In a cramped dorm room hallway sat 20 kids and an RA, converging for the first section meeting of their freshman year. The RA asks, “What’s your dream job?” While some students answered, “a doctor,” or “a dancer,” many students said “I just want to be rich, and fast.”
Looking around the hall at each other, it was evident that every person in the room was on a fast track to obtain their version of success, be that a family, a thriving career, or completing a large project. When talking about these goals and views of success, many young people feel like they are in a race against time to get things done.
For many 18-year-olds, they want to have everything on their bucket list checked off by the time they reach thirty, even. Why is that? This impatience with ourselves is rather new – many baby boomers didn’t consider themselves “middle-aged” until well into their fifties, but many millennials consider themselves out of their prime by mid-thirties. Though it just a hypothesis, much of this impatience could be due to the fact that millennials have been marinated by technology their whole lives, which is just about the most immediate thing in the world.
Millennials have grown up with any amount of information available at their fingertips. With a tiny device they can put in their pocket, they’re able to google, check email, research for a project, or find any statistic in seconds. Phones, laptops, and tablets are portable, making the accessibility of information and skills even better. Information isn’t the only thing that technology has made accessible, either. With services like Amazon Prime, young people can have virtually anything to their doorsteps in days. It’s easy to see how if someone has been raised having information and goods available in a matter of seconds, the patience one may give him or herself to acquire information, say, through school, would be lacking.
With this lack of patience combined with the many years of schooling and expertise required to land a job that will pay rent, the millennial lifestyle can be one of constant frustration. Everything else around them seems to be operating so quickly, with new products being released every day, new information constantly available. Yet their own paths to success are quite the opposite, with years of school, training, internships, and apprenticeships before they can even think of a career. Many older people ask why millennials are so impatient with themselves, but in a lot of ways, it seems that they’ve been conditioned by their environment to be such.
It’s very important to be patient when thinking about long-term goals. Though the capitalistic society that dominates global culture today may make obtaining these goals a more arduous process than it was a half a century ago, these goals are attainable with patience. We must not allow the fast-paced technological industry to dictate how we view ourselves and define success for ourselves.
Success is personal, and we must have the patience to acquire it.