#millennnials

Student Rant: “I Got The Poison, I Got The Remedy” – University Third Year Blues

Life gets complicated.

HOW ARE YOU TODAY, THIRD YEAR? Yes, I see that you are blue. OK, let’s have a flick through your medical history. Ah yes.  Your first year was, although hilarious and dotted with memorable games of pub golf which end with you, a random, a kebab and a cardboard box, it was also the very first time youever achieved well below what you believed you meant to get – based on…

The Millennials

The habits of the new generation known as the millennials is the target of marketers, economists, corporations, and journalists. Making loyal customers out of young people is the best long term strategy. The millennials - as defined by the National Journal - is a group of people, born after 1980, who came of age during the worst recession of the last roughly 75 years.

Millennials Taste

The Millennials taste can be summarized in the tabulated data by the Boston Consulting Group below. It shows a move away from luxury and switching over to healthy staples. Fresh fruits, organic food, and natural products are the choice over luxury goods, soda, applications, and handbags.

This new generation prefer to throw cash at new experiences and adventures. They reward socially responsible companies that they can connect with and that they deem as authentic.

Information Age

Growing up in the information age, this group place emphasis on mobile services more than anything else. With good connectivity other inconveniences are only a minor setback. They were basically asked, "How could your banker best serve you?" in the KPMG results tabulated result above. The convenience of mobile banking is clearly the top priority over more branches or ATMs.

Housing Woes

According to the Trulia analysis of Current Population Survey data there is a spike in the millennials living with parents. These young home buyers are holding back due to tighter mortgage lending, career instability, and high levels of student debt.

The Millennial generation is the product of a discrepancy between accessibility and attainability.  Anyone can send an email, but the responses are few, and the jobs are even further and far between.

How we got this way is rather simple.

It took a decade or two of indoctrination, of someone telling us that the world was ours, followed by the painful realization that reading Tweets were as close to big wide world domination as many of us would get. Ours would be a second-hand success. Most of us were left to fake it or blame the odds and cede to apathy. Delusions of entitlement headed off work ethic at the pass, and a narrowing spectrum of life experience and a contrary exposure to idealistic extremes left our senses dull.

Technology shoulders some of this responsibility (as does globalization, a weak economy that’s seeing the number of young adults making less than $25,000 increase by six million, and Sean Rad), but technology, for all its 0s and 1s has done something interesting, and slightly ironic: it has turned us into sentimentalists that lack the ability to see, or be lead to the truth. It has made us nostalgic for a history that’s not ours, and as a result denies us the future we desire.

It’s why we say things like: “I miss real photographs,” while simultaneously Instagramming, or Tweet, “I like the smell of books.” We’re stockpiling nostalgia, visions that never really belonged to (most) of us in the first place. We’re hoarding the image in our head without the means or the actual desire to put in the hard work to accomplish it. We’re busy surfing the internet wave, but never stop to realize that the wave is wet or that it’s pulled us under, or when, more often than not, we’ve missed the crest all together.

We don’t appear to want to shoulder any responsibility– like the fact that we refuse to read the fine print, and then collectively uproar that a conglomerate didn’t provide us with the magnifying glass. We’re a bit French (aie)  in that manner. And when someone questions our abilities, we get pretty tetchy.

We want everything, while understanding the value of nothing. We accept everyone while having sympathy for no one. We see the man on the side of the road, but we aren’t going to be the one to stop. We jump in the fire and take a piss on it all at once. Tristan Walker may have succeeded, deservedly so, but for most of us this will not be the case.

We have to be willing to get out from behind the computer. We have to not only pay attention, but be willing to engage. We need unsentimental efficiency to disarm our nostalgia.