thin porridge by the end.  Check out this post if you don’t believe me.

November

Am I a man?  Well, my kids, when asked this question, usually say something like “Not really—you’re just a big daddy guy.”  It’s safe to say, however, that I’m a male, because I can’t see the forest for the trees, or however that goes.  To wit, I failed to notice an important post-election news story concerning a novel solution to the problem of leftover campaign signs.  A guy up in the Pacific Northwest recycles them, turning them into bicycle accessories:  “Peterson occasionally holds workshops in the art, demonstrating how he reuses the corrugated plastic material that’s used for lots of front yard-type political signs.  He cuts the sheets with a sharp craft knife or scissors into desired shapes and then stitches pieces together with nylon cable ties.  On some items, he uses a more sophisticated technique involving scoring the plastic and folding it.”

This is almost as good as not having election signs in the first place, a desire I expounded upon in detail that month.

December

The big news I was waiting for in December is more notable for almost not being reported at all.  I’m talking of course about the outcome of the Novartis drug recall I blogged about last month.  Several drugs—Excedrin, Gas-X, and my precious NoDoz among them—were recalled by Novartis a year ago because quality control problems in the factory were resulting in broken tablets and, worse, prescription drugs such as Percocet getting mixed up with over-the-counter remedies.

Novartis finally did get its act together, but the media barely covered this.  I searched this evening on “excedrin recall” and got just five Google News hits.  Four of them were unrelated to this topic (e.g., “Female Orgasm:  Serving an Evolutionary Function?”), but one—exactly one—covered the return of Excedrin to the shelves.  This was the Patch.com site for Hazelwood, MO.  Its editor wrote, “When Hazelwood Patch announced the recall, the article quickly became one of our most viewed articles.”  I think it’s worth noting that this article didn’t mention Gas-X or NoDoz.  I guess Hazelwood citizens are an alert, non-gassy people who mainly get a lot of headaches.  A quick look at its home page offers, I think, some insight into why.  The main headlines for today:  “Elderly Woman Robbed at Gunpoint and Carjacked, Assailant Captured in North County”; “Man Breaks In[to] Hazelwood Pet Store”; and, “Ask the Patch Pro:  Seeking Gun Safety Experts.”  Other articles on the homepage include “Gun Brought to Mall” and “Mugs in the News:  The Faces That Made This Week’s Crime Headlines.”  All this really makes me appreciate my relatively peaceful community.  If our local Patch had covered the Novartis recall at all, they’d probably have focused on Gas-X, given the popularity of legumes and vegan fare here.

Conclusion

If you made it to the end of this lengthy post, I think the rest of your 2013 will be gravy!  And if you’re reading this long, long after the year 2012, I hope this recap gave you a good sense of what life was like in that difficult, exciting, tedious year.

Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media

Introduction

I attended a lecture recently about parenting.  The speaker, a Ph.D. psychologist, talked a lot about biological factors such as neurotransmitters; specifically, about how motivating children can often be a contest between the parents’ goals for the child and the various dopamine sources available to him.  Put more simply, it’s really hard to get a kid to do his homework when he’s engrossed in a movie, video game, or the Internet.  “Just a sec” is the kid’s equivalent of the snooze button.

Another thread of the lecture involved the ways evolving society is making it even harder for kids to focus on activities like schoolwork, given the new distractions facing them, like texting and social media.  In addition to traditional sources of dopamine (e.g., calorie-dense food, booze, drugs) the lecturer mentioned “social commerce,” which she described as the kind of widespread but shallow interactions offered by sites like Facebook and Twitter.  These interactions, she declared, produce more dopamine than the deeper connections with close friends and family.

In this post I examine the intersection of dopamine, social media, and kids.  Whether or not you ultimately agree with my observations and philosophies, perhaps I’ll help you to ponder some good questions.

