You've probably heard all the media hype about millennials lately. I personally have heard how we will save the world, how the fact that we simply exist will ultimately ruin the world, and just about everything in between. The problem that we face as a generation, however, is that our entire lives we have been told what we will do. No one has ever just wondered how it would go -- everyone already had an answer.
I would like to go on record and say that we as a generation are a group of extraordinarily different people. I would say we tend to have differing opinions on very important things such as government, education, life, and priorities. We have also grown up in a very evolving time in the world. We are the last generation to remember where we were and what we were doing when 9/11 occurred. We also grew up with corded phones and dial up internet. While these may seem like two relatively small things in the grand scheme of life, they are two crucial things that played a part in our childhood.
With the great advances in technology that occurred as we grew up we got to see the huge leaps that occurred. Our first phones were Nokias and flip phones, maybe a Droid Razr if you were lucky. Now many of us have miniature computers in our pockets that we can use to almost instantaneously find information on whatever we wish. It is a pretty huge leap in technology from that point of view.
The facts are that we are a group with extraordinary numbers. If we were to all be similarly minded we could change things, quickly. The thing is that we are not a huge group of the same people, we have our own minds and priorities, more than any other generation possibly. We've grown up with technology being there to help open our minds to many things that may not have been available to us without it. Ask anyone in our generation a question they don't know and they will pull a smartphone out of their pocket and Google it right then and there. While previous generations may have had options on how to gain this information, none were as quick as the instant gratification that we have grown up to know and love. We are a generation that has had access to information from a relatively young age, which helped shape ourselves independently of our families' presence.
We are also the last generation to not have grown up receiving prizes for participation. When we were growing up and playing sports everyone did not receive an award just for being there. To get an award you had to be the best, there were winners and losers. To me this is one of the bigger changes between the millennial generation and younger generations. We learned that you were not going to move up in whatever you were doing by just being there. As a generation that is often times referred to as the lazy, entitled generation this is one of my main arguments against that. We are also a generation that keeps score, we want to win, we want you to lose. It sounds like a bad source of motivation but is it really when you think about it? We are a generation of people that are motivated to go out and be better than everyone we can.
Now these are a lot of generalizations and purely just one millennial's opinion. I see a lot of problems with telling the millennials what they will do. How about everyone else sits back and just lets this generation and all of their potential play out. But what do I know, I'm just a millennial and everyone knows how we are...
