The Man Baby
It is a pandemic spread wider than I thought and we are all going down
Life skills. We all should have them. We all need them. And yet, we are raising generation after generation without even having the bare minimum of acceptable life skills in their repertoire.
When I thought about this incompetent generation up until yesterday I fully believed it is the generation in their teens and in the twenties making up the majority of the folks in this struggling generation. But it is way worse than that. We are dealing with a generation of people 40 years or younger who are no longer broadly viewable as competent. Sure they might be good at one thing or another, but not in the sense that the older generations are good at stuff. As a generalist in life skills. For example: I can cook, clean, understand basic mechanics, basic programming, I can sew, knit and crochet (don’t like it, but I learned the skill), I can navigate the internet and most softwares with little introduction, I can do basic math needed in everyday life, I can maintain small household appliances, repair small wears and tears, and know in general when to call a professional and to top it off, I can drive cars and trucks both manual and automatic. This is no longer normal.
Simple things like driving a car is becoming a skill that many teens and twenty-somethings no longer desire to have. Sure, in Europe with public transportation this might be a lesser problem, but where I live in the United States it indeed is an odd skill to forego. Why would you purposefully make yourself less mobile and rely on others to drive you around?
We all are hearing about the lack of social skills, the lack in common sense, the lack of service orientation in servicing professions, and the lack of executing normal day to day repairs and maintenance of our household items. We hear about it as marching towards a more one sided, more feminized societal framework. We hear about it in the context of mass histrionics and public display of other Cluster B behaviors. And it is way worse than that, too.
Just fairly recently, about three years ago, I met a guy who was working with my husband on some movie projects. He seemed reasonably nice. But I did not spent much time with him. I assumed he was in his late twenties working as a personal trainer and pro-wrestler most of the time; the other times he was an aspiring albeit really bad actor. I did not know much more.
Well, now he and my husband are working on renovating the apartment he is renting. His primary help in the move? His mom. And I got curious and looked him up online: 36 years old. Nearly 10 years older than I thought. And his lack of what I believed are normal skills and common sense is more apparent than what I would have expected to see in anyone over 30.
He cannot measure and cut a piece of wood to specification. He literally ruined a full box of floor boards that way. But he argued he did it right even when proven wrong by the parts not fitting. He did nothing wrong.
He has no pride in executing work with quality.
No taste of his own, follows trends on Pinterest without assessing whether the interior design actually matches the place in question or is doable.
No ability to organize a move; relies basically on others to make things happen on time.
Cannot solve a problem from how to carry heavy things to how to pack it safely for the move to how to cut a vent hole into the flooring or clean the interior of a small pipe without a speciality tool. Just nothing. Problem solving is just not there.
Here is where I believe his upbringing has given him feminized skills (it is apparent he was raised by a single mom), but no masculine skills are present. And this one sided-ness of skill development makes him a toxic mess. Ten years ago I would have fought anyone arguing that a masculine presence is important in a kid’s life, but seeing more and more people (not just men) raised by single moms is making it very apparent that imbalances are being created. This guy is one example of many, but I am using him, because he is so extreme:
He uses crying and manipulation tactics to get what he wants. No negotiation. No real standing up for himself. Instead he guilt trips everyone to helping him.
He is working out like crazy as wrestler and personal trainer and looks the part, yet, his mannerism and mimic is very feminine, so you always feel his head is disconnected from his body. Not necessarily a flaw, but it really shows up in his bad acting. He just does not have a classical male mimic. It is weird to describe, because he is also straight but cannot find a decent partner. His last partner was a married woman who then cheated on him. Karma.
Feelings and emotions are everything and trump everything. Facts really do not matter to him. He puts his own well being over everything else and judges the day simply by how he feels and … it is always negative.
He looks like he works out a lot (my daughter says, he looks like a Dorito), but his functional muscles are not there. Cannot lift heavy things or move things easily. Everything about him feels inflated and useless.
I also believe his upbringing has nurtured a narcissist and he never really learned how to incorporate others in his world view. It is apparent to me that he is a single child raised by a single mother who did everything for him.
“Can you give me a hand for a second”, is always answered with “Not right now.” He just does not interrupt what he is working on to support others. Ever. Even if it is as small as “Can you move a little, so I can grab the bag behind you?” “Not right now, I am concentrating.”
He needs attention 24/7. The poor landlord will likely get a daily call on anything that is not perfect.
