A couple of points. I read the article as focusing on what would now be non-traditional experiences that the men in the article had. Lots of experiences are good and I know a number of people who had a variety of experiences. A friend who is an ER doc had several jobs after college (and was a Dead Head) before going to a baccalaureate program and then to med school. ShawWife joined, under age, a Canadian paraprofessional program (like the Peach Corps) and was stationed first in Northern Canada with tribes and then in Fiji when she was 16. They told they knew she was lying about her age but she was so engaging and entertaining that they accepted her anyway (imagine that happening now). At 14(?), she and a friend rode their bicycles from Montreal to the Gaspe Peninsula without parental permission. When it was time to get back to school, her dad said, “You got yourself out there. You can figure a way to get back.” Others spent a year of a few years doing being artisans, etc.
The article is filled with unjustified assertions like no modern actor is as interesting as Steve McQueen or no modern novels are equal to Hemingway and that modern authors only “imagine the keenest dramas of the human experience would be like” because they have no real experience, etc.). But the main assertion is that the reason that today’s generation is uninteresting is somehow that “guys who grew up in the suburbs typically don’t have the skills, know-how, or simply the confidence to try their hand at those kinds of pursuits, and they don’t know who to ask or where to go to even explore the possibility.”
I think the reasons have much more to do with the much more competitive economy that we have (partly as a result of globalization) and the higher cost of living (driven in part by high real estate prices that are driven in part by many years of central bank liquidity keeping markets afloat). In a more global, more competitive market, credentials became more important in terms of signalling. So taking three years to bum around and make money in various ways would now count against you in a way that it might well not have 50 years ago. I wonder if my friend the ER doc (who is on the faculty of an august medical school) would be able to get in to med school today with his varied post-college work experience.
I can imagine that in today’s world, parents might have said “Wait, you are going to spend 6 months in an Indian reserve in Northern Canada and then 6 months in a village of Fiji that is so remote you have to take a plane, a boat and a dugout canoe to get to it (and that had had no or almost no Caucasian visitors).” Will that be safe? How will it look for your college or grad school applications? Couldn’t you do something more valuable with your time? Per someone’s comments, it is part of what makes ShawWife such an interesting character (although there is a lot more).
Those experiences do help. Psychologists have done many studies trying to see which traits (openness, Machiavellianness, gender, race, …) predict who will be a good negotiator. Roughly speaking, there are no real effects except one: People who have lived in another culture tend to be better negotiators. This is probably because it is easier to put themselves in minds of other people, which they have to do when they live in another culture. So, this would distinguish tourism and semesters abroad with lots of other Americans from real experience living and working in Italy or the Czech Republic or Cameroon.
I feel the same way. Also, maybe some people would like to travel, but can’t. I don’t mean to sound rude, but I know people who have been all over the world who aren’t really that interesting. Also, some people just like to travel so they can check off boxes and brag. To each their own, but I don’t think travel automatically makes someone interesting.
With helicopter parenting being the norm (and often enforced when free range parents get accused of child endangerment), that type of thing would seem outlandish in the US today.
Medical schools may still look favorably at some kinds of non-traditional experiences, although not at the expense of the expected pre-med experiences.
However, it may be harder these days to do odd or generic labor jobs as a migrant worker to earn enough money for “interesting” travel experiences.
It was very popular in my day to go to Australia which has a specific visa for backpackers permitting them to do farm work and travel around the country for a year (https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/work-holiday-417/first-working-holiday-417#Overview). I think it’s still quite common in the UK and Europe to do this. But it doesn’t include US passport holders and I’m not sure many Americans are looking for poorly paid, backbreaking labor anyway - hence why I guess there’s presumably not been demand to make US passport holders eligible.
These really don’t seem to be unusual jobs to me. There are plenty of kids who work on farms, do circus arts (very popular in my area), one of my millennial nephews rode the rails and hitchhiked and passed bad checks (don’t think it made him more interesting, though), plenty of young men get arrested still, join the military, work in construction, work in automotive shops, and work retail.
I mean, nobody is selling encyclopedias door to door any more, but I do have plenty of young people working for non-profits (usually environmental groups) knocking on my door. They get paid to do that! I know there are kids who work maintaining trails (not lumberjacking exactly, but there are probably some that do that too).
What makes an “interesting generation” is the times they live in and how they respond to the circumstances with which they are confronted. And then the final consequences of the decisions they made.