Dopamine and me

Dopamine isn’t happiness, and doesn’t lead to happiness.  It is the neurotransmitter most associated with pleasure.  From an evolutionary perspective, its job was to motivate the kind of behavior—e.g., eating as much calorie-dense food as possible—that would increase the chances of survival.  (If cavemen ate like supermodels, the human race wouldn’t have made it.)  Dopamine production is stimulated also by sex, novelty, high risk activities, rest, and sleep—anything ancient man needed to survive.  In modern society, dopamine is also produced by winning (and its illusory cousins like scoring in a video game), shopping, passive entertainment like TV, and even TV ads (which provide novelty and, I suppose, the notion of hope).

Personally, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with dopamine.  “Love” because hey, what’s not to love about pleasure?  Hate because I’ve experienced how dopamine can manipulate me.  As a teenager, especially during the year after my parents’ divorce, I got pretty heavily into TV, recording some pretty stupid programs and watching them all afternoon after school.  I felt glutted by cheap spectacle but was too lazy to figure out something better to do.  To this day I’m easily mesmerized by TV, as is my wife; our solution is to eschew it entirely (i.e., we don’t have cable, nor an antenna).  Occasionally we’ll go on a video binge, renting five or six episodes of, say, “30 Rock” and watching them over the course of an evening or two.

I’m similarly wary of caffeine.  As an impressionable youth I remember my dad getting almost panicky during a road trip due to caffeine withdrawal.  He explained, as we took an off-ramp to a convenience store, that if he didn’t have coffee every two hours he got a splitting headache.  I found this really disturbing, and as an adult I still prefer not to be beholden to caffeine (or any substance).  Don’t get me wrong:  I love the way caffeine makes me feel—but I also fear how it can enable us to deprive ourselves of sleep.  Meanwhile, I’m as cheap as they come and refuse to pay for Starbucks, fancy beans, all the equipment, etc.  So I use No-Doz, and only before bike rides.

Beyond these practical matters, I have an ideological problem with dopamine:  it makes me feel cheap—a slave to my most basic desires, like a lab hamster hammering a button to get food pellets.  The craving for something is base; the will power to resist this craving feels, to me, more evolved.  (Yes, I’m aware that though I am not a hamster in an experiment, I may yet resemble the dog trained to resist eating the milk-bone balanced on its snout until the master gives the okay.  Except that I am both the dog and the master.  My discipline is of a sort Don DeLillo has aptly described:  “You are making your own little totalitarian society ... where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people.”)

My neurotransmitter of choice?  Endorphins.  These I must earn, and getting them never feels like a failure of discipline.  So many desserts are advertized as “guilt-free”—note that there’s no need to construct the notion of a guilt-free workout.  But this isn’t just an ego thing.  Endorphins are simply more powerful.  If dopamine tells the brain, “that was nice,” endorphins offer actual exhilaration.

Dopamine and kids

Self-control such as I’ve just described is largely unavailable to kids.  I have often pondered how my own daughters—little angels though they may be—often seem a manifestation of pure appetite.  I’ll give you an example.  My younger daughter, when she was about four years old, got too much chocolate on Easter.  During the drive home from her grandma’s she hurled in the car.  A week or two later, at a birthday party, she asked if she could have a second “muffin.”  (She meant “cupcake,” but having never seen one before she thought it was just the tastiest damn muffin she’d ever had.)  I said to her, “No, that would be too much sugar.  Remember that giant chocolate rabbit you ate on Easter?  Do you really want to throw up like that again?”  She thought about this for a couple seconds and replied, “Yes!  Yes I do!”

Advertisers take full advantage of this unbridled desire, and peddle appalling things like sugary cereals directly to kids, harnessing the youngsters’ amazing whining power.  Advertisers push especially hard on teenagers, taking advantage of the awful combination of spending money and the lack of a fully formed prefrontal cortex (the seat of restraint and good judgment).  There’s another reason my family doesn’t have cable TV:  commercials.  I refuse to go toe-to-toe with the great evil advertising minds.  It’s much easier to remove the temptation than to fight it.

