Popular Posts

Friday, June 14, 2013

MILLENNIALS, NATTERING AS WE GO, WHY IMPORTANT, WHY A CONCERN!



 
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 14, 2013
 
COMMENT:
A number of readers have been disappointed that I did not elaborate on the references made to my other works that bear on the subject at hand.  As one reader put it, "I read these pieces and didn't need a rehash.  But the reason I'm writing is that a lot of the ideas expressed here have been expressed in your books going back to Work Without Managers, right?"  Actually, I have never written about millennials, per se, but have written about social, cultural and economic trends vis-à-vis workers and managers.  With that in mind, I've expanded on the premises expressed here.
*     *     *
Claire McNeill, about to graduate from university, has written an interesting Op Ed piece (Tampa Bay Times, 6/14/13) titled “My digital generation adapts and pushes on.”  She writes:
“I’m a millennial according to the label that pegs us for those of us born from the 1980s to the late ‘90’s. My reputation precedes me, apocalyptic tales of my attention generation abound.  We’re narcissistic and disaffected, reeking of entitlements.  A legion of Peter Pans, we’re complacent in our dead-end temp jobs, squatting in our parents’ basements.  We’ve been spoiled by our helicopter parents and coddled with trophies received for every tiny achievement – or just for showing up.  We’re Pavlov’s dog, raised on instant gratification or social media.  We don’t know what bootstraps are, all 80 million of us.” 

She goes on to say these criticisms ring hollow from where she stands, but as I hope to show this is not necessarily so.  She goes on to say her generation is optimistic --- what American generation hasn’t been despite dire circumstances?  Optimism is both a blessing and a curse to Americans.  It is one reason our leaders lead from behind.  They hope for the best with the emphasis on hope and have little courage or inclination to take risks to upset that fixation on optimism, that is, until events come crashing in and make it impossible to do otherwise.  In a way, the Digital Generation is the personification of this optimism and engagement style.

Then she argues quite lucidly the fact that “we are true digital natives."  That cannot be disputed but she says it as if it implies that being a "digital native" is an uncontested good thing.  Truth being known we don't know and therefore cannot argue the point with any credible confidence.
 
“The Internet is something we live alongside,” which again I think is true.   While she sees the cost benefits quite clearly, I confess to being wearier.  Obviously, her generation has left the baby boomers television generation behind as her reality and reality television are intertwined.

Ms. McNeill’s generation Is Tom Friedman’s “the world is flat” with global markets, blurring demographic, cultural and national boundaries, indeed, nationalism itself.  “My generation will be the most racially and ethnically integrated of all time.”  If this alone proves true, it could become the greatest generation in the history of man as we, at last, would be by definition a human and hopefully humane race.  But does she believe civil society will truly become civilized, and that war and terror will perish while social justice will pervade the planet?  I don't think so. 
Evidence that this young lady has her head screwed on properly is that she sees her generation intuitively engaged in incessant change with no inclination to retreat from it.  On the other hand, she sees the same anxiety-driven questions with which to grapple and a similar sense of an identity crisis.  When being authentic is more a matter of what others think of you than what you think of yourself, identity and anxiety are always challenging (see Meet Your New Best Friend 2013).
 She also admits several college trained friends are treading water, some waiting instead of doing something to change the momentum.  She correctly calls these individuals “slackers.”  But she sees most engaged while gritting their teeth, volunteering, networking, adapting to the reality of the situation, taking the initiative and “pushing on.”  If ten percent of the millennials are like her, Pitrim Sorokin’s “Ideational Culture” will surely materialized, but before calling for a parade, let us look at this a little more in depth.

Time’s columnist Joel Stein, 41, misses being a member of this generation by about a decade.  But it is clear that he wears their colors (“The New Greatest Generation: Why Millennials Will Save Us All, Time,” 5/20/13).  What is interesting about Stein’s complementary and complimentary piece to Ms. McNeill’s is that his waltzes through data expressed elsewhere (see “An Open Letter to Young Professionals,” The Peripatetic Philosopher, 6/12/13) while doing a good job of outlining the possible challenges ahead:

(1)         Millennials aren’t trying to take over the Establishment; they’re growing up without one.  IF this is true, and there is little doubt that it is, at 80 million strong, they are still only a quarter of the American population.
 
