Dear World: I Am Going to Iceland to Eat Ram's Testicles

Bingo. I will show this to my very young niece and nephew. Thanks for writing this Ash! And encouraging the next generation to do what they want to do. On their own term (ditto for me. This was the motivation I need to go after the dream companies I want to work for).

I will agree with you that a mindset shift needs to happen. I don’t like painting in broad strokes across generations because it simplifies things to a place of half truths.
I am a Gen X mother of a much younger child (9 years old). I have always felt the entrepreneurial pull. I am raising him completely opposite of the mentality my Boomer parents had – I want him to follow his imagination and ideas and never, ever get a corporate position because it sucks the life out of a person. My husband and I are attempting to teach him by example so he never grows up thinking there is one form of financial security and that it’s found in a cubicle in some bland office park.
However- entrepreneurial can mean something outside of digital creation, etc. I fear the loss of skilled trades like plasterwork or, for example, your stone mason. If we teach an entire generation that life is to be lived online and that is where the new financial security lives – well then we are no better than are boomer parents. Let’s teach our children that getting a degree in marketing is the biggest waste of money (not sorry – and I worked in marketing) and that finding a love for trades and techniques that nobody is continuing to learn or that a year of traveling the world is a better education than an institutional one that will provide more happiness and satisfaction.
I realize that someone who isn’t raising a young child in the digital age isn’t witnessing the emotional, mental and physical toll it’s taking on them. Get them exploring, back outside playing and using their imaginations. My god we don’t need an entire generation of digital creators.
Perhaps that wasn’t your intended message but it did read as such – so just here with a counterpoint. Agree to disagree.