So it is with the ice cream truck.  You may think of this truck as a standard part of childhood, something you may even feel nostalgia for.  Not me.  In my book, the ice cream man is a terrorist.  My brothers and I would be happily playing with friends, and then we’d heard the music of the approaching truck, and the play would be forgotten as our friends would run inside and beg their moms for money—a fusillade of relentless pleading—and then, money in hand, they’d tear out into the street toward that truck as though their lives depended on it.  Then they’d eat their overpriced ice cream in front of my brothers and me as the truck drove on, seeding unrest through every neighborhood in its path.

Am I just bitter, envious to have missed out?  No, that’s not it.  Even as a kid I had found it a disgusting spectacle, from beginning to end.  Fast-forward a couple of decades:  the first time, as a parent, that I heard the ice cream truck coming, I launched a preemptive strike:  “Run to the windows, girls!” I cried.  “It’s the music truck!”  Fascinated, my daughters asked me what it was all about.  “He just drives around, playing music for kids,” I said.  After two or three years of this, my older daughter said, “Hey!  He’s not just playing music, he’s selling ice cream!”  I casually replied, “Yeah, well, that too.”  She fired back, “Can I have some money?”  I said, “Absolutely not, ever.  Don’t even ask.”

Dopamine and social media

It’s all well and good to make fun of kids and their cravings, but adults are pretty good at facilitating their own dopamine production:  faster, sportier cars; premium tequila and countless new microbrews; ever-fancier coffee beans and grinders and home espresso makers; clever ways to introduce dopamine into exercise, like heart rate monitors and Strava; and, to an explosive degree, social media.

To reiterate, social media serves a different role than close friends and family.  Close relationships are probably more closely associated with serotonin; in any event, they aren’t the same thing as social commerce.  When a person from your past comes out of nowhere and “friends” you, showing that he or she hasn’t forgotten about you and wants to get back in touch, that’s got to feel good.  I reckon that each time somebody posts something to your wall, you get a little dopamine hit.  I googled “facebook dopamine” and right away found an essay describing how the dopamine produced by social media is so powerful as to be addictive.  This essay cites a study of how often, and in what contexts, people are stopping what they’re doing to check in on their social media sites.  For example, 34% of those under 35 actually admit to doing this during a date.  (We could almost infer from this that social media offers more dopamine than sex, because after all, who’s going to get lucky after being so unconscionably rude to his date?)

I am not above this quasi-addiction.  It kind of crept up on me.  In general, I’ve had a policy of avoiding social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  As much as anything this stems from a “New Yorker” cartoon I saw way back in 1997:  a man sits at a computer, and his little daughter, in her pajamas holding a teddy bear, taps him on the shoulder; he says, “Honey, please don’t talk to Daddy when he’s in a chat room.”  Such a prescient cartoon, anticipating the bizarre epidemic of people ignoring those around them in favor of a burst of off-the-cuff text from an unseen correspondent.  (The comic comeuppance continues in the “New Yorker” here and here.)

I will acknowledge that I’ve enjoyed Twitter occasionally, following professional cyclists.  There is sometimes a refreshing unguarded quality to athletes’ tweets, particularly when their competition-induced neurotransmitters are still firing away.  (In fact, one team has instituted a one-hour moratorium on all post-race tweets from its riders.)  But I can’t dish it out:  I am certain that nothing in my life warrants a blow-by-blow of my activities, and it would be a bored person indeed who would bother to read them.  Moreover, I think every tweet is a partial lie.  Why?  Because whatever you claim to be doing, you’re actually doing that plus tweeting.  If I were to tweet, “I’m hanging out with my kids,” and you were able to ask my kids what I was doing at that moment, they’d say, “Playing with his phone.”

Where dopamine has gotten hold of me through social media is through this very blog.  When I conceived of albertnet, my goal was simply to write little essays and stories and have some sort of audience, however small or random.  It was never my goal to have a reciprocal communication with anybody, and for the first couple years it was almost impossible to know who, if anybody, was reading my blog.  Occasionally somebody would post a comment, or e-mail me about a post, but that was, and is, exceedingly rare—which is fine.  I’m not trying to “deliver an audience,” but to write whatever I want and if someone reads it, great.  I joked about my readership apprehension and “screw the reader” philosophy in a post a couple years ago:  “Where this blog is concerned, ‘screw the reader’ may end up meaning ‘screw exactly one reader’ (sorry Mom).”

