What a good little boy!!

You are not special.

After the self-esteem clap-splosion of the 90's and 2000's, I get the feeling that the U.S. is beginning the long descent into the reality of non-specialness. Hey kid...you know that picture you farted out in art class, with the macaroni and the stick figures? Well, honestly kid...it wasn't very good. And you know that three-pointer you air-balled at the game yesterday? That really sucked.

And you know you? Well...that's not all that impressive either, kid. Maybe it's time you start realizing that the world isn't going to hand you a living on a silver platter due solely to your intrinsic specialness and brilliance.

Oh, and you over there! Yeah, you! Super overachieving hippie kid! Come here...we need to have a chat.

Ok, you want to "save the world", huh? Why is that? Oh! Because you've been fed a steady diet of stories where small bands of plucky do-gooders overcome overwhelming odds to defeat unalloyed evil? Great! I admire the mix of narcicissum and genuine compassion feeding your delusions of messianic grandeur.

Let me give you same bad news, though...you're not going to save the world. Why? Because the world and its evils are way, way, way stronger than you. But!!!! Let me also give you the good news. Here's what you CAN do.

If you're really, really lucky, you can join (or even create) an organization, whose work might, slowly and incrementally over the course of decades of grueling and thankless work, achieve some modicum of improvement.

Oh, and some other bad news...this will probably involve you having to sit at a desk all day long staring at a computer. It will probably not involve any fight scenes, magic, romance, or mural painting.

This steady stream of platitudinous bullshit that we've force fed to our nations's kids over the past 20 years has, in my humble opinion, made it harder for young people to function in the real world. Life in the real world is, well...kinda boring. Changing the world is, well...kinda boring. And it seems to me that some people have been so artificially inflated by this self-esteem mumbo jumbo that they have a hard time doing stuff like following directions...doing boring jobs...taking entry level jobs...etc.

I think, instead of telling kids how special they are all the time, we might try stressing that 1. you're gonna have to learn to take orders and get along with people and 2. aiming for the middle is not such a terrible thing to do.

*This post has been brought to you by Joe's Pop Psychology Nuggets: The blogosphere's leading source of non-empirical, anecdotally based sweeping generalizations.