In life we all belong or want to belong. We belong either to a family, a group of friends, a school, a workplace, an industry that entails your work, social groups, a region, a religion, a tribe, a race, a country, a continent, a world you name it. We strive to belong to a certain social group based on our interests, hobbies, nature of work, our core beliefs, our visions, our missions or whatever inspires us to belong. Usually, the social group will have a name and people may describe you based on where you belong. For example, the farmer who sings, or the doctor who teaches, or the lawyer who just joined politics.
Every belong group has a characteristic or more. For example, someone can describe people from the same family as having similar smiling styles or head shapes, the list is endless. Characteristics give a description. According to a book titled Sociology; by University of Minnesota, they categorize social groups based on mutual expectations and common identity. The authors go deeper and deduce two concepts that are related to social groups but have distinguishing characteristics. They are social category and social aggregate. They define a social category as a collection of individuals who have at least one attribute in common but otherwise do not necessarily interact. While social aggregate is a collection of people who are in the same place at the same time but who otherwise do not necessarily interact, except in the most superficial of ways. For instance, people in a stadium watching a match.
With the information age shaking up and quickly changing the mode of operation for the human race, there were people born right at the beginning and the centre of the information age. These people have one attribute in common; they were born right in the middle of the information age, but they do not necessarily interact as an entire group. They are a social category. These people are the generation Y; popularly known as the millennials.
Now, there are different generation groups and they are listed based on the time they were born and the characteristics they portray. The current naming of generations can be traced back to a poet named Gertrude Stein who deemed lost, the generation who came after the first World War. Thereafter, different studies were carried out that birthed the generation naming. Right from 1946 onwards different generations have been given a name. People born between the ages of 1946-1964 are known as Baby Boomers. Closely following them are a generation nicknamed, Generation Jones. A name given to then by previous generations including the immediate one the baby boomers; following a comic strip that was in the newspapers from around 1913-1940s: Keeping up with the Joneses. Then Generation X who were born from around 1965 to 1980. From there are the millennials born between 1980 to 1996. Generation Z popularly known as Gen Z or iGen from around 1997 onwards. Then there is Generation Alpha which was before termed as Generation Z but different studies have depicted that there could be a difference in children born from 2010 onwards, due to different shared experiences. Hence Generation Alpha.
We zero in on Generation Y; the millennials. One of the most complained about generation. They are termed as ‘‘slow starters’’, ‘‘microwave generation’’ you name it. Most of these stereotypes are because many of them have not followed the norm. They have ‘delayed’ in getting married, they delay in moving out of their parents’ homes, they question a lot of things, they want to change a lot of things, I mean you could write a whole paper on why they are the worst generation ever. Or you could try and understand why they behave the way they do.
Let’s call them; not microwave, slow starters or whatever let’s call them the catalyst generation. Simply because they are, kind of at a crossroads. Let us get into the mind of a millennial. This is a person who when they were being born, digital inventions were skyrocketing. People now had personal computers, and they were no longer just for the army or the big co-operations. The television had developed so much that there was a lot of access to information which was previously not very accessible. An influx of information. So, it was not just information that they learnt at school, or their parents told them or older siblings or friends. The media was educating them quite a lot.
So, for a child who is now a teenager or just getting into teenage-hood or is a pre-teen and the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, Cable TV just to name a few are establishing themselves and there is a lot of information out here, then these teenagers could easily become disillusioned. Studies have shown that the brain fully develops in the mid-20s and for some up to age twenty-five. There are scans that even show that some cells in the brain of a teenager and late teenager up to maybe twenty-four are just developing and forming. Which compared to a person in their late twenties brain, is different; the cells have fully formed which means that they are able to make better or more informed decisions.
Now, computers, TV, internet; these were all new things, at the time when millennials were teenagers especially or at least below 25 years of age. And we all know that the younger you are, the easier it is to adapt to things. Therefore, millennials were now getting access to a lot of information which their parents; who were mostly the baby boomers didn’t know, or because of age they wouldn’t easily adapt to or relate to. Already, communication becomes a challenge and the parents just term them as difficult or blame it on the teenage phase. So now, they are bombarded with information from all corners and of course this will affect them. How they reason etc. Now they have worldviews from all over the world literally at their fingertips, millennials, including Generation Z and also Generation Alpha and probably the generations that will follow after alpha.
Just like any other child born at whichever point in time, there are things that will influence them outside of what they have been taught and know. The best way to know if an adult child has caught what you taught them, is not to deter them from interacting but to let them apply what you taught them in the real world. At least every person goes through stages and it may look different all through the years but growth is inevitable and that is life.
Different generations have differentaspects
different aspects of life
i wonder what millenials are thinking about gene z