But then, some months ago, a wealth of statistics suddenly became available to me.  Now, I can look at pageviews for the last day, week, month, and all-time.  I can see who is reading what posts at this very moment.  I can see where in the world they hail from, and I can see how they found my post.  (Sometimes the search terms are very funny; one hit on my vasectomy post was a search on the phrase “will vasectomy make my testicles droop.”  Sometimes the search terms are flattering, like the search on “albertnet suffering cold-pressor test,” clearly from a repeat viewer.) 

What I discovered is that this blog is more popular than I had ever thought (though it’s entirely possible pageviews represent Google misfires rather than people actually reading my posts).  Now I find myself tracking the pageviews of every new post.  Whenever that number is higher than I expected, or just higher than it was yesterday, I get a little hit of dopamine.  I must be, because I have come to find this activity oddly compelling, in the way that beating your old score at a video game is compelling.  That is, in that dopamine-glutted way that starts to make me feel like a loser.  I’m strongly considering swearing off pageview viewing altogether, or strictly rationing it.  But I’m not sure I have the will power.

Dopamine + kids + social media

Consider that I, an annoyingly disciplined person, distrustful of dopamine response, and with a fully-formed prefrontal cortex, am all but addicted to Blogger pageview stats—probably the least compelling of all social media.  How, then, can a teenager even stand a chance against it?  Here is a source of dopamine that many, if not most, teenagers have unlimited access to.  It doesn’t cost money, they’re not going to get carded, and in many cases their parents give them carte blanche, assuming access to social media is as innocuous, ubiquitous, and mainstream as running water or electricity.

And yet, sites like Facebook strike me as a social minefield for teenagers in particular.  I’ve heard enough about adults offending one another, embarrassing themselves, wishing they hadn’t friended somebody, wondering how to extract themselves, etc.  And these are the people who have presumably learned how to get along—at least, who should be closer to social poise than they were in junior high.  As the writer Lore Segal has written (in a telegram sent by one of her characters), “'PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING BY NATURAL HUMAN FEELING.”  This protocol is far beyond the grasp of the average teenager.  Isn’t the hormone-ravaged teen existence hard enough without a constantly evolving online social world?  Probably the worst aspect of social media is that it takes those terribly embarrassing teen moments that , a generation ago, would have faded into distant memory, and makes them permanent.

I’m grateful that the sudden rise of social media has taken place before my own kids are really old enough to participate.  This is giving my wife and me a chance to figure out, in advance, a family Internet acceptable use policy.  It probably sounds like I’m joking and I admit that phrase sounds corny, but I’m serious.  It’s very tempting to assume that anything involving technology is good for our kids.  Parents brag about it:  “I can’t figure out how to set up a new printer, but my ten-year-old is a whiz at it!”  People talk of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants,” and a parent could be excused for believing that facility with computers and the Internet might make his or her child the next Mark Zuckerberg. But this idea is actually pretty absurd. I recently read a newspaper article about an expensive private school in the Silicon Valley that bans computers and other high-tech gadgets; one of the parents, a Google employee with a computer science degree, reminds us that computers and related technologies are designed to be idiot-proof: “It’s super easy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. ”

In other words, facility with computers doesn’t say much about a young person’s intelligence or career prospects; the ability to consume any technology has little do to with creating it. To put it another way, your kid isn’t going to be the next great food scientist just because he enjoys eating at McDonald’s.  So my strategy as a parent is to restrict my kids' access to computers and other passive entertainment sources in favor of books and other traditional kid stuff. 

Meanwhile, there's the issue of security. After taking great pains to put our kids in a good school and thus surround them with good peers, my wife and I aren’t about to let them roam the great untamable Internet unheeded.  In the context of the Internet, the movie ratings system seems kind of quaint; if you had to rate the Internet as a whole, it would have to be X—but there’s no ticket taker to turn kids away.  What’s to keep kids from unknowingly corresponding with wackos, and/or stumbling on images they come to wish they hadn’t?

