The Peripatetic Philosopher admits:

Why My Fascination With Millennials

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 6, 2015

HEADLINE:

 “Sales at Bonefish Sink!" (Tampa Bay Times, August 6, 2015)

Sales have plummeted at this Tampa Bay franchise chain, experts conclude, because the millennials don’t see upscale chains as adventuresome.  They prefer mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa restaurants run by local people in the community.

Typically, and expectedly, these experts see millennials as being “anti-chain” driven when a simpler and more telling explanation is that millennials don’t waste their energy being “anti” about anything. 

They don’t find it necessary to dine where you pay for the ambience or the brand or for the opportunity to rub shoulders with the up and coming, or those who think they are. 

For millennials, it is simply a matter of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and letting those who prefer fancier eating accommodations, all the more power to them. 

Millennials are not into resentment or standing on some soap box and protesting the high prices for low lights and cloth napkins.  They just drive by these eating emporiums.

NOT A NEW FASCINATION

For the past twenty-five years, I have been following the growing presence of what I deemed “personhood” as opposed to the “common good” that has been the rhetoric of the priests, pundits, politicians and academics since time immemorial. 

Since coming back from South Africa in 1969, I have seen a tectonic shift in American values, first almost imperceptible but gradually gaining momentum until I saw it having some considerable force in 1990, when I wrote Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2^nd edition 2014).  I wrote then:

The established culture of American society, the “common good,” has failed to support the society that it would define.  Yet, many of its advocates, often located in American Think Tanks, stubbornly insist it is the only way.  Against this reality, the culture of “personhood” now struggles to establish itself …

“This difference has already had pivotal ramifications across America, from the home to the workplace.  Adversaries have been made of parents and children, teachers and students, the clergy and laity, manager and workers, leaders and followers in all walks of life.  It has also produced a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements in the organization.”  

This chart taken from Work Without Managers that summarized the shift:

My designation of “personhood” hardly made a ripple on public consciousness, not even after Executive Excellence Magazine featured my idea.

It was not until Time Magazine (May 20, 2013) featured a cover story on millennials with the title “The Me Me Me Generation” that Americans started to take stock of this growing phenomenon. 

It shows the power of words.  This word, “millennials,” is a designation beyond the Hippies, “Y” and “X” generation; beyond the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of that moment that had no legs. 

It was not “personhood,” I wrote, “but an angst of the “common good” that was already fading.

If you studied the crowds of malcontents of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, it was evident there were few if any millennials.  They are not into protest.

Joel Stein made a most salient observation in his Time article on millennials:

“Millennials aren’t trying to take over the establishment; they’re growing up without one.”

Millennials have, indeed, grown to maturity in a climate where words took precedence over deeds, presence over performance, where false expectations were treated as real supported in denial, where justice was often the epitome of injustice, where authority had no teeth, and celebrity created the noise but provided little music.  This has found millennials retreating into themselves, and for it called “narcissistic.”

That said millennials have not had to think, do math in their heads, or weighty research to write school papers.  They plagiarize the Internet without guilt, content to lead ghetto fabulous lives addicted to their computers and mobiles while disinclined to take seriously what they have been taught was important.

With millennials, a philosophy of belief is implied rather than stated.  Whatever millennials may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard of their lives, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with the Bible and God.    

With all their excesses and counterpoint orientation, Joel Stein in Time Magazine thinks they’ll save us all.  On this I am more circumspect as I see them as a work in progress, one gaining momentum and in that process changing the very nature of what we call “civil society.”