Millennials get a lot of grief from Boomers and from GenZers, but it seems to me the Millennial generation brought a change of mind-set about consumerism that is fairly important and not fully appreciated.
If you’re not familiar with demographics and especially the
names popularly applied to U.S. population cohorts, here’s a quick guide:
- Remember that these definitions are porous because a generation is considered to be roughly two decades and we look at decades through our numbering system, as though somebody born in 1939 is radically different from someone born in 1940. However, that 1939 cohort would have stretched back to 1920, and there’s quite a bit of difference between the experiences of that individual and those of a person born in 1940.
- Those old enough to have served in World War II (roughly born from 1900 through 1920) are often called the Greatest Generation, after a book that Tom Brokaw wrote describing how they survived the Great Depression and sacrificed during the war.
- The generation born from about 1920 through 1940 really doesn’t have a popular name, and they would have come of age in the postwar period and through the Korean conflict. (They were sometimes called the Forgotten Generation, but that name has been more popularly applied to a later cohort.)
- The Baby Boomers are the huge population cohort born from the end of World War II (1945) through 1964. I’m part of this generation, which one demographer described as moving through time like “a pig in a python” creating all kinds of disturbances as it passes through each decade of life, including a looming health-care crisis as the Boomers become older and older seniors.
- The newer Forgotten Generation is Generation X. They were born roughly from 1965 through 1980.
- The reason Generation X is forgotten is because it was framed on either side by huge attention-hog generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials (aka Generation Y). Millennial and Boomer antipathy also plays into it. The Millennials are not necessarily digital-native, meaning the Internet and personal computing weren’t necessarily part of their early lives if they were born in the early 1980s. However, latter-day Millennials, those born in the late 1990s, pretty much are digital natives, used to having computers as, shall we say, playmates before they began using them as work tools.
- Generation Z is social-media native, which manifests today in platforms like Tik-Tok, not Facebook, Boomer!
Getting back to the Millennials not being fully appreciated:
Sometimes I look around the room where I type these posts
and there’s just a mass of belongings, possessions, stuff – all demanding my
attention and time to keep in some kind of order. We’re talking largely books
and LP record albums, as well as a boatload of Compact Discs, not to mention
VHS videotapes and paper, paper everywhere.
What I’ve read of various opinion polls on Millennial attitudes indicates a vast shift from “possession” to “access” when it comes to these artifacts of popular culture. Digital access through an online stream or subscription is as good as owning an object that holds the same information – whether we’re talking books, movies, TV series or musical recordings. This has great benefits ecologically, since whatever artifacts that don’t end up in museums or well-supported private collections will end up in landfills.
Certainly, all that plastic in CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes and even clothing will
never degrade into molecules that will reintegrate with other molecules on the
planet in the natural cycle. Instead, they will remain forever apart (barring
some technological breakthrough) in smaller and smaller micro-bits, but still
essentially, plastic, with no other value once its initial plastic structure
has degraded.
The Millennials as a group seem to want to uphold values
that are good for the planet and society in general and have been viewed as
more concerned about one another than their overachieving Boomer progenitors.
Generalities, of course, are generalities, but these attitudes have helped
define the present and all of us should be aware of that and offer some
gratitude to the Millennials. This is an important pop culture change and an
important change to the consumer culture that, in many ways, bodes well for the
future. Although digital assets like Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have arisen to create ownership rather than simple access in the virtual world. Who knows if that's just a rear-guard action of the old materialism or proof that the more things change the more they remain the same?
OK. I’ll get off my high horse now, and let you respond:
“OK, Boomer, we don’t need your stinking approval!”😉
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