Meanwhile, Internet gaming runs from the educational to the merely time-wasting to the hideously violent; why should I let my kids decide what’s appropriate?  (At least they’re both girls.)  I let my older daughter play two kinds of games:  those specifically assigned in school, and those that teach her the Dvorak keyboard layout.  Nothing else is even on the table.  Even if they found suitable games, I’m not about to allow them, because video games are addictive—they create a dopamine-fueled drive for bigger scores, driving a compulsion to play without any legitimate reward.  I am not just speculating.  I was a videot myself as a teenager (though at least then I had to ride my bike across town and compete for gaming machines with other non-virtual youths).

Parents I’ve talked to have responded to this approach by saying, “Won’t depriving your kids just create a pent-up demand, and cause them to rebel and go too far in the opposite direction?” Perhaps—but I’m betting it won’t. In my household videos are severely restricted (if I had to put our policy in words it would go something like “In general you may not watch them, though we’ll make exceptions as we see fit”). Here, my younger daughter cleverly tried to get permission for a video while my wife was on the phone. It was a good strategy ... maybe next time it’ll actually work.



Has this policy created an outsized craving for videos? Not really—my daughters love watching them, but their expectations are realistic and they don’t often hassle my wife and me about it. For example: the other evening my older daughter put in a video. (She’d cleared it with her mom.) I was happy to watch with her and her sister because, as I’ve described before, I do enjoy some good lowbrow entertainment and the movie was “Monsters Vs. Aliens.” Imagine my surprise when, after ten or fifteen minutes, my daughter abruptly turned it off and said, “I have to practice piano.” Equally shocking was that her little sister took this in stride.

What about older kids?  When my daughters are teenagers, will I let them have Facebook or Google Plus accounts?  I’m conflicted on that one.  Part of me wants to say “no,” and the other part of me wants to say “hell, no.”  Will they get these accounts anyway, behind my back?  Possibly.  But at least they won’t have smartphones to stare into—on that point my wife and I are firmly resolved.  Part of this is selfish:  when I’m with my kids, I want them to engage with me, not think of me as mere background static as they pour their attention into a handheld electronic device.  It’s bad enough when their noses are in books and I can’t get their attention; at least reading is something I can share with them, rather than having them look down upon me as a dopey old person on the wrong side of the digital divide.  (The smartphone may be the most sophisticated parental-estrangement device ever created; click here for details.)  And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and three years from now the social media revolution will have fizzled, like disco, breakdancing, and the Macarena.

But wait, you might say, the Internet is so cool, and opens up such a wide world of worthwhile stuff, and social media enables your kids to connect with friends even when they can’t get together in person!  What’s wrong with that?  What kind of deprivation-obsessed fascist are you?  What are you gonna do, send your ten-year-old outside by herself to blow bubbles with the little party-favor wand from her sister’s birthday?  No, we don’t keep that junk around.  Check this out:

I’d researched how to make my own bubble mix at home, but it looked complicated and I needed glycerin and where would I find that?  And yet, my daughter somehow figured out how to make the best bubble solution I’ve ever seen, so robust you don’t even need a wand.  It’s amazing how resourceful a kid can be when she doesn’t have anything “better” (i.e., easier) to do.

Fiction - Guide to Managing Millennials

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for crude humor and mature themes.

Announcement

I am happy to announce that this is my 100th blog post since I started albertnet! My first post was in February of 2009. Funny … it doesn’t seem like that long ago.

Introduction

I got a solicitation in my work e-mail that was either spam or a reasonable business proposition, depending on your point of view. (As the aptly named Senator Packwood pointed out, “How can you know until you try?”) The solicitation was from whitepapersforbiz.com and was for a $99, 18-page guide on “Managing Generation Y.” The ad started out: “Generation Y. The Internet Generation. Millennials. Whatever you call them, this new generation of workers is the largest to hit the workforce since the Boomers, and they bring with them unique expectations.”