(2)         Millennials, while lacking face-to-face empathy, know how to turn themselves into a brand.  They self-advertise on some social media with scores sometimes hundreds of “friends” and “followers.”  This inclination is seen by University of Georgia psychologists as the equivalent of inflating their balloon on such social networks as Facebook.
 
(3)         Millennials define who they are as personality types by the age of 14, whereas earlier generations were unsure who they were until in their 30s.  Growing up on reality television, which is basically documentaries of personality types, is credited for this development.
 
(4)          Millennials, rich or poor, think and behave the way rich kids have always behaved.  That is why they are the first generation of teenagers that is not into rebelling.  They are not even sullen.  As one person of this generation confesses, “I grew up watching Peanuts.  MTV was a parent free zone.  MTV president Stephen Friedman says of his reality shows, “My audience outsources its superego to their parents.”
 
(5)         Millennials love the business culture and all that it represents and celebrities as well.  Previous generations were suspect of business and kept celebrity at arm’s length. 
 
(6)         Millennials are not cowed by power.  They see themselves as part of the power curve and embrace celebrity with all its connotations.  Institutional authority is leveraged without hesitation to negotiate better contracts.  Position power is neither intimidating nor mesmerizing but only something to engage.   
 
(7)         Millennials are not true believers or into counterculture because for them there is no culture. There is no “us versus them” mentality.  This is yet another reason why millennials don’t think in terms of rebellion.
 
(8)         Millennials have experienced President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Great Recession of 2008, and the Arab Spring.  They look to winter of their lives optimistically on a personal and professional level.
 
(9)         Millennials have no interest in aborting “the system,” but choose instead to embrace it.  They are pragmatic idealists instead of causal idealists.  They are tinkerers rather than dreamers; life hackers rather than life strategists.  What you see is not only what you get, from their point of view, that is all there is.
 
(10)         Millennials are comfortable in a world without leaders or leadership.  They don’t consider them relevant or necessary; the same is true of managers.  From their perspective, the world is flat and to be engaged without installing interferences.  The focus is on their interests, only, with leaders and managers treated as if poster board intrusions.  That explains why the “Occupy Wall Street” and Arab Spring in Tahir Square in Egypt fizzled out.  They are not into rebellion or a cohesive attack on their frustrations.  They are only interested in giving notice as to what they are, which is a new phenomenon.  They are not planners or activists.  They are the ultimate conclusion to Pacifier Nation.   
 
(11)         Millennials need constant approval.  They post pictures on their mobiles while trying on clothes; they have massive fears of missing out or not being included; they are more interested in themselves than in anyone else, but need the approval of others so they can in turn approve of themselves (re: see Meet Your New Best Friend, 2013).
 
(12)         Millennials are celebrity obsessed, but don’t idolize celebrities.  They see celebrities “just like us!”  As with celebrities, everything with them is context not content.  Content is a running theme without a beginning, middle or end, or necessarily a plot.
 
(13)         Millennials are not likely to be churchgoers, even though they believe in God, because they don’t identify with big institutions, religious or otherwise.  Earlier generations with such a mindset would want to change the religious, educational, governmental or political system to better reflect their ideas and ideals.  This is not so with millennials.  They have no trouble with them being as they are as long as they don’t take their mobiles away.  
 
(14)         Millennials could best be described as being cool about everything, but not passionate about anything.  They are informed but not palpably transactional or transformational in the sense of being interested in changing or even disturbing the status quo, again, as long as it doesn’t disturb their modus operandi. 
 
(15)         Millennials are pro-business and financially responsible.  They have less credit card debt than any other previous generation since the era of credit cards.  This is in part because they may live at home and use their parents’ credit cards.  That said they do have $1.1 trillion in school loan debt.
 
