MY strong dispute. Hear me out.

You think that the so-called “strawberry generation” is spoilt and incompetent. But let me tell you here why you are wrong.

“We are dealing with a new generation that will try out a job, and if they think it’s not suitable, they will quit,” you say. Arrogantly. You are so distorted with your successful egos because you’ve had the privilege of being born first, that you cannot look from our perspective.

Times are different. We are the most educated generation in all of history. What you blindly accept because others tell you, we will say we don’t want to do it, because we have read about, pondered on and evaluated it. We are finding unprecedented ways to carve out our careers. And who are you to stop us and say we are spoilt and pampered?

We are facing challenges that you didn’t: fewer jobs, stiffer competition, a pathetic salary. Sure, you had those same struggles when you began your career. But did you ever feel inadequate even though you have a degree? I would think not. A degree in your generation elevated you in terms of social prestige. While in our generation? We slave away for years to get a degree, where lo and behold, it is only a requirement (out of many) to secure a job under the system that your generation created: the infamous corporate ladder.

What does a career mean these days? Your generation has established that a career means climbing up the corporate ladder, working up from scratch, listening to the berating your superior gives you and swallowing it all up. We do not want that in our generation. We want to acknowledge and celebrate the breakthroughs from our years at school, especially after all our sleepless nights studying for that piece of paper. For us, our degree is not only a piece of paper, as you like to see it. It means sweat, blood, effort and tears… even if you brush it off as just a hiring requirement.

Your generation subjects us to tedious, old-fashioned, conservative methods of training – those that reflect your own experiences, but are not geared towards the challenges we face. The corporate ladder demands people with both academic prowess and the will to withstand long, hard hours of monotonous training… yet, like you say, the pay is only RM1,500! What a joke! You will be defiant and say, “You ungrateful brats… in my day, I earned RM1,500 as well and I lived with that!”.

Therein lies the generation gap, my friend. Followed by inflation. You were born in an economy where degrees were rather uncommon, and positions could be filled easily if you had the qualification. You got a salary that was decent back in the day. We need to live. Prices for necessities are rising, but our wages are stagnant. Houses are ridiculously unaffordable, and we will always live with debt. How about you step into our shoes, receive RM1,500 a month, and try to live with it today? Would you think we are still ungrateful?

Your generation has set up a system whereby corporations can give us only a certain amount of jobs. That structure is suitable for your generation, but it is unable to accommodate the increasing amount of educated people nowadays. It’s all a lie for us to follow what you are doing. You may have had more time walking this Earth and have gotten ahead, enabling you to set up the status quo, but it is an oppressive one, where the rich, influential and powerful at the top are staying put, not surrendering their places to let new minds in, and you blame the rest of us in the middle and working classes, saying we are not working hard enough.

Our generation is different from yours. You cannot use your old yardstick to measure ours. Our generation chases happiness over stability, while your generation chases stability over happiness. We grew up swallowing useless subjects that you shoved into us at school. Politicised Sejarah? What the hell is Moral? We do not want to be your brainless machines, working on autopilot in society. We want to think. We want to be our own leaders, not be susceptible to your traps.

We want to be fulfilled by what we are doing. A stable, but unchallenging, unrewarding job? No thank you. We are educated, thus, we want to feel that all the hard years of education that we put ourselves through are put to good use.

I am sick of the conservative minds of the past generation, who didn’t have as much exposure as we do in the sophisticated era of the internet. We grew up with the internet, giving us an opportunity to exchange new ideas and create new mindsets, linking the world together like never before. We found ways to break through the oppressive system that you would like to entrap us in. Our generation is different. We know we want change. We speak out. We do not like people who think they know all that, solely based on their life experiences in their generation, telling us what we can or can’t do. We want to fall and rise back up on our feet.

While your generation chases money and stability, our generation chases happiness, even if that happiness comes with challenges: ripples and waves pushing us down. We are tough, we stand up. Contrary to how you think we are the “weak strawberry generation with attitude”, our attitude is what makes our generation the most dynamic generation mankind has ever seen – global interaction, sophisticated thinking and the courage to say “no”... whereas you whimper with blind obedience to every command your parents give you, even when you know that it’s not always right, it is merely their point of view.

Therefore, I urge you to think again about where you are coming from. Because who are you to label us? Your only advantage is the privilege of being born into this world first. Your time will soon pass. The social structures you feed us will slowly be destroyed. It will be our time to rule soon. – November 22, 2017.

* Eunice Tang reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight.