It is articles like this from News.com that always make me chuckle and sigh with pity.
Every generation has struggled to find a voice of it’s own. This may be the first one struggling to find a market slogan of its own.
Alanna and I were hanging out and talking about the crop of younger people that we know, born after 1982. Here are some of the things that we thought about.
- They would have been around 10 years old when Nirvana was big.
- They don’t remember TV without cable
- They were just barely in college for 9/11
- They have never heard of anything but a 24 hour news cycle
- Constantly in touch but with little to say
- Pop Culture obsessed
- Brand obsessed
- Very little reading besides magazines
- They probable had ATM and credit cards at an early age.
- Grew up with computers, yet don’t really know how they work.
- Not much of a work ethic
- Over dramatic about the impact of their own life on the world around them.
- Huge sense of entitlement
One of the things that I realized is that I can’t name someone who is around 24-28 who is some sort of hero or roll model? Football players? Britney Spears? It is always the job of the generation after to destroy the culture before them and recreate it anew. But what exactly is it? I see people who say they are into music, who don’t have any music or don’t play music. I see people who say they are spiritual who are mostly ignorant of all the world’s biggest spiritual movements. I see people who say they are obsessed with hard work, take more vacations than everybody else in the office. I hear a whole lot of talk and not a lot of action and I think maybe they are “Generation talk a lot of trash”.