(16)         Millennials are not shy; they are comfortable in front of a camera; they can talk intelligently in sound bites, but perception in a personal sense is still everything.  Proof of this is that the average 17-year-old has more images on Facebook than a 17th century French king had of himself in his lifetime
Joel Stein’s piece in the Time’s, to his credit, lays out some of the factors with which observers over the past thirty plus years have registered concern.  The late Christopher Lasch wrote a series of book on the subject commencing with “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) and “The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984), among them. 

Should you read these books, studies written before the Information Age took hold, you would find that Lasch anticipated that what I call “the Pacifier Generation,” would in time materialize.  It is with us now.  The mobile has become the replacement for the plastic nipple that so much earlier had registered contentment, while freeze framing millennials as if the center of their own universe in narcissistic delight irrespective of the perturbations clamoring for their attention and resolution.  Studies indicate that:

(1)         The incident of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that is now 65 years of age or older.

(2)         58 percent of college students scored higher on a narcissistic scale in 2009 than in 1982 (National Institute of Health).

(3)         Millennials got so many participation trophies while growing up that a recent study showed that 40 percent believe they should be promoted every two years regardless of performance.

(4)         Millennials are fame obsessed.  Three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be personal assistants to famous people as want to be a United States Senator.  This is the antithesis of delusions of grandeur for themselves, but rather an interest in being near glamour and power to benefit from the reflection.
 
(5)         According to a 2007 survey, four times as many would pick the assistant job to as celebrity  over CEO of a major corporation.

(6)         Millennials are so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60 percent would feel right without any guiding principles or outside authority.  This nullifies the role of the Church and organized religion as personal intercessor.

(7)         Millennials are stunted.  More of them live with their parents who are between the ages of 18 and 29 than live with a spouse outside their parent’s home (Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults).

(8)         Millennials are lazy.  In 1992, 80 percent of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with great responsibility; in 2002, only 60 percent did (Families and Work Institute).  They still want the perks and privileges that before were offered as incentives to performance.  This has been described elsewhere as leading to workers being suspended in terminal adolescence (see Work Without Managers 1991).  WWMs anticipated the decline and irrelevance of management in the conduct of business, but it didn’t anticipate the arrival of milennials as the Digital Generation.  Millennials have become an exclamation point to the premise of this study.
 
(9)         Millennials cannot do simple math (adding, subtracting, division, multiplication) in their heads; they need a calculator.  Nor can millennials spell or construct grammatical sentences without the Internet.  Their curiosity in both regards is skin deep as they rely on some software for grammar and spell check as well as the thesaurus for the word that they will use.  The vocabulary in their heads is limited, too, as they are not a reader generation. 

 
(10)         Millennials at 80 million strong (born between 1980 and 2000) are the largest generation in American history.  Baby boomers, who are now retiring, are not far behind at 78 million.  In an ironic way, due to the abandonment of parenting requirements of baby boomers, millennials have had the opportunity to be their own parents as well as the inclination to create a world that best reflected their orientation and mindset.  They were into games as children and now they are making life a game on another level.  They justify their toys – devices of the Information Age – as instruments of efficiency or tools, while showing little interest or inclination to reflect on what was lost never to be experienced again for what was gained.

 
(11)         Rich and poor are equally narcissistic, materialistic, and technology addicted.  There is little indication that millennials see this as delimiting.  The consequence of this paradox is that no generation has been so focused as millennials on the present or less focused on history or the past.

 
(12)         Self-esteem issues peak with each generation at some point, but with millennials it has accidentally boosts their narcissistic preoccupation.  Self and esteem have become an oxymoron as verification of individual worth has ceased to be from inner direction but almost entirely from outer verification.

 
(13)         Millennials believe hooking up or networking is as important if not more important than actually developing individual talent.  There is a sameness to postmodern existence which the Television Age with its monolithic architecture of hearth and home, dress and manners, and even layout of cities and towns has become even more so in the Information Age and the common denominator of millennials.

