Millennials: We are not Entitled. We are Empowered.
Millennials. According to the U.S. Census Data there are 75.4 million of us in the United States (one out of every four people). We represent $200 billion in annual spending power and are now the largest cohort in the U.S. workforce, surpassing Gen X for the first time in 2005.
Here are some other facts about Millennials:
· We saw Star Wars Episodes 1 through 6 in sequential order.
· We thought the USSR was just part of a catchy Beatles song.
· Some of us were shitting our pants on September 11th because some of us we were still wearing diapers.
· We roll our eyes at our children who say they “don’t know what CDs are”, just like you rolled your eyes at us when we didn’t know what 8 track tapes were.
· We probably moved back with our parents after college and we’re now bragging to our friends about how we can finally afford our own place.
· And according to every generation you survey, we’re entitled. Fact.
Societal stereotypes don’t paint a pretty picture. According to an Ernest & Young survey, 68% of employees think Millennials are “Entitled”. In Lisa Pollack’s recent Tedx Talk entitled “Its about time we stop shaming Millennials”, she exhibits this quotation.
She further asks the audience to guess which generation this wisdom came from. The 1950’s? 30’s? The civil war era or revolutionary times? Nope.
This is, in fact, a quotation that hails from the 8th century B.C. We have literally been shaming our young people for all of recorded human history. It’s pretty simple to understand that if our children are our future, this is not an attitude that moves us forward.
Millennials have been characterized under a purview of “jobless recovery” victims turned ungrateful narcissists. Victims of a receding middle class; stricken by the Great Recession leaving us sinking into a perpetual state of depression — a depression that matches the ass-shaped dent we’ve left on the corduroy sofa in our parents’ basement , formed while binge watching all ten seasons of “Friends” the weekend after walking on Graduation Day. This is where our generation has supposedly found a foothold. Living beneath the homes that housed our childhoods; forming hunched backs that mimic Quasimodo (most underrated Disney movie of all time); a symbol of a lifetime of hauling around all those participation trophies; scorning every Boomer that refuses to just die and give way to a younger more hip workforce; cursing our most sacred deity; the all mighty of technology, for automating any entry-level job out of existence. Most important to this torturous existence is loving every single self-absorbed, lazy minute of it, reclining into that basement sofa we lost our virginity on, not lifting a finger, not working a day in our lives because, above all else we are entitled, right?
Wrong.
We are not entitled. We are empowered.
Entitlement is believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment. Our childhood taught us the opposite. It taught us we are not special at all. We saw gold star stickers blanketed across everyone’s homework, stellar or mediocre. Helicopter parents became lawn mowers cutting down any sense of self-esteem attached to our individuality. This left us knowing we were just like everyone else.
The lessons kept coming into adulthood as we watched the Great Recession turn our parents’ American dream into a collective nightmare. We saw them get dropped by their employers, like a microphone after a Jay-Z concert, while the top 1% was busy unclipping from their golden parachutes. We saw that the grand bargain of trickledown economics left us with 99 problems a 401k ain’t one. This left us resigned to the status quo and a bit (very) cynical as we entered the workforce.
Then we saw the world shrink into the palm of our hands, leaving us clasping capabilities we could have never imagined. Cable news brought images of violence and despair from around the world in neatly packaged 24-hour spin cycles. We saw the untenable circumstances in our world juxtaposed against the collective human experience, steaming live on social media. We saw South Korean’s gorging on Saved by The Bell while North Korea rattled sabers. We saw thousands of PTSD inflicted soldiers come home from Iraq & Afghanistan while Charlie bit his brothers’ finger. We saw 11 million Syrian Refugee’s fleeing a multi-sided war for control, embodied in the corpse of 3-year old boy whose body washed up on the front lawn of our modern and refined civilization while, just a few days later, breaking news was Justin Beiber being mobbed by teenage girls in Beverly Hills. We saw Katrina rip through the American south, bringing to the surface racial wounds a century old, amplified by man-made climate change while “[Name Your Country]’s Got Talent” reminded us that what we all have in common is our greatest dream is to “make it big,” but in reality most of us settle for “just making it.”
Piercing through all of this we saw hope in our collective power. We saw one bucket of ice spark a feverish movement that raised over $220 million dollars to combat Lou Gehrig’s disease, leading to a major breakthrough in identifying the suspected gene at the source of ALS. We witnessed Obama be propelled into the Oval Office in 2008, and keep his address in 2012, fueled by thousands of small donations. The globalization of our human experience proved that change can happen quickly; that money talks; and that we can play a part in fanning the flames of change. The Great Recession made us want to focus on what is truly important in life; that is our families, our relationships, and making a positive impact on the world. Our childhood lessons in conformity tilled fertile soil for these ideas to sink in more deeply into what is now a purpose-centered generation.
Something has emerged from all of this and we call it being empowered. We are empowered to make sure there will be a brighter tomorrow for every person on this planet. We see that the playing field of the world has shrunk and that we outnumber those in both political and corner offices. So, we think they should pay attention to our vision for humanity. We want to inject our vision for the world into every aspect of our lives and we want to enjoy the ride along the way. The two primary fonts we desire to create and imbue our values are what we consume and how we work.
Our consumption reflects our values
Millennials now represent the largest percentage of the population with purchasing power. Which means marketers want our money, but how will they get it? What we consume, and the quality of the products we consume matter to us. It not only serves as a reminder of our values but also is one of the most effective ways for us to influence change around us. We vote with our dollars.