Right away this caught my attention. First of all, I was thrown by this term “Millennials.” Millennials? As in, born around the turn of the century? These people are eleven now. Please tell me they aren’t invading the workforce. Meanwhile, if the workforce is being flooded with these Gen-Y types, during a terrible recession with the worst unemployment in decades, who are they to be expecting anything? How about “being happy just to have a job”? Why should we coddle and cater to these people?

Naturally, I’m just being a bitter old man here. Obviously we need these youngsters very badly, because they “get it,” they can conceive of the next great “killer app,” they can solve our office computer problems, and many of them are still good-looking enough to be the public face of our companies as the rest of us, skin wrinkling and backs aching, run out the clock on our miserable lives. It has always been thus. So, the management guide makes perfect sense.

This is where I come in. I’m guessing that most corporate wage slaves—especially “individual contributors” (i.e., non-managers) like myself—are going to find $99 a bit steep for an 18-page electronic document, especially when the advertisement has embarrassing typos like “3 way to develop productive relationships with Millennials.” (Whether they meant “3 ways” or “3-way”—which would be kind of shocking—that’s pretty sloppy). So I figured, why don’t I write my own guide, which would be shorter (and thus better), and much, much cheaper? I might not have done as much research as these guys, but a little advice is better than nothing. Best yet, I let my PayPal account lapse, so I’m not even going to charge you. You can just buy me a beer next time I see you.

[Please note that what follows is fiction. I do not allude to any actual company in this piece, nor am I a human resources type, nor do I actually have real advice for anybody in this realm. It’s just for fun. Okay? Good.]

THE ALBERTNET GUIDE TO MANAGING MILLENNIALS

Seven core traits of Generation Y

Naturally there are vast differences among the members of any generation, but certain generalizations can be made (and are essential to handy pocket guides like this). This guide will concern only Americans born in 1990 or later, and who are entering the corporate world of offices rather than service-sector jobs, self-employment, or itinerant farm labor. Also, this guide only discusses males. Research for the equivalent guide for female employees is still underway as it is a much more complicated matter. (The section about boots and other footwear, by itself, is likely to eclipse this entire guide.) Stay tuned for how to order this second guide as soon as it is available!

Here are the seven core traits of Generation Y:

Informal – They consider not only words like “sir” and “please” to be old-fashioned, but also formerly widespread ideas like politeness, hierarchies, and decorum.

Connected – They are continuously in touch with a very wide, though seldom deep, electronic network of other Millennials (along with older sickos masquerading as them).

Casual – Old-fashioned business attire like suits, ties, socks, and clean shaves have been virtually abandoned by Gen-Y.

Entitled – This generation was raised by parents who were kids in the seventies—that is, whose parents were only into themselves. The backlash of the seventies selfish parents has manifested in overindulgent nineties/aughts parents who showered their kids with love, attention, praise, and expensive toys, making Gen-Y hugely imbued with a sense of entitlement.

Scattered – Millennials don’t have time for MTV, full magazine articles, lectures, books, or this guide. Their intellectual activity is the equivalent of waiting tables. They’re able to keep a dozen different text/Tweet/phone conversations going while seeming to be paying attention to you, but their mental worlds are too frantic for deep thoughts or discussions.

Public – Generation Y has become so inured to self-disclosure, due primarily to Facebook and other social networks, that the line between public and private has been essentially erased.

Smart – As far as we can tell, these kids are really, really smart. (We kind of have to say this, in case one of them happens to read this guide and becomes really, really offended.)

Deep down, Millennials are not only aware of these traits, but are very proud of them. This means if any member of an older generation, especially somebody in management, demonstrates these traits, the Gen Y employee is likely to feel patronized. You will do well to be as polite, isolated, well-attired, timid, organized, private, and, well, clueless as possible in the presence of Gen Y. This shouldn’t be that hard. Just be yourself.

Getting off on the right foot

A big part of your success in managing a Millennial is hiring the right one to begin with. Careful recruiting has never been more important—or more difficult—than it is now. Here are some pointers.

