These are millenials. They are cretins by nature. The "did everything right" statement is used often when these people are upset they didn't get an outcome they felt entitled to. These adult children believe that "success" is just a list of instructions like a board game and that if you do all of the things other people told you to do, you'll get what you want.
No savings, vehicle, or home for most of the generation? "We did everything right, the system has failed us!" No mention of how millenials, "the most educated generation", are also the generation with the most single mothers, the highest rates of drug addiction, and most of their monthly income is spent on drugs, funko pops, and video games. Nor will they admit that their "education" was in fields of study that offer the individual no real-world skills and offer society at-large no value.
Didn't get that promotion? "I did everything right, the company is wrong!" No acknowledgement that showing up late more often than not, being unproductive on Monday after partying all weekend, and spending half of the day socializing instead of working means you're not fit for more responsibility, and just being not a white male doesn't cut it.
Caught a virus? "I did everything right, society should have protected me!" No accepting that you got sick because you were more interested in having fun than following the rules we all learn as kids: Wash your hands, respect everyone's personal bubble, and don't touch strangers. No amount of subordinating your own critical thinking and personal responsibility to others alleviates your own poor decision making.
This is all because of vidya, and I'm not kidding.
I think covid has "gamified" life in a way many millennials are having a problem getting away from. Video games have a simple value proposition: if you fulfill all the quests, you'll
always get the quest rewards and win the game.
The only time a game doesn't work like that is if there's some kind of glitch. If you kill Bowser and the game blanks out for you and you never get to see yourself rescuing the princess, fuck, that's a buggy game. And you wasted all that time on it! People who once could have seen life as a series of risk-taking events that sometimes pay off (and sometimes don't) instead have been taught to see the world a different way. Not just as a game:
A buggy game.
Their parents told them the way to play to win: go to college. Get decent grades. Show up basically on time for work. Collect your quest rewards: house, picket fence, dog, 2.3 children, promotions, retirement.
For a lot of them, even though they pressed all the right buttons, the game still refuses to grant them a win! And now, just as they've become fully enraged at the glitchiness of the "game," covid hits.
At first, covid was also a game with clear win conditions you could learn by paying enough attention to in-game lore: Stay indoors. Wash your groceries. Stay 6 feet from the next person in the grocery line, and you won't get it. Now
here was a game for the millennials who'd gotten so frustrated and angry trying to win the "life" one. The covid game had clear rules and metrics...remember those early (totally unsourced and BS) charts with one person or both people wearing masks and engaging in distancing, and how each one lowered your probability of contracting the vid?
And if you got through all the initial quests, you'd get the ultimate power-up: the vaccine. So they sat inside like good boys and girls for a year, dutifully playing all the mini-games (no mask! mask! double mask! n95! PCR test requirements! Rapid antigen tests!) to pass the time until the vaccines became available and gave them the power armor they needed to get through the next levels.
In the spring of 2021, when they went to the newly-opened potion shop in the game village, the NPC there told them: "
The vaccines work even better than we expected, they almost break the game, they are basically invincibility potions, you become 100% invulnerable to the worst impacts of the virus and no longer need to worry you're spreading it to others." When adults 20-45 got their shots, it had the feeling of when people open a new video game stage. Now you've got the weapon/armor/level to make it possible to see areas of the map you hadn't seen before. Go to festivals again, it's ok! Take your sweetheart to a restaurant, the monsters can't touch you!
In video games, friendly NPCs selling potions don't lie to you.
So when the vaccines turned out to wear off really quickly and have far fewer benefits than expected, initially, the millennials were fine going along with it. It's like getting that invincibility star in Mario, of course it wears off fast, if you want its benefits to continue, you'll have to find another. Stick that booster in my arm!
And then, just like that, the game went all buggy. People who "did everything right" and had fulfilled all quest conditions
got covid anyway. The vaccines didn't work against the new variant and especially didn't work to stop spread. Suddenly parties full of people who showed up with invincibility potions were all losing the game of "don't get covid whatever you do." But the friendly potion shop guy couldn't have been lying. It must be the work of the villains who just went through the game map with no armor living by their wits and trying to access higher levels of the game without taking any proper precautions.
They've started to realize that the rules they've been playing the game by aren't working, but their video game training leads them to believe the rules cannot be mistaken. The game has glitched. All it needs is a hard restart (perhaps another nice, long lockdown to refamiliarize yourself with all the mini-games? Or maybe a new game rule that you can't enter most areas of the game without the newly-available potions? Or some new armor in the form of better masks/respirators?). You might lose some unsaved progress, but it's the only way to get back to playing a game that makes sense.
This is why they can't change their minds to accept new information, or realize they've been lied to. It's why they keep pushing to double down on the strategies they've already learned, the ones they have "muscle memory" for. That first lockdown, life seemed simple and urgent and predictable. Surely if we do it again, and do it a bit smarter or at least differently this time, we won't get the same glitch. The people who drink a new potion every time the old one wears off will be invincible again and the idiots who come to kill bosses before they get the power armor will get killed like we knew they would. Order will be restored. We'll be able to watch the closing credits.
