I am sure that for thousands of years (or at least hundreds), most teenagers and new adults (18-30) have been very concerned about their image and themselves. It's a time where you find out who you are and what your place in the world is going to be. And though it could change 50 years from now, I believe it's very natural in your early to twenties to think that what ever you decide now, or whoever you are now, will be the definite version of you. So, I think it IS true but not only for the 'millennials'. Nevertheless, I sometimes get annoyed at all the blaming of other generations. Each generation has, of course, contained millions of individuals who responded to the time they were born and grew up in in a million different ways. That's why I always liked the first episode of Girls when Hannah says: 'I think I may be the voice of my generation...or at least a voice...of a generation.' Because aren't we all just a voice of a generation?
You really think people currently aged 18-34 are responsible for all that? Millennial bashing never gets old for some.
This current generation is a threat to civilization as we know it, and the evidence is all around us, evidently.
Sorry, but truisms such as this entirely ignore our scientific fields, in this case social and political sciences, which indicate that different generations do overall possess some different characteristics- this is in great part due to changing technologies, as @jannert mentioned, but also shift in cultures, economies, and social orders. Don't tell me a generation growing up in the Great Depression is going to be the same as the generation growing up in the 90s. That's ridiculous. People are more similar to one another than you think, and are certainly a product of their times. There's actually a theory (feel free to take with grain of salt) that generations in America have been cyclic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory Idealist, reactive, civic, and adaptive. Millennials fall under the civic category. They're a nice bunch. Based on my own observations, "civic" is the perfect word to describe many of them. They enjoy team work and cooperation, they are civil to one another, very PC, and not full of themselves. Conversely, millennials are actually a little boring. They're not super confrontational (don't worry, we're getting to the boomers), their ideas are rather tame, and I think they eschew individuality in favor of conformism, not in the sense of culture, of which they embrace diversity, but in societal behavior. Again, they work well in groups. Millennials are incredibly respectful. Look at like this. Millennials today love Bernie Sanders. They organized for him, they held phone banking parties for him, they fund raised for him. If it were the Boomers in their 20's instead, they'd be celebrating Jill Stein and setting fires in the Capitol. From everything I've heard, the young people of the 70's were wild, much more so than the Millennials today, and this also fits in with Strauss Howe generational theory, because the boomers grew up in an increasingly good economy, and fit the "idealist" mold. More proud, more reckless, and more flavorful than their Millennial children and grand children. I'm spending just one line for the Gen Xers, AKA the nomads, whose alienated personas make them largely worth glossing over. Sorry Wreybies, Steerpike, and Lewdog...
The men of my generation (Boomers) were busy getting drafted to go fight a totally unjust, but deadly war in Vietnam. Conscription is one thing the subsequent generations have not had to deal with.
Yes, the fear must have been tremendous. But maybe it is not so different for a young guy today - in a small [or a large] community: 'Grandaddy served, daddy served, and ye shall serve, praise the Lord.'
Not disrespecting Boomers at all (right now ). When it comes to creativity, I think they have the Millennials beat. Certainly in music...
Got to point out this post by The Wolf, a true work of art. Should be posted on every refrigerator. Now run along Matt and tell your wife you have more fans...
Do they get to draw lottery numbers, just like my male friends did? I had a few friends with cosmic luckout, including a boyfriend at the time who drew number 366. (The leap year allottment.) And one who was exempt from the draft because his father had been killed in the Korean War, and he was an only child. (Not so lucky in some respects.) But the brother of my boyfriend drew number 7, and he shot over the border to Canada before they closed it ...and he lived there all the rest of his days and never got to go back to the States, not even for a visit. So it wasn't all sweetness and light for us Boomers. I think we had relatively easy childhoods, but it started getting weird after that. The Vietnam War dominated my late teen and early adult life.
Yep, the coddled speshul snowflakes of recent times are responsible. Comedy becomes cheap references, fine art becomes stained underpants on the wall, songs become irritating club noise, stories become glorified fanfiction. Hanson were the Justin Beibers of the 90's. But consider how big a step down that is. Each Hanson member could individually sing better than Beiber and they wrote their own songs, and they each play their own instruments. The standard was just higher in the 90's, and it's what we expected.
I doubt it. The key argument about the downfall of culture is this: Music in the past was better because the shit got forgotten. Time shaves the chaff away, leaving the people looking backwards with only the highlights to think about. Give it twenty years, and kinds born today will be roaring about how much better music was in the days of Taylor Swift and Adele. Does that sound ridiculous? Does it sound more ridiculous than the idea that humanity's taste in music has been an eternal slide into the abyss? What I say doesn't matter really. You can take a man's money, home, and hearth, but you won't prise his ego off him til he's got Satan's fork up his arse, if you catch my meaning.
I think there is something to the current generation being less creative. A lot of creativity stems from boredom, when a mind is backed into a corner with nothing to do, it creates. With current technology, there's always something to do; watch entire seasons of a show, play some unending game on your cellphone, talk to anyone literally anywhere. When do you think about making something new when your mind is constantly engaged with the old?
I don't buy that creativity is a result of boredom. Sure, having all of those things to distract you can eat at your drive, but I don't buy that the creative impulse is a product of boredom.
But does that only apply to Millenials? Everyone has the same distractions, right? It's not like it's only Millenials on the internet or watching Netflix...
All creativity? No, but enough to make a noticeable dent in society? Yes. The mind is basically a reward seeking machine, we want them there chemicals that make us feel good. When we're stuck in a boring situation, where we're getting no reward, the mind searches for new ways to get that reward, hence a certain level of innovation, and creativity, is born. I would say all current generations have the same access to these new innovations, but the generation that grew up with them, and has much more widely adopted them, are affected (or is it effected?) the most.
I'm still not buying it. Maybe there could be a correlation, but this seems to be a gross over-simplification of an extremely complex drive. The creative impulse is more than just a way to feel reward. If that were the case, why does anyone choose to write, paint, draw, play music, over something easier? If it were as simple as you've made it to be, nothing would be created.
"There is nothing new under the sun." Kidding, that would be a total copout. "why does anyone choose to write, paint, draw, play music, over something easier" To explain this, I'd use an economic function of supply and demand. If something were 'easy' then the supply would be very high, and reward very low, driving producers into other, seemingly more difficult and risky, markets. Maybe my view is a bit simplistic, but that's because seeing and understanding the whole is beyond my ability. We're living in an ever expanding world where there is so much available to learn/watch/experience. Creating our own fantasies requires a substantial amount of effort, why put forth that effort when what we want already exists? Of course this breaks down the more you learn, when you reach the end of available knowledge and entertainment, and at that point I see minds becoming bored again and creating, but it is after a much longer.. ehh... gestation period? Is that the right word?
This might be one of those agree to disagree situations. I see where you're coming from, but I think there's more to it than that. To say creativity is driven mostly by boredom suggests that if we're not bored, most people wouldn't create. And that all of the beautiful creative masterpieces of the past were a result of boredom rather than something deeper those people had to say. It also suggests that people before the age of information had less to do. I don't think that to be the case. Sure, fewer leisure activities, but more for basic survival needs. I just don't see it. I think there's a lot more to the equation than boredom = creativity.