One of the most common mistakes managers make when recruiting Gen Y is to be visibly startled by the candidate’s appearance. This can cause the candidate to clam up completely, or else to lash out. If you know what to expect, you can keep your cool and have a positive recruiting experience. Things to be ready for:

• The candidate may not wear a necktie to the interview. Many Gen Yers literally cannot believe that this would be expected, even in an interview.
• Clip-on tie? Hide your astonishment. The candidate may sincerely want to please but knows he could never actually tie a tie; or, he is wearing the clip-on ironically.
• Giant fist-sized perfectly symmetrical Windsor knot? You’ve got a great candidate: somebody who actually trusts the sartorial advice of his (albeit misguided) father or grandfather enough to get help tying his tie. This guy is more likely to be emotionally stable, and might also be more docile in accepting quaint workplace traditions like working hard.
• Corporate logo, penis graphic, or animal art on a necktie? Roll with it—unless it’s a donkey or elephant. That could mean a politically active person, who could seriously damage workplace productivity during election season.
• Totally oversized suit? Could be a loaner from Dad. Or maybe the candidate got a bad clothier recommendation from a pal and went to Big & Tall. So many Millennials are seriously overweight, Big & Tall has become almost the de facto clothier for interview suits. (In fact, the parent corporation, LivingXL, is considering rebranding the clothing chain “Big & Normal.”)

Traditionally, an interview consists of an employer asking questions of the candidate to find out if he is qualified for the job. Today, the candidate’s ability should be assumed. Technology is changing so fast, your candidate will probably have an innovative, super-efficient way of carrying out his work tasks—something you never would have dreamed of. Or, the Gen Y new-hire may think of totally different job activities, or even a totally new business for your company to get into. Thus, the main purpose of the job interview is to convince the candidate that your company is a cool place to work—even while you take care to avoid coming off as a poseur.

Three ways to Motivate Millennials

There are of course countless ways to motivate your Gen Y employees, most of which work only some of the time. But we have identified three surefire ways to get the most out of your Millennials:

Interns. Always have some interns around to do most of the work. Not only do interns not require motivation (after all, trying to turn their internship into a paying job is all the motivation they will ever need), having them to kick around will build and sustain the self-esteem of your Gen Y employees.

Rejiggered ratings. In the traditional ratings scale used for older employees, change “underachieving” to “achieving”; change “achieving” to “exceeding expectations”; and change “exceeding expectations” to “needs improvement.” The name changes to the lower ratings are to protect an employee’s morale, since Millennials in these rungs obviously came through the “praise everybody” system where every player on the soccer team gets a trophy, even the ones who never kicked the ball. The name of the top tier is designed for offspring of Tiger Mothers, who respond only to verbal abuse.

Free soda. Fountain beverages are extremely inexpensive but really make your Gen Y employees feel valued. Put the beverage company’s marketing machine to work for you! (Note: do not offer Shasta or other off-brand beverages—this will backfire!)

Public vs. private

Self-disclosure is a habit for Millennials, so you should be braced for offhanded disclosures, ranging from the candid to the downright maudlin, that would have been unheard of a generation ago. The danger here is that your reaction could catch your employee completely off-guard and cause him terrible embarrassment. It is natural to assume that anybody of this generation would have pretty thick skin, but actually they do not. There is no non-verbal communication on Facebook, and face-to-face workplace interactions are not something the typical Gen-Y person is accustomed to. A poker face and a ready comment (e.g., “How did that make you feel?”) are advised.

For example, in his first or second week on the job a Millennial might make reference to something his therapist said to him. Generation Y, unlike the proud and/or shame-filled ones before it, is very relaxed about getting a little help sometimes. To show surprise at this disclosure—to say nothing of gasping—would be a very damaging, and alienating, faux pas. Instead you should respond (practice this in the mirror if necessary), “Wow, that’s very perceptive. Say, is your therapist accepting new patients?”

