Millennials demanded careers balancing parental approval with peer-impressive coolness

Evidence

Millennials now equally weighted “creative” and “class.” As Anne Helen Petersen observed, millennials “internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a ‘good job’) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a ‘cool’ company).” Neither being a corporate drone nor being a starving bohemian solved their dilemma; millennials wanted lucrative careers that aligned with their personal brands. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 310

Categorization

• SEED: The two-audience career signal (parents’ respectability + peers’ coolness) is a tension worth an essay: how did ‘personal brand’ become the resolution of a category conflict that earlier generations saw as irreconcilable?