We want to know we are being a responsible neighbor and world citizen. We want our eco footprint to be nonexistent because we are loyal to our global community. Case and point; we are obsessed with buying organic. As a generation, we’re so green-washed Kermit the Frog called and apologized for all those years he was blind to his green privilege. Since now he sees, it is so easy being green. We will pay top dollar to know our product is the safest thing we could be putting in our bodies. Companies that respond and align authentically to these values will earn our loyalty.
We also expect the company’s we invest in to respond to our worldview. According to businessinsider.com, Millennials are doing more than just eating avocado toast and snap chatting; they’re also driving the growth of a $9 trillion dollar investment market — sustainable investing. Sustainable investment products aim to deliver outsize returns for investors while remedying societal and environmental ills. Thanks to Millennials, sustainable investments have grown at a rate of more than 33% between 2014 and 2016 in the US. The market for such products, as a result, has grown from $6.57 trillion to $8.72 trillion. That’s over $8 trillion being pumped into investments aiming to fix the societal and environmental ills every former generation created, while encouraging firms to prioritize corporate responsibility programs over profits.
We’ve even shifted from consuming things to consuming experiences. Just ask any hipster in your local downtown café which festival they went to this summer, Burning Man? Outside Lands? Stagecoach? Coachella? Electronic Daisy Carnival? This is one thing we’d like to thank the Great Recession for. We’ve traded in tacky hoover-ville homes filled to the brim with useless appliances for a van life. Minimalism is on the rise and we are on the go. We are mobile, we are wireless and more and more of us are letting go of belongings. We’ve got better places to spend our money, a sentiment echoed by a recent study by Harris Group that found that 72% of millennials prefer to spend more money on experiences than a bunch of stuff we can’t fit into a mobile, experience driven, lifestyle.
We want Companies who want our dollars need to satisfy our desire to experience life fully and our demand to improve humanity through our consumption.
As employees, we prioritize fulfillment over advancement
As we entered the workforce, we hoped to further inject our preference for experience over consumption. In the case of our work, we value fulfillment over advancement. The rejection and slow rebound our parents endured from the Great Recession shredded any notions we previously held that economic systems were set-up in our favor. Very few of us expect social security to pay us the same it pays current retirees when our time to retire comes. Unfortunately, we still need to eat, and eventually we need to move out of our parent’s basement. Plus, despite preferring life experiences over materials, we still want the new iPhone and were eyeing that backpacking trip through South East Asia next summer through our Google glasses.
So, we’ve set out to prove wrong the fallacy that more work means more worth. To us, we are inherently worthy and do not need this reflected in our position or stature. 74 percent of Millennials want to advance up the management ladder but only 20 percent want to advance if it means spending less time with their families or on their personal lives[1]. We would rather move home to be with our family than take a job that doesn’t have, in at least some measurable way, a positive impact on the world. We want to work for companies that have a higher purpose that we can get behind. De facto Millennial mouth piece, Mark Zuckberberg, commented at the most recent Harvard Law School commencement address that “the challenge for [the millennial] generation is created a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.”
It’s not that we don’t want to work hard. In fact, we are craving to belong, to have purpose, and fulfillment in our work lives. When surveying millennials’ career goals, research found that 82 percent wanted to take on increasingly challenging tasks, 77 percent claimed the would like to be known as an expert in their field.[2]
We are easily frustrated with the status quo because the status quo is built on so many half-baked truths that are so out of alignment with the interest of our collective greater good. An apropos example of this being the idea that you need status and tenure to contribute in the work place. Side bar: To any millennial parroting that entry-level employees haven’t earned their place. You are simply echoing the ‘generational hazing’ that senior managers imposed onto us and it’s holding us all back. This is where our empowerment in employment needs to catch up with our empowerment as consumers. We need to maintain just as much empowerment when we’re wearing a 3-piece suit in a conference room as when we’re donning a 2-piece at the annual Memorial Day volleyball tournament. #BikiniContest #Confidence. So, we need to speak up in meetings, we need to make ourselves heard, make demands on our bosses and be willing to have demands made on us.
We’re empowered but perhaps not yet powerful
None of this is intended to discredit the work of our previous generations. My own parents worked hard to create a better life for my siblings and I. They emigrated from the United Kingdom and chose careers that would provide the income necessary to raise us in the most safe, affluent neighborhood they could secure access to. Protecting and providing a positive environment for their children to grow in was part of their vision for contribution to the world. Their story is one of thousands just like it and for that, we are grateful to our parents, mentors, teachers and coaches.
Now we want to help raise the water level for all of us and set upon a course of progress. To do that, we see that we must inject our purpose and values into every aspect of our lives. Admittedly, we’re not perfect. In fact, we’re probably getting it wrong more often than we’re getting it right, but when we do strike a chord, it can resonate around the entire globe. We are a generation who feels like we had to figure out our own path because all the paths that had been blazed before were covered in caution tape once we got there.
While we seem to have this burning desire to save the planet and heal our societies, we must also walk with humble recognition of those who came before us. We need to blaze a new path forged through gratitude for all the blood, sweat and tears that went into creating us and all the societies we walk through. Perhaps with this manifesto, we can comment on where we can do better, how we can grow and come together to become more powerful through our empowerment. The opportunity to Integrate our collective purpose into the preservation, progression, and evolution of humanity is right in front of us. History will judge us cruelly if we fumble the ball at the 1-yard line after such an incredible pass to progress and drive for equality.
We are Millennials. We are empowered. We are standing up, we are standing together and we are standing for tomorrow. We would love for you to join us.
[1] https://www.popsugar.com/news/Why-Millennials-Entitled-42873548
[2] https://www.popsugar.com/news/Why-Millennials-Entitled-42873548
