According to YouTube analytics roughly 80% of people watching it are under 35 years old. Marketers have invented a name for this demographic of impressionable young people they’re called millennials, others have labeled them generation Y. A millennial is anyone born after 1980, that includes myself and most of my readers. In fact millennials now outnumber every other generation.
but according to multiple studies, we are the most depressed generation ever. Psychology today reports that the suicide rate amongst young adults has tripled since the 1950s and terrifyingly suicide is now the second most common cause of death among college students. Between 2005 and 2014 the number of clinically depressed teenagers increased by more than half a million, three-quarters of whom were women every year more and more millennials are taking time off work and seeking help for mental health issues an even greater number of report extremely low job satisfaction and say that they experience difficulty maintaining relationships.
Young people always get a lot of stick, the older generation have always experienced ‘juvenoia’, a fear or hostility directed at the younger generation. This is nothing new baby boomers born just after the war had a strong work ethic, and believed that the amount of hours worked directly relational to their income. Baby boomers heavily begrudged the generation that came after them, Generation X. They were more independent they changed their careers more often and believed in a fair work life/balance. And now it has come full circle once again baby boomers and generation xers alike are resenting generation Y the millennials. Who have brand new values such as collaboration, work that actually meaningful and impactful, for having fun in the workplace and ofcourse free FOOD…
Do previous generation look down on upon us just because we’re different or is it more than that? Even time magazine has poked the millennial beast calling them “lazy, entitled narcissist” who still live with their parents. But unfortunately they could have a point, unike the generational divides of last century, there is a lot of research and statistics that suggest every bad label millennials have been tied with, maybe well deserved even if it isn’t strictly through our own fault. The cold hard facts don’t lie. The volume of incidents of narcissistic personality disorder is three times higher for people currently in their 20s than the average.
Are we really all in love with ourselves because we received 50 likes on our latest selfie? Experts believe there are very real, observable causes of this heightened narcissism. Millennials are the first generation that has been brought up on reality television and every year more than most superficial reality programming is shoved down our throats. Such programs advertise narcissism above all else, portraying looks and popularity as the source of fame and happiness. In such shows real human relationships are often shown as being cheap and disposable. And then of course there’s a social media swamp that drowns us all in a sea of likes, shares pins and follows.
Countless studies have shown that dopamine the pleasure chemical is released in the brain when we receive likes on our photos and videos. This system breeds narcissism at its very core. It appears that the more narcissistic we are and the most selfies we upload the more likes we will inevitably receive and sadly this actually makes us happy.
Experts also accuse us of being entitled. A recent study 40% of millennial believe they should be promoted every two years even if they have not earned it. Research shows that this entitlement to be given handouts, regardless of one’s performance, stems from an unusual place. Remember school sports day? Even if you came in last place you still got a trophy just for participating. As children we were always rewarded for taking part somehow, its the taking part that counts remember? Countless studies have proven that this attitude created disingenuous and diluted sense of achievement and can be deeply damaging to our future expectations of what it really takes to achieve something.
This philosophy is unique to our generation, generation X-ers, baby boomers and those before them were all brought up in a deeply competitive environment. It was instilled within them from a young age that rewards have to be earned through hard work and graft. They were not told that they were entitled to anything.
The so-called silent generation that lived through both world wars certainly didn’t feel entitled, they lived through the hardest times of modern history and everything they had earned, they had to cling onto with their lives quite literally. This meant that when they brought up their children, the baby boomers, they instilled within them a strict mentality of saving every penny and an extremely hard work ethic. They were told that nothing in life was for free or even expected. it was all up to them.
The baby boomers grew up and had children of their own generation x, thus they passed on the same hard work ethic. But then a huge shift happened in the global economy that changed everything. Generation x lived through a time of great prosperity, industry was on the rise and the world was finally dragging itself out of the pits that it had dug for itself during the war. This gen xers can do attitude made them and so they taught their children, us millennials that if you put your mind to it you can do anything and live a very successful happy life. Their parents have drilled in their head that You are special and unique, this has created the generation of people who believe that they are special. Millenials are fame obsessed too. In recent survey, millenials are four times likely to work as an assistant of a famous person than be a CEO of a major corporation. In a recent poll, teens were asked what they would like to do for a career 54% of 16 year olds answered, “become a celebrity”. Far gone are the days when becoming a celebrity was just a side effect of demonstrating unique talents to the masses.
Millennials are also lazier we have grown up with technology that can think for us and therein lies the biggest problem that’s ruining the lives of young people today, mobile phones. I know you’ve heard it 100 times mobile phones are bad for you, but do you really know just how damaging they are from mental health? Because the researcher is terrifying. So just imagine you’re enjoying a meal at a restaurant with family or friends how many times do you check your phone? Over the course of that, the average millennial checks their phone over 100 times per day and they touch, tap, swipe on their phone over 3000 times per day. Because we are all addicts. I mentioned earlier that receiving likes release dopamine, well so does 100 other things we do with our phones.
