It’s time to outgrow the generation gap
Because we’re making progress and you’re going to be left behind.
I’ve read so, so many lists and opinion pieces full of statistics, assumptions, and generalizations explaining why the people of my generation are the way we are. Why myself and my friends live in limbo between feeling like we deserve so much and still feeling like children, and most of all: why we won’t shut up about it.
Yes, many of us received at least one participation trophy in our lifetime. Many of us were told we can do anything. A lot of us got degrees we can’t use in a meager work force and paying off those degrees is proving to be, well, near impossible. But another Top 20 List of observations getting to the bottom of why we spend so much time on our smartphones and how to handle us seems to be beating a dead meme.
My generation as well as my parents’ and my future kids’ generations are all born into circumstances which define how our stories affect this planet. Millennials’ natural inclination for technology and aversion to paper maps are not pitfalls anymore than having a bit of a drawl is a pitfall of being raised in Georgia. We are products of our environment—for better or worse. You can call it anthropological, but the extreme scrutiny clouding each generation of 20-somethings is creating a mass hysteria. The words “millennial” and “Generation Y” have become dirty ones. And at this point, these social explorations are not adding much to the conversation about the next generation to wear the metaphorical pants.
While my generation was unlearning the Dewey Decimal System and foregoing phone calls for texts, we were building up some new perspectives on the same old same old. We have some understanding of who we are now, and we’re trying to focus on the future of the world that was handed to us.
There are plenty of Generation Y leaders whose entrepreneurial gumption was sparked by their millennial predisposition (and probably a handful of unpaid internships and decades worth of student debt). People like me and many of my friends who have thought, “Why not right now? We have nothing to lose.” It’s not a convenient choice. To be honest, it can be painstaking, but the resources to turn a passion into a profession are right at everyone’s fingertips, so why not grab it? Millennials continue to use their often-criticized optimism as a motivating force to change the game.
These are some of those people. The ones who make us think we can do anything, because they did.
Brandon Stanton — Humans of New York
Proving social media can be more than a self-serving time suck—it can be a platform for powerful storytelling.
Few people have had the immense success of social media storytelling as Brandon Stanton. Everyday, he posts photos of people in New York. Some of them look bizarre, some stylish, others pique his interest by their social interactions or setting. He snaps a picture and asks them a question about the saddest thing in their life or what they want to be when they grow up. And from this pocket full of questions comes the most gut-wrenching, sometimes simple, sometimes funny, sometimes enigmatic stories from complete strangers.
But what got him started taking the photos? Three years ago, Stanton got laid off from as a trader in Chicago and moved to New York to pursue his weekend hobby full-time. Since then, he has built up a following of almost 2 million people on Facebook alone. Even with hundreds of thousands of likes within the first few seconds of posting his photos, Stanton had trouble getting his book published. Publishers said, “Photography books don’t sell.” But Stanton knew his would. He knew people saw what he saw in these strangers. Of his two offers, he published with St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, and Humans of New York immediately topped the NYT Best Sellers List when it was released last month.
“Photography books typically don’t put up big numbers. And Humans of New York does ‘sound’ like a regional book. But what they didn’t know was this— an amazing, international community of people had gathered around this blog. And week after week, you guys put up pre-order numbers that were absolutely jaw dropping.”
What started as just taking photos of interesting people has turned into a force of universal truth. Bringing life into the eyes of strangers behind a screen.
Matthew Manos — founder of Very Nice
Proving that design is more than fonts and Pantone swatches. And then proving that design can change the world.
Several years ago, Matthew Manos found that nonprofits were spending billions of dollars on services and he set out find a way to change that. After interning at different firms, Manos realized that many of them weren’t living up to his ideologies. So, he created his own. In college, the idea started out as a 100% pro bono design firm. That didn’t work out, but five years after founding VeryNice, he’s operating on a 50/50 model. Half of their work is done for free with help from volunteers and an extremely dedicated team that works with twice as many clients to balance out the costs. And their design goes way beyond pretty things. In his TEDx Talk, Manos addressed a big stereotype people have for designers: “Business makes money and that designers help sell things.”
“But what if systems weren’t all such a static thing. What if they actually were a dynamic thing. What if they were a designable thing?…This shift in mindset I would argue… can transform the practice of entrepreneurship into a medium of design.”
Watch any of Manos’s lectures and you’ll see VeryNice comes from a place of treating design as tool for impact. They design ideas and their knack for innovation is guided by the belief that philanthropy starts at the beginning of a business—it’s not an afterthought.
Tavi Gevinson — founder/ Editor-in-Chief of Rookie Mag
Proving teenage girls are made of more than hormones and emoticons.
I wasn’t a teenager that long ago, but when I was Teen Vogue was the closest I could come to reading about other teenage girls like me, and Teen Vogue had nothing to do with girls like me. It was a lifestyle they wanted to sell to me—a two-dimensional one at that. Tavi Gevinson felt this void too, and she did something about it. After the success of her pre-teen fashion blog, StyleRookie, she created Rookie. An online magazine for and by teenage girls. Brilliant, funny, strong, depressed, happy, quirky, dark teenage girls. The magazine features sections like “Dear Diary,” “Live Through This,” and “Ask a Grown Man.” There are playlists, lovely illustrations and essays about girls, about boys, about love, sex and what to wear.
Before even graduating high school, Tavi has started a stellar and respected career by making something she’d want to read and putting together a team she’d want to be a part of. She never seems like she’s trying to grow up too fast or linger in the age of teeny bop. She is fearlessly embracing what comes natural to her and exploring what doesn’t—traits which are key for any entrepreneur.
Her pre-teen ambition has left her in a seemingly idyllic position approaching her fist year of college, and could be a running theme for high school graduates in future generations.
“I feel lucky in that I don’t really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don’t really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.”
Amy Kaherl — Detroit Soup facilitator/director/ coordinator
Proving young folks still know how to get things done offline.
The sharing economy has brought about more than the ability to rent strangers’ apartments. It’s given us a platform to share and fund ideas that may have never been heard otherwise. Most of these crowd-funding platforms are on the internet, but Amy Kaherl is the director of one that’s face-to-face. Three-year old Detroit Soup is a simple idea: dinner attendees donate $5 at the door, then they hear four big ideas from their peers and neighbors about education, startups, art, agriculture—anything affecting the community. After the presentations and plenty of soup, everyone votes on which idea they’d like to fund and the winner gets the earnings from that night.
A city like Detroit is not without new ideas, but growing beyond the perception of being the bankrupt Motor City is still tricky. Kaherl is one of the people making a positive impact in rough times, and she’s doing it on a neighborhood scale.
“We want to make sure that neighbors are helping neighbors with decision making and supporting the community. My goal is to have at least 10 dinners happening in our neighborhoods. Once they grow I just hope we can sustain the momentum and become a staple in these communities.”
On the streets of cities like New York, Los Angeles and Austin you’ll find plenty of people who are working on their big ideas and they’re going to Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund it. But there’s a different kind of pride and vulnerability that comes with getting up on a stage in front of the people who will be directly affected by your idea and just laying it all out. Through Detroit Soup, Kaherl is facilitating the kind of offline impact that can make lasting change.
Most millennials have never known the full-time-job-in-our-field-with-benefits-right-out-of-college life we planned for growing up, because things change. Less jobs and less money with more technology has left us a whole new equation to solve. We’re trying to carve out space for ourselves where there wasn’t space before and re-imagine expectations for not just us but the people around us. Call it grandiose or naive but, before you do, look at these young people and the thousands of others who are making it work and laying groundwork for big change.
Sources for photos in collages: Brandon Stanton: portrait, background; Matthew Manos: portrait, background; Tavi Gevinson: portrait, background; Amy Kaherl: portrait, background
