“Your generation is so lazy.” “Your generation does nothing but complain.” "You all feel so entitled.” “My generation was nothing like yours—we knew the value of hard work.”
To anyone in the millennial generation, these may be some common sentiments you hear from teachers, neighbors, colleagues, and even family members on a regular basis. It seems that no matter where we go, we are always hit with accusations that our generation is going to be the downfall of society and that there’s no hope for any of us to change.
While some of these statements can be seen as true in certain situations, specifically as a result of the self-esteem movement, a lot of them do our generation a complete disservice.
Back when our parents were children, they were raised more or less the same way as the kids down the block. While they all were disciplined, some to an extreme extent (including belts and paddles to the backside), they were also fed ideologies from their parents and were raised believing that the mighty dollar will solve all your problems. Due to lack of interaction with people across the world, there was no one to challenge these beliefs, resulting in the boom of capitalism and many of the problems we see to this day.
I don’t want to blame our parents’ generation for the increase in poverty and social problems in the world. After all, they are certainly responsible for the boom in technology we have seen in the past decade or so. But our generation has certainly felt the impact of these advances and the ideologies that are parents were fed from the day they were born.
As time has progressed, the gap between poor and rich has widened significantly, the poor are finding it harder to secure jobs, the cost of living has increased exponentially, and unrest seems to be everywhere. All this seems counterintuitive to what the technology revolution was supposed to do: make our lives easier and place everyone on equal playing fields with access to information from all over the world.
Being raised with this technology has certainly set our generation a part from past generations. We now have a broader worldly view, we can learn anything and everything with a click of a button, and we can complete tasks with relative ease. Despite this, our generation seems to see entitlement in everything, we tend to isolate ourselves from the world, and only see value in something if we are personally benefitted. Not to mention everyone needs to watch what they say or do, so as not to offend someone and spark controversy. I’m not going to lie; having to live in a state of increased hyper vigilance is exhausting. No wonder so many people have turned to isolation and introverted tendencies found in the solace of the screens in front of us.
But I believe that if we can overcome this isolation, our generation can be the next “Greatest Generation Ever.” We’ve been raised with this technology, so we should embrace it in a way that benefits our world as a whole. Instead of secluding ourselves behind screens, we need to use the information and technology as our disposal to learn more about and respect each other. We need to use this technology to build a more sustainable world. One where killing is not revered. A world where we respect each other for the one fact that will always stand true: we are all human. And we need to start treating each other as such. Instead of marginalizing ourselves, instead of intentionally splitting ourselves into groups, we need to stand united as one human people to overcome the problems and challenges that face our increasingly globalized world.
By doing this, we can be the generation that sees the downfall of society. That is, a society that has wandered so far from the core values that make us all human; a society that has placed too much emphasis on the mighty dollar; a society that has become increasingly individualistic in nature. In other words, a failing society.