Of course, playing off your Gen Y employee’s disclosure is totally different from disclosing anything of an even remotely personal nature yourself. Why? Because you’re like the Millennial’s mom or dad, so for you to open up is embarrassing (in the “eww!” way). If, say, you mention that you have an appointment with a dermatologist, don’t be surprised if your Gen Y employee says, “Dude—TMI!”

To the great consternation of human resources departments nationwide, Gen Y employees cannot be prevented from Tweeting about just about everything that happens in the workplace. The only way to keep your company’s private business private is to require employees to create a Twitter alter-ego. You can put a positive spin on this requirement when explaining it to your Millennials. One benefit: with this alter ego they can be even more brash, insulting not just their enemies but their friends.

Of course, everybody mentioned in these Tweets must have a pseudonym as well. To assure this, have your employees refer to their colleagues (and yourself) by whatever secret nicknames they’re already using. Tell your employee, “If you think of me as ‘Balding Douchelord,’ just use that nickname in your Tweets.” If the employee resists, get him excited by saying, “As of yet nobody has created an iPad app that turns a name into an alias, like ‘Joseba Bloviatronica’ for ‘Joe Blow,’ then checks its availability. Somebody is going to make a killing on that app!”

Internet use

Telling a Millennial not to use Facebook while at work would be a real morale-crusher, so you have to allow it. But with other types of Internet abuse, you need to be more firm. Specifically, you can’t have employees using the corporate network to steal media content. Gen Y-ers cannot grasp that sharing MP3 files or downloaded movies is theft; this is literally beyond their comprehension. Explain that there are some upper-level managers who just don’t “get it,” and that these managers unfortunately have the authority to fire people. This will no doubt elicit a knowing smirk—Millennials are expert at covering their tracks—so you must follow up by saying, in a low voice, “Look, there are sysadmin people in this company very jealous of your success. They might just have nothing better to do than set up network traps to get you busted.”

Of course, even bringing up Internet acceptable use policy will get you labeled as one of “them,” so to build back the rapport with your Millennial, you need to get up, close your door, draw your blinds, and let him in on a little “secret”: that there’s a conference room with an extra PC that isn’t on the corporate network but instead steals Internet connectivity from the Starbucks in the lobby. He can use this PC to browse untoward websites, just like he did at the public library as a junior high kid.

Sensitivity training

Gen Y-ers are known for being sensitive. But this doesn’t mean they’re sensitive to others’ feelings—just to their own. We’d all like to think these kids have evolved into something kinder and gentler than we are, but honestly, what can we expect from a generation whose credo is “Sucks to be you!”?

It is widely accepted among Millennials that you can insult somebody as bluntly as you want, as long as you say, “Ha ha, you’ve just been punked!” afterward. It is very uncommon, however, for them to consider their audience for such gibes; that is, they’re just as likely to insult a grey-haired senior colleague as one of their pals. Naturally you cannot assume the senior colleague will understand, so you need to alter the Gen Y employee’s behavior.

The best angle to work here is the purely pragmatic. Don’t say, “Now Tyler, you shouldn’t give Donald a hard time just because he prints out so many documents. He’s kind of sensitive about his work habits and feels like you’re making fun of his age.” That’s just not going to work. What you should say is, “Tyler, don’t make fun of Donald. He’s a gun nut and kind of unstable.”

This sensitivity washes both ways. For example, if Donald, who is putting his daughter through Columbia, sees fit to pack a sack lunch every day, he certainly may. But just because he’s always eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches doesn’t mean he can continue to do so. Millennials are likely to be allergic to peanuts, and even if they’re not, would be scandalized to see a peanut product right out there in the open. After all, peanut products are practically a controlled substance in modern schools. In deference to Gen Y, have your older employees switch to another type of nut butter.

Conclusion

This guide is really just the beginning. Behaviors among Generation Y are always changing and shifting, even as older employees become ever more rigid, even brittle, in their ways. Perhaps the best way to motivate Millennials, and make them feel good, is to ask their opinion about how you should behave. (It’s tempting to have them critique this guide, but of course they’re much too busy.)

dana albert blog