Mythical Millennial #16: Hey Simon Sinek, what’s good?

Brenda Wong
Mythical Millennial
4 min readFeb 12, 2017

I’ve been resisting the urge to talk about Simon Sinek. You know. The guy with the viral Facebook video saying he’s nailed what’s really wrong with millennials? The interview has reached over 89 million views and a fat ton of engagement, to the probable glee of whoever is managing that Facebook Page. There’s already been tons said about this, however ten separate people sent me this video so I thought I’d dive a little deeper.

This video is worth a watch. Mostly because it’s fascinating to see how millennials are perceived by ‘experts’ (Sinek himself is 43 according to Wikipedia, so does not fall into the usual millennial age range), and secondly, to digest overall reaction it got. Everything from “yaaasssss, so true” to “this guy’s a moron” has been said. Why are his opinions so divisive?

My two cents on the whole thing:

  1. The major flaw of this whole piece is the generalisation of millennials. This is a common mistake to make, but something tells me this was a calculated approach by Sinek. Everybody’s talking about millennials. He might as well provide us all with ~the answers~ and get a whole lot of recognition for it. Heck, I don’t blame him.
  2. His overall view of millennials seems sympathetic at first. However, he points out that we all grew up flawed because of failed parenting, that we’ve been told we’re special so we can’t deal with failure and that we can’t find joy because of cellphones. It’s a pretty damning indictment of an entire generation.

Having said this, me telling you to ignore all this would be wrong. Watching, reading and listening broadly to all sorts of media is more important than ever, lest we fall into the social media bubble trap once more. My advice is to just be liberal with the salt-sprinkling, if you know what I mean.

Our relationship with food in this century is a complicated one, to say the least. Clean eating was the fad of 2016, seeing the rise of Deliciously Ella, the Hemsley Sisters and Amelia Freer to pedestals of worship. So why are they denouncing it?

Ella Mills recently stated that she’s never described herself as ‘clean’. The Hemsley Sisters have pooh-poohed clean eating as “a media-coined term.” Is something fishy here, or is that just my kombucha fermenting?

We haven’t sexualised wellness in the same way we’ve done fitness gurus, sure. However we can’t ignore that the wellness machine’s gears are largely made up of young women. Aspiring to Deliciously Ella wellness (slimness) might be the cause of the rise of the clean eating disorder, orthorexia. So, what can we do? Well, like Ruby Tandoh said in her recent Guardian piece, “Wellness is a fad diet…Hold the wellness gurus accountable. Make them eat their words.”

The most pleasant earworm I’ve ever had.
Dog Years by Maggie Rogers

Facebook recently ran a huge physical campaign for their Live feature, and it got me thinking — will live streaming become the next big thing? After all, Periscope has come and gone, and Facebook Live is now plagued by basic ‘vote for your favourite’ campaigns.Oh how I long for the heady days of the Drummond Puddle Watch.

I leave you with this excellent article on why live streaming shouldn’t be done by everybody, written by The Drum’s Adam Libonatti-Roche. (I think he’s right.)

See you in a fortnight, lovely people.
B x

Originally published on Mythical Millennial.

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