Ryan sent me a video to
watch the other day by a guy called Simon Sinek, who’s talking about how
Millennials are struggling with forming relationships, having rewarding
careers and life in general. I shared the video (and I’ve put the link
at the bottom of this post or you can click on the picture on the left)
with the intention of putting up this post to go with it.
Unfortunately, I got sidetracked. Several days later, I’m picking up
where I left off. Well, kind of. I also had several conversations about
the video with Ryan and my Uncle and I thought it would be an
interesting exercise to get their views on the video, too: three
generations of commentary.
At the start of the video, I was
intrigued; Simon makes several great points. But I don’t agree with his
ultimate point at all, because he’s saying that Millennials are the way
they are and it’s not their fault, poor them; they’re victims of poor
parenting and the narcissism of today’s technological lifestyle.
Excuse
me? Millennials are the way they are and it’s up to them to take
responsibility for it, look at how things are, take what works and move
beyond what doesn’t work. That’s the way it is for all of us. That’s the
way it has been since time immemorial. It’s called growth, development,
maturity.
Simon points out that companies need to support their
employees and bring out the best in them, and right now that’s not
happening. The poor Millennials want to make a difference in the world
and because they’ve grown up with this need for instant gratification,
they’re getting disillusioned and moving from job to job. Employers need
to change the way they do things to stop that. Employers definitely do
need to change. Some of them have an appalling culture that affects not
just the poor millennials but every other employee, too. We’re all
human, we all want to make a difference in the world, but as time goes
on and the world changes and grows, we’ve become more aware that making a
difference is a basic human driver. We’ve moved away from mere survival
to something more. This can be said about every company towards every
employee. When a company’s main focus is the dollar, when it’s all about
efficiency and profit and production, something needs to change. It’s
no longer a sustainable business model. A successful business today
needs to be about the people within the company, not the product. The
people are the true resource, not the product.
Each generation
has its own hurdles to overcome. If I look back at my grandmother’s
parenting technique, “Bring me that brush so I can hit you with it” will
never form a part of my child-rearing armoury. But my Granny was
rearing her children to the best of her ability, in the way that she
felt was appropriate at the time. She wanted her kids to do well, she
wanted them to succeed, she did her best. Did my parents have crap to
deal with as a result of that? They sure did? Do I have stuff that I
need to deal with because of things that my parents did? I sure do. We
all do. My parents did their best, my grandparents did their best, I did
my best, AND WE’RE STILL GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES. It’s called growth,
learning, development, maturity, wisdom. It’s called being human.
On
the whole, parents ALWAYS try to do the best they can for their kids,
it’s an inbuilt survival mechanism, it’s difficult to avoid. Parents are
also people. They’re growing, learning, making mistakes. Parents are –
shock, horror – fallible. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing
most of the time, they make it up as they go along. There could never be
a manual for parenting but we’re all so individual. Our personalities
and unique experiences mean that each of us will deal with every
situation in a slightly different way. We have to learn for ourselves.
That’s called LIVING. That’s what being a human is all about: learning,
growing, maturing, becoming wiser.
The Millennial generation has
it no harder or easier than any other generation, their experiences are
simply different. The outcome of that particular style of parenting is
different to previous generations. Their lifestyle is different to any
other generation. The expectations that they have from life are
different. And conversely, every older generation since the year dot has
commented that the younger generation don’t know how easy they’ve got
it and that they don’t know how the world will survive when they younger
generation take over.
This is all GREAT news, because it means
that as a human race, we’re growing and developing. We tried something,
maybe it didn’t work as well as we wanted it to and now it’s time to
take whatever learnings we need to take from it, integrate them and
grow.
But the overall feel of the video, intentional or not, was
that of “oh, the poor millennials” like they’re somehow weak,
powerless, victims who have zero control over what happens to them and
how they’re so hard done by and how they’ve got so much to overcome.
That is not my belief. My belief is that these generations are the
strongest we’ve produced yet. They may have different problems to
overcome, problems that haven’t been seen before in the history of
mankind, but so has every generation before them. It’s all balanced: the
size of the problems/experiences/expectations I believe is balanced out
by the size of the opportunities and potential rewards.
