If you were born roughly between the late 80's and the 2000's, you've most likely at some point heard of the term Millennial Generation/Generation Z used to describe that newest crop of kids born after Generation Y, X, and the Baby Boomer Generation. Millennials have also unfortuantely been the topic of much negative attention as they are frequently also described as lazy, narcissistic, entitled individuals who don't care about much in terms of the real important life/death issues of the world. I'm not necessarily saying that is true for this entire generation, but if it were true, wouldn't this so called apathetic millennial disease just be the inevitable product of the tireless work and hopes and dreams of previous generations?
The Baby Boomer generation was the product of a few generations before them which were met with some incredible hardships--war, disease, dust bowls, market crashes, battles for civil rights, inflation, you name it. They had a tough life, many of them, and they dug in their heels and taught the generation that came after them, the Baby Boomers, what hard work was about, what loss was about, what working together to make a country one that you could be proud of, was about. Nothing in life, as they knew, came to you for free, you had to work for it. So the baby boomers took that to heart and did what every single generation before has done, which is promise that the new generation that would come after them, would not have to suffer like they suffered, and that they would help them move that much further in this world than they did. This cycle of wanting better for the next generation and wanting things to be much easier than the previous generation continued. Match that with not having things like drafts, better education, and more rights for individuals....I bring you the Millennial set.
They have it easy as compared to previous generations, technically as they should, given this cycle of wanting better for the next generation, and the next, and the next. Those very people who complain about this particular generation have in fact created the monster. Technology has made literally everything easy straddled with being a generation built on the landfills of rampant consumerism and expendable monies and incomes. More and more parents are buying expensive cell phone and internet plans, first cars for, and allowing adult children to move back home. Most everything is set up to be either convenient, easy, or fast or all three and social media has made it an art form, one that can actually be very lucrative, for those narcissists out there, and now...and now, some people complain.
With the giving over of something like a cell phone, a kid has the world at his or her fingertips. Kids can know, see, and do anything they want in an internet world meaning more and more these days that there is less and less influence from parent to kid, and couple that with parents who are either single parents, or a two income household that have to work all the time...the former generations ideas of family time have almost completely fallen by the wayside. I mean how many times a week do you, or your family have dinner together sitting down at a table, having important life discussions?
One of the scary things about this is that progress is not retroactive. With more and more pushes in science and technology to make a world where we are basically not needed anymore (self checkout, video surveilance, smart homes, missels that can be fired from a base not even in the same country they are deployed in, etc.), we are slowly and systematically eliminating our jobs and the need for us or the new generation to work them in favor for more time, leisure, and otherwise, making ourselves obsolete. Seriously, did anyone see Wall-E? That was pretty much a documentary on our future, a future we are willingly going along with and creating as we speak.
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