He does not seem to have friends to help with the move. Instead his mother is tasked with packing and painting footboards. And.. she is incapable of doing that firstly thanks to bad knees and secondly because she also has no skills.
He needs to be complimented for anything he does, even if it is a shitty job. For example, he tried to lay flooring himself, but had to stop as he could not do it. But then talked about nothing but how good of a job he did with the 5 boards he laid. The professional that came later that day to finish the job, told him he needed to tear everything back out as it was done the wrong way… and the man baby started crying to a point that the professional floor installer worked around the 5 boards that were in place incorrectly so not to offend him further.
He is never wrong. Ever. He argues till the cows come home how everyone else is at fault, but not him.
Not to bore you any further with these types of examples, so I am stopping now. To me, we are indeed dealing with behavior that is happening when nurture takes over and becomes the only way a kid is raised. When there is no rough play with Dad, when there is no masculine influence in the life of the child to balance things out, when a kid is spoiled and every booboo is taken too seriously instead of teaching kids how to get over minor pain points. I have never been a proponent of the “shake it off” approach, but I have to admit that sometimes telling someone to get over things is necessary. It is also necessary for a child to experience pain both emotional and physical, so they learn how to avoid it in the future.
As a generation X free range kid, I fell out of trees, scraped my knees, and walked around the village I lived in with my friends without my parents knowing where I was. I navigated the unfriendly neighbors as much as the friendly one, knowing who to provoke, who was helpful, and who I should avoid. I smashed my glasses more than once sledding or playing ball.
As a poor kid, I learned very early simple skills like sewing and making toys and games out of cardboard. I learned how to cook when there are only limited items in the fridge. I can make spam taste good. The concept of splurges was unknown to me. But yet, this is a very common answer of Gen Zs or Millennials when you ask them why they did not save money: “Oh, I needed to splurge a little on myself." When things are tough the answer is often to throw money at something to get some instant gratification. New clothes, shoes, or a new “thing”. We taught the generation not to be able to live with unhappiness or any negativity. They need to be happy at all times and if they are not, they need to find an instant remedy that does not require any thinking or hard work.
If you think back about your school or college years? What made you feel most accomplished and proud?
For me it was winning a writing contest and … I always felt great solving complex math problems in school. I felt great when my friends loved the stuffed animals I sewed.
What about you?
I’m not sure how much time you have spent around single moms, but it’s remarkable how they simply will not acknowledge when their only child is in the wrong or not doing their best. It’s like they have a filter that they simply will not allow any negative comments (however gentle) to get through when it comes to their child. I think they become emotionally enmeshed with their child to the degree they can’t see things impartially. A father figure knows the child will need to be on his or her own in the future, so he tends to understand or at least resister an issue with his child. A single mother somehow thinks she can always shield her child from the world and the problems he or she brings upon themselves. It’s scary. A child of a single mother can lie to you, get caught, and then not face anything from the mother who will turn it into “he means well, etc.” I’m curious about your comment that ten years ago you’d fight against the idea that a man needs to be present and assertive in a child’s life. Can you articulate when that change of mindset happened? Was it from these encounters with fatherless or absent father children?
I work (remote) for a company based in Southern California. We have had immense trouble hiring junior people to do basic admin sorts of tasks.
For example. We had a sales administrator who had an MBA on her resume. She talked convincingly about what she could do and we were happy to hire her in the expectation that she would do the basic order admin sorts of things to begin with and then move up to more demanding things shortly afterwards. It soon became apparent that she was unable to write coherent sentences. Since we wanted her to write emails with somewhat customized content to our customers and prospects this was a problem because there were no snippets of boilerplate she could use. She also appeared unable to read more than the first couple of sentences in any email - more than once she replied to emails asking a question that was answered a couple of paragraphs down in the email she was responding to. She had (and this shocked me) problems using excel to do basic things like calculate totals for multiple subscriptions with discounts then adding sales tax. She couldn't make a sales forecast for renewals that was accurate.
The worst thing was that she didn't realize she was the problem or that she needed to work on fixing things. So when someone fixed her first sales forecast she made the same mistakes the next quarter.
We have found a man now who is probably about the same age (late 20s / 30ish) who does all of these things. We are making sure he's happy and has no desire to move on to greener pastures because we don't want to go through this again. We've also had good luck with interns, but our interns are the children of current employees (who are all married) so they may be special.