Millennials are most likely to have a high degree of unmet expectations which the late Christopher Lasch anticipated nearly forty years ago (see Culture of Narcissism) with them escaping into the electronic case of their own making.  Millennials don’t get angry, or make demands on the status quo, they simply lower their expectations and level of satisfaction and resigned themselves more or less to their fate.

(14)         Millennials have come of age in the era of the “quantified self,” that is, it is not the quality of anything, friends included, but the numbers, as they obsessively are recording and adding constantly to their data base with the number of hits, etc.

(15)         Millennials are text crazy sending and receiving a minimum of 88 per day.  They are constantly waiting, wherever they are, for the buzz to tell them they have a message.  It is the silence that is most threatening and the buzz that is most consoling.

(16)         Millennials live under the constant pressure and influence of friends.  “Peer pressure is anti-intellectual, anti-historical and anti-eloquent” says Professor Mark Bauerlein, Emory University.  But this is not new.  Peer pressure has always been a confounding phenomenon.  What makes it more so in this Digital Age is that anyone who does not have and is not slave to a mobile is non compus mentis, or completely irrelevant.  This mindset is more pervasive than racial, religious, educational, political or social bias.

(17)         Millennials constant texting and tweeting is according to Professor Larry Rosen of California State University, “doing a behavior to reduce anxiety.”  It is the Digital Age pacifier surpassing Valium or cigarettes, booze or dope to register contentment, so it isn’t all bad.

(18)         Millennials are not creative.  The constant search for a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my latest textual update!”) increases contentment and satisfaction but reduces creativity.  From 1966 to the mid-1980s, creativity scores in children increased.  They have been falling sharply since 1998 according to the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.  Millennials argue look at all the advancement made practically every day in electronics and their applications.  Technology is grounded in application, and application technology has been vigorous and impressive.  But the science, which is the foundation and source of technology is old, very old in some instances harkening back scores of years and beyond.  Look at art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy and psychology, and you will see evidence that perfection has taken precedence over perspicacity. 

(19)         In the era of social networking, largely through an unnecessary face-to-face engagement, empathy scores have dropped and narcissism scores have climbed.  Millennials have trouble intellectually understanding other’s with differing points of view.  It is outside their normal orientation.  Before they were called the Digital Generation, they were referred to as the “spoiled brat generation” by some writers (see Six Silent Killers, 2013).

On the heels of the Time report, we learn that in California students with perfect attendance records at some inner city schools are eligible for cars or iPads as rewards for perfect school attendance but not necessarily with any requirement for improvement in school performance.  This policy differs from school district to school district, and the financing for these incentives is said to be completely privately funded. 

Nattering as we go, the interest here is to engage the reader to see the possible impact in terms of transactional or transformational benefit to society for the period.  We have had several generations named in the last century and a half.  Transactional leadership pursues economic and psychological contracts that meet the material and psychic needs of society.  Transformational leadership recognizes the material and psychic transactional needs, but goes further to transform the system to more effectively and efficiently meet those needs.  Here are my most subjective designations::

(1)         Missionary Generation (1860 – 1882) – transformational with Franklin Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryant

(2)         The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900) – transactional with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scot Fitzgerald and James Joyce

(3)         The Greatest Generation (1901 – 1924) – transformational with Betty Friedman, Ronald Reagan and WWII veterans

(4)         The Silent Generation (1925 – 1942) – transactional with the Silent Majority and children of the Great Depression

(5)         Baby Boomer Generation (1942 – 1960) – transactional with Oprah Winfrey and the Culture of Narcissism

(6)         Generation X (1961 – 1980) – transactional with Jon Stewart and children who became their own parents

(7)         The Millennials (1980 – 2000) – transformational with Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga

It is perhaps hard for millennials to understand why we give them so much attention, but so little credence.  This is not new.  We do this with for every new generations.  The only difference with millennials, and this may prove significant, is that they don’t seem to take the rest of us seriously, as they have had to be their own parents, and now on their own, don’t feel they need us.  For Joel Stein, “That’s why we’re scared of them.”

 

*    *     *

 

No comments:

Post a Comment