Good evening everyone! I hope everyone has had a great week so far. Tomorrow is Friday and that’s not a bad thing at all. I wanted to talk about something different tonight. This week I have been reading and actually seeing in my job a bias against millennials. I mean a lot of negative things. “Millennials are entitled, spoiled, lazy”. I have heard and read it all this week. I don’t understand it.
These young people are our future. I don’t see all of these negative traits. I see people who are passionate about their world, their politics and life. Work is not their first priority nor should it be. I have played the company game ever since I was 24 and I followed the rules and did what I was told and I am just a little better off than when I started. These young people can see through the corporate bullshit and know life isn’t work. Life is everything except work. Work is there to pay bills. If you have a job you’re passionate about, that is awesome. Hard work can be good, especially if it involves bettering society as a whole. Millennials are smart enough to question the status quo. Change cannot happen without it.
Look at life from their eyes. Fresh out of college they start out drowning in debt. The job market is insane. Companies want an incredible amount of education for bad underpaying jobs. They are finding their way and all they seem to face is the criticism from older generations. This is not the America of 50 years ago. One cannot just have a single income home, buy a house, a car or take a vacation. Millennials do have it harder I believe. The real problem is us. By us I mean anyone older than this generation. A lot of people have the attitude of “I got mine so fuck you” or “I had to go through all of this, so should you”. Why should they? Why should they fall for the same trappings of life that we have? Consumerism has plagued us. Not just in general shopping, but also in the image of what people believe life “should” be. You need to be married, have kids and be ready for life all by the time you’re 25. There is a tremendous amount of external pressures put on them. They resist. We haven’t. We gave it all for the “American dream”. So we can sit in front of our TVs after work and forget everything else that is going on in the world. Millennials see the bigger picture. They know the world is dying from climate change. They see the hatred and the racism that older generations have brought on to the earth. Millennials have a conscious and they worry more about the future of the world than anyone older than them.
Millennials face challenges that were not there 25 years ago. Social media has made the world more open to us all, but it also has open the doors for hateful people looking to make others miserable. There is more of an openness about issues such as gay and trans acceptance. (Although I really don’t like the term acceptance, it seems to have negative connotations behind it. Just let people live their life. Try to understand and love them unconditionally). Social medial has brought the ability for gay and trans people to express their feelings and let everyone know what hey are going through. That is excellent; however, it also brings out the trolls and the idiots who find pleasure in making fun of an issue they could never understand. It’s nobody’s business how you identify yourself. You are who you are. I do not understand how in this day and age that there is still so much hatred about a person who the world doesn’t see as “normal”. There is no normal. What is there are billions of people on this planet that are just trying to survive. If any person can find happiness and a feeling of peace within themselves, let them have it. We have no right to deny that. I might not understand it all myself, but I want to learn. I am a 48 year old married man, no one special, but I want to know what makes us tick as people. I truly hope one day that this will be a non-issue and people can live their lives the way they want to.
This has been on my mind all week. I hear my peers just off handily say that Millennials are lazy. They do not see the world the way it is. What I say to that is they are trying to mold the world into a better place. The world does not have to be the way it is, it can be changed and I believe Millennials and future generations will do just that. I wish them all the luck in the world.
Take care!
Mid-Life Crisis Task Force 