Taking a selfie, a picture of food or even writing status update that you just cooked the most amazing omelette of your life. All these acts release dopamine even before we upload them to the internet. The anticipation of multitude of likes and comments makes our brain go bonkers with dopamine. Within seconds we start to receive feedback, this instant gratification, instant approval from our peers. And it goes on and on round-the-clock we receive instant gratification when we wake up, peer approval before we go to bed and throughout the middle of the night the dopamine swirls and swirls in our brain and its everlasting continuum of self fulfillment and reward.
This only serves to perpetuate or narcissism. Until it stops. When we upload a photo of chapo, avocado and toast mayai (Kobi Challenge nayo) and it doesn’t receive as much attention as we hoped. In our minds our peers have rejected us, we are now lost without purpose we are now depressed. Does all this sound familiar? This cycle of massive releases of dopamine followed by periods of intense sadness sounds very much like an alcohol or gambling addiction, doesn’t it? Whether we like it or not, we have become a generation ofaddicts. We are so addicted that our phones sleep next to us, stay next to our food as we eat and the reason we have our loved ones in second priority to a little dopamine device it’s the reason we don’t talk to people on the bus, matatu (yes Kenya we have those), on the train, at school or work, we instead indulge wholly in our addiction because we are truly addicted and most of us don’t even realize.
A survey of more than 2000 millenials found that 93% use their phones in bed and 80% use their phones on the toilet. But its not your fault, Millennials are simply a product of the environment, this is the hands we were dealt, we grew up in a time of rapid technological advancement and as long as mobile devices continue to generate enormous profits then companies will continue to develop new digital mechanisms and social networks that provide us with instant gratification and it keeps coming quicker and quicker we no longer have to wait for our next fix. Its instantaneous we have snapchat, facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest, whatsapp any of which can provide on next fix whenever we desire it.
Our parents didn’t have these distractions. They had to put work and effort into receiving the approval of their peers. They had to have meaningful conversations and form strong deep and long lasting relationships with both their friends and partners. At work they had to graft day after day, and when the promotion came along my god did they deserve it. In contrast millennials have become immensely inpatient we are so used to instant gratification that if we don’t get a promotion 10 minutes after we start a new job we get bored of it because its not in the timeline we are used to. We say we want to make impact, yet we expect do so within our first six months at a new job.
And when 6 months or year has gone by and we’re still the tea and coffee guy for the office it makes us feel disenfranchised, worthless and depressed. But it’s not your fault you have grown up in a maelstrom of dopamine on tap when ever you desire it, so naturally you expect the same instant fulfillment from your career and relationships. We can’t tap a button to help us achieve that, there is no virtual replacement for hard work and genuine conversations. We can’t swipe right to get promoted and I’m sorry folks but it’s going to take more than commenting on your partner’s latest selfie to make them feel genuinely valued and loved. Take them on a date, forget your phone for the entire time. Because the moment you do they are now priority.
So should we be worried about the future of a world run by these terrible millenials? in 10 or 20 years time? These narcissistic, self-obsessed, lazy, entitled young adults who want success handed to them on a plate? Who can’t tie down a relationship or achieve satisfaction in the workplace, because the’re too addicted to social media.
Well, yes we young people have our issues but we’re actually no different to the last generation. Also labelled as entitled and lazy when they were young. We need to recognize that the world has completely changed both technologically and culturally over the past twenty years, and millennials are the first of adopters of this strange new lifestyle. When you can build a billion dollar business from your bedroom if you put your mind to it. All our apparent faults are clearly symptoms of trying to adapt to a completely strange new way of life, that are parents didn’t have to deal with.
We face new pressures and stresses and challenges, and we need to find better ways to cope with them rather than indulging in social media. And for all of us there are actually good things to say about us millenials that are rarely brought up. We are the most tolerable generation ever. Research shows that prejudice has fallen with each generation. Millenials are less racist, homophobic and sexiest than their parents. a Pew research asked adults aged between 18 and 29, what their most important priority was during their lifetime, 52% said good parent, 30% said have a successful marriage and 21% replied helping others.
Now that doesn’t sound like a generation that is completely self absorbed, Does it? And in our inability to hold a normal 9-5 job, may not be entirely due to our reliance on social media.
Maybe its because we want more than the monotonous normality of working for some heartless giant corporation like suffericom who drink our bundles like juice. Research shows that millennials are the most entrepreneur generation ever. Spurred on by young do-it-yourself success stories like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as its innovation we have an unstoppable appetite to achieve something big and make an impact, right after we are finished sending is hilarious snapchat.
This mentality might be proving difficult to some large corporations who need to employ cheap, young labour that can sit in an office and push buttons for 8 hours a day. But it’s certainly is changing the world in ways our parents could have never imagine. There’s no doubt that we need to spend more time interacting with one another and less time on social media. All the research has shown that it does bad things for mental health. But we need to accept that the world is rapidly changing. Millenials have their faults but they are changing the world in incredible ways just like the generation before us and the generation before that. Change has always come and always will, it is inevitable. So we need to find a way to work with it for the better instead of spending our time pointing out the faults in others.
Thank you for reading
