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Simon -- can I call you Simon? I'm going to go ahead and call you Simon, since you seem to be on such familiar terms with me and my generation. Simon, let me tell you about my participation trophies. I got them for playing soccer, and they were handed out from a bag at the end of the year with all the ceremony of communist factory workers getting their lunch rations. My response was not "Well, clearly I'm going to be handed a six-figure job as an adult." It was "Neat, a trophy! Now I'm going to go back to thinking about Pokemon or farts, because I am a child." Later it was a nice reminder of time spent playing with my friends, and as I got older, eventually only the teams that won were rewarded. This did not shock and sadden us -- it was what we expected, and wanted, because we were actually capable of observing adult society, and we noticed that pro sports teams weren't handed many trophies for constantly losing.

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But Simon says all of this caused us to drift through life until one day we entered the "real world," which to Simon means the workplace, because once you step outside the office, reality dissolves into a hypothetical cloud. And once in the "real world," we were all stunned to discover that we weren't special and that our moms couldn't make our bosses give us promotions. And so "in an instant, their entire self-image was shattered." What? Do you think no millennial ever watched their parents struggle with their career? Do high school and college exams, where you are literally graded on your performance and told that it will shape your future, not count as a "real world" which can affect your self-image? What the fuck are you talking about? But Simon is convinced that because of this, millennials have lower self-esteem than previous generations. Hey, that sounds like a conveniently vague, borderline-impossible-to-measure "fact" that you made up on the spot. Oh, and what data we do have suggests that you're wrong.