This
generation is far from powerless and they’re definitely not victims. Or
at least, they can be if they want to be, the same as everyone else, and
maybe they have the power to be far more victimised and powerless if
they want to be. It’s a choice. My feeling is that they’re the best
generation humanity has produced yet, and the following generations will
continue to improve. Yes, they face different challenges to me or my
ancestors, but they’re more than capable of dealing with them. And yes,
the older generations need to change and grow and adapt in a way that
gives the younger generations the best foundation they can have for the
future. That’s how it’s supposed to go… in a perfect world. We’re
becoming more and more aware of what we need to do to make things work
best; we’ll get there.
***
Ryan’s commentary on the video:
There are, apparently, two schools of thought:
In
the first, the idea is that, originally, humanity was at its peak,
morally and emotionally. Since then, with the invention of more and more
weapons and unnecessary technological clutter, we have come steadily
further and further away from that basic state of human nature. People
point to heroic eddas, or classical epics, and claim that because the
people in those were unquestionably heroic, we have definitely come
downhill from there. Now, instead of lying around being tragically
moral, we just sit on our phones and ignore the more general problems
facing our species.
In the second, however, the idea is that as
we develop more and more advanced technology, moving further away from
the necessity to spend the entirety of our days finding food or shelter
or other such banal trivia, we come to a state in which we can develop
our morality and emotion consciously. Being rid of the superficial, we
can focus on what it really means to be human.
So: either we
were better in the good old days, or we’re getting better with every
passing day. Sound familiar? Is the glass of cognitive understanding
half empty, or half full? Do Millennials really contribute anything to
the world, or were things better before the invention of the internet?
I
saw a video a couple of days ago, and promptly sent it to my mum, who’s
generally interested in these kinds of things. In it, a speaker
‘diagnoses’ why Millennials have such different expectations in the
workplace. His reasoning was to enable the older employers to understand
why Millennials want standing desks, or to have their phones on them at
all times, or to – and I’m not exaggerating – “make a difference in the
world”.
[Quick Point: I’m a Millennial, according to most
measurements on the topic. I grew up when Facebook was in its infancy, I
watched the internet grow into what it is today, and the changes that
it made impacted on how I developed as a person. Just so you know: it
might make my viewpoint different to yours.]
This speaker said
that the differences between the newer generation and the older are
caused by four distinct effects: bad parenting, changing technology,
ingrained impatience and a communication-filled environment. And while,
as he goes through the list, he makes a few good points about how we
were raised differently and how technology has impacted on the way that
we interact with the world, in the end I found that I didn’t really
agree with him. For two reasons.
Firstly: all of this assumes
that our generation is different to the one before. “Millennials are so
entitled.” “Millennials are impatient.” “Millennials don’t know how good
they’ve got it.” Should I bring everyone’s attention to the 60s? At
what point do people think that the fact that technology has changed
mean that the people who grew up with it are somehow worse for having
different expectations about how life should be lived? Where does the
change occur in a person, going from “technology is great” to
“technology is ruining young people”? Because I will guarantee: the
people who complain about iPhones and Apps are the same people who
defended the rise of mobile phones.
Secondly: we shouldn’t be
tiptoeing around the fact that young people act differently to old
people. Young people have their phones ringing, and if we don’t like it,
it’s up to us to bring it up. It always takes a while for society to
develop an etiquette about new technology, and in the last ten years
we’ve gone from “don’t speak to strangers on the internet” to “set up a
date with a random person over an App based on nothing but a picture and
a short paragraph”. Sure, young people may be rude in the eyes of old
people, but old people are behind the times to young people.
And that is the way that it has ALWAYS been.
My
point is that, in the end, people are all the same. Every generation
since the dawn of time has complained about being sandwiched between a
generation that doesn’t move with the times and a generation that moves
too quickly.
We weren’t any better before, and we won’t be any
better in the future. But maybe we can get rid of the idea that our
generation is better than the others.
***
I’ll add my Uncle’s commentary as soon as I can.
