BOOM: You get a trophy! And you get a trophy!

Hi, I'm Boom. I was born between 1982 and 1997, which makes me a millennial. (Yes, that's right. Even by the most generously late definitions, there are no millennials who are teenagers anymore.) And I have been given a participation trophy.

I participated with Max's special needs soccer team for a couple of years, and at the end of the season, they had a simple ceremony where they read everyone's name and handed each person a trophy, basically for being there.

In the last few years, the participation trophy has crystallized as a symbol of the millennial identity. People seeking to discredit the millennial experience have pointed to them as signs of entitlement. "They're the participation trophy generation! They expect to be congratulated just for existing!" Ah yes, I remember when a nation of five year-olds stood up and held the nation hostage, demanding to be presented gold cups to celebrate their ability to breathe.

What did my trophy mean to me? It was cheap junk I never earned, but felt obligated to keep and display. A few pounds of plastic and metal nobody asked me if I wanted, and I would've told the organizers to keep it and put the money to better use even back then. I put it on top of a tall bookshelf in my bedroom, and it might still be there, but for reasons between "I don't know how best to dispose of it" and "I don't care enough to bother about it". It sat next to the Pinewood Derby car in a display case that I would bring to where I live now if I knew how, because while it won no awards and was a highly non-competitive vehicle, I built it (with a lot of help) and made it the car I wanted it to be.

I've heard other millennials describe the lesson their participation trophies taught them as "don't trust praise, any amount of effort, skill, and ability will receive the same amount of hollow validation, and you will never know what your input is actually worth to those around you." I don't think I was ever that jaded about it, but I quickly learned how to tell real praise apart from empty congratulations.

In my grade school, there were also end-of-the-year ceremonies where the faculty came up with something unique and somehow positive to put on a certificate for every student in the class, along with honor roll and perfect attendance certificates as they applied. So everyone got at least one certificate when they were passing out honors. I know some of them were real struggles for our teachers to come up with, but there's a subtle difference I think is important. Everyone got their own certificate that recognized their own accomplishments. Not all of those accomplishments were worth the same, but they were worth something. Everyone is worth something, and no one is fully interchangeable. A personal validation is much more inspiring than a hunk of plastic bought in bulk.

Valerie: Here's a couple of articles about the affect of these kidhood trophies in the adult workplace:
 from The Atlantic : https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/project-time-off/how-millennial-trophies-created-a-generation-of-workaholics/1260/
and again https://relate.zendesk.com/articles/entry-level-syndrome-and-the-participation-trophy-generation/