By Donna Arp Weitzman | Author of Cinderella has Cellulite and Other Musings of a Last Wife
When analyzing the scars and fears of Millennials, and the common themes that society imparts on them, it evokes poignancy from the eyes of a baby boomer. Has the current situation of the world set up the Millennials to never experience peace through their eyes wide-open 24-hour media existence? The negative, war-torn world bubble that Millennials were raised in likely revealed a dark underbelly, which put a lid on the joy that our youth should have experienced, that of growing up in a safe underexposed environment. Over information from thousands of sources, mostly biased, has likely caused mental and emotional scars in the brains of our young people.
Their ability to feel the euphoria of a sing-along America is simply not in their psyches. There are those older Americans who try to pigeonhole the Millennials by saying they are unmotivated, spoiled and impossible as a workforce. This is coming from the paradigm of generations who were taught to go along to get along. This is not the world of the twenty something’s, who would rather reward disruption and disrupters. And the emotion of fear is not exclusive to the Millennials. For many generations fear has topped the emotional and psychological sphere of humankind.
Fear has eternally resided in every human. The difference is that much of our new generation is brave enough to admit what most of us heretofore hid through bravado. After all, baby boomers were leading the world. When you look at the impact of social media and the presence it has on the planet, the increasing outlets and platforms only enhance the cross-collaboration within this Millennial Generation. Social networks are an extraordinarily important part of Millennials’ digital lives, in part because social networks have become much more than a way to just connect about personal matters.
At the same time, we have heard in various ways that people increasingly want to take more control over social media, manage their time spent using it, and improve the quality of what they see. Numerous people have expressed a sense of frustration, particularly with Facebook, for having too much information, taking up too much of their time, and containing too much content that was not trustworthy or worthwhile. I believe that the ability of our youth to think deeply, admit fear, and champion disruption has changed and will further continue to change our crippled and scarred world. Millennials, through their savvy and unbridled communications, can shape their world, and I believe they will. With such a gigantic generation in sheer numbers alone, new trends and patterns of behavior will start to develop in the relative near future along with the emergence of new technology. These trends will be perceived both positively and negatively by other generations, but soon a new voice and mindset will take over to re-shift the paradigm and the way our media is conveying its message to the most impressionable demographic of people, which will have long lasting effects in the future.
