Ok, I usually like to source things on this blog, but i definitely don’t want to contribute to a gossip blog, so I’m not linking to it (but a Google search could probably get you on your way):
The accompanying story, written by Joel Stein, sums up Millennials as such: They’re narcissistic. They’re lazy. They’re coddled. They’re a bit delusional.
The National Institute of Health backs this up. Among people in their 20s, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is three times as high as in other adults.
However, despite being self-obsessed social-media addicts, these young adults are really the US’ saviors - or at least have the potential to be.
Changing fast in a world undergoing rapid technological shifts, they’re surprisingly optimistic, confident, pragmatic and most of all, adaptable.
I’ll admit that the article (the real one, not this blog thingie) comes to a kind of mixed conclusion, but Stein makes it clear that the Millennials have everything they need to be all right, as Cheap Trick would say (this song is incredibly relevant to the article) and that he certainly believes great things will come from them/us.
We’re an open generation and are generally interested in where other people are, what they’re doing, what they’re eating (Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare). We understand digital marketing from childhood, giving us a kind of innovation in business that a lot of previous generations had to learn from their previous generations. Do you know how excited the lawyers I speak to get when I tell them I know how Facebook and Twitter work? Or that I can build a basic website? They remained baffled.
The article even talks about how the behavior of Millennials isn’t even that different from previous younger generations; it looks a little bit different because the world is a little bit different. We seem self-absorbed (and I’ll admit that I probably am) because there are so many ways to share what we’re doing right the fuck now. People in the 50s would invite neighbors over for boring vacation slideshows, but Millennials have a different way of doing that in a way that folks from the 50s couldn’t even dream of.
The biggest thing that article brought up that should be given thought to is our purported lack of empathy. And with a very recent run-in with an RPer’s suicide, I believe that stat whole heartedly. It’s been proven that this sort of indirect communication deals with cold empathy; face-to-face/direct communication deals with hot empathy, the amygdala (and related brain circuits) controls. It’s not the same when you communicate through a screen.
So, in the end: we feel entitled, we’re narcissistic, and we just sort of exist. But so did every youth culture before us, we simply live in a different environment now and our behavior had to mutate in response to those environmental changes. We aren’t worse or bad, we simply are. We have great potential to do some real world-changing things. We even have the know-how. Just give it (and us) some time.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the article.
