Might Be Doomed
And What We Can Do About It
Text: Victor Andreas Lund Shammas
Photography: Caroline Hargreaves
“They're young, smart, brash. They may wear flip-flops to the office or listen to iPods at their desk. They want to work, but they don't want work to be their life,” writes the USA Today of our generation, the so-called Generation Y cohort that was born roughly at the end of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s.
The newspaper tells us that this generation is “both high-performance and high-maintenance”. It is a generation that is unwilling to mindlessly heed the command of ageing managers in the work place, that knows about money and savings and retirement schemes, who would rather work to live than live to work, according to the RainmakerThinking think-tank, which has worked for such memorable parties as the CIA, Department of Defense and weapons manufacturer LocheedMartin.
Ours is a generation that desires “change, change, change”, according to the think-tank.
And in unrelated, though equally distressing events, just about 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003, reports Iraq Body Count.
“Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent” is the title of a book written by another Generation Y “expert”, Chris Resto. His “field guide to the Gen Y employee” makes for insightful reading. This generation desires three things, which any big business recruiter of the former generation must keep in mind when appealing for the hearts and minds of the young: Careers, glamour and gossip.
“College students talk and talk and talk. No surprise here, given how many communications devices and social Web sites are at their disposal: cell phones, Blackberrys, instant messaging programs, Facebook, Myspace, etc,” he writes derisively.
Talk is cheap, as the old adage goes.
Other analyses of our Generation Y conclude that we know our way around 401k retirement plans, that we will begin saving for our pension schemes before we reach the tender age of 25, and that we will favour second-hand cars in our “automotive consumption” habits, according to the New York Times.
A thought strikes me as I pore over this material. It is as follows: What is the matter with our generation? Not a word about politics, about activism, about getting our act together and repairing the evils of our time. We put the generation of 1968 (of which much ill can be said) to shame with such self-indulgent concern for our careers and nothing else but ourselves and ours.
In the annals of Generation Y, there seems to be much talk about our consumption patterns and whether or not we will ‘act right’ in the labour market (we will, most likely), though much less talk about building a right society.
Anecdotes may serve to illustrate. When I was 15 years old, I joined an anti-war organisation. Pretty soon I found myself at the head of a rally of young people with a bullhorn in my hand, shouting slogans against the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I got a girlfriend, drank some wine and had many terrific discussions with my fellow comrades that ran well into the night. We organised a ten-thousand strong march through my small hometown, and in many, many other places in the country, and indeed the world, other activists did the same. Our government, the Norwegian government, was forced to withdraw any support for the invasion of Iraq by these popular actions.
These are the formative experiences. And they are good to keep in mind, at a time when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that every American spends nearly 3 hours a day watching television, and only 15 minutes a day reading a book.
Do not let the generation of parents wonder what our real estate buying patterns will look like ten years down the line (as The New York Times did earlier this year), or how they can most easily seize us by the arm and make us into efficient machines in the labour apparatus (Time Magazine, July 2007) but let them wonder instead: Will this, the society that we adults have put together, last another turn, or will it be tossed into the sea and replaced with a shiny, dangerous new thing?
After all, as the Time Magazine piece concludes: “Before too long, they'll be the bosses.” Let’s make sure we do it right while we are still in the driver’s seat.
Victor Andreas Lund Shammas is Norwegian and has studied at Oxford University. He currently attends the University of Oslo, Norway.