Millennials: Born to Change the World
Our “Divine Intolerance” makes us impervious to the regressive traditions that threaten our world.
End of an Era
It feels like we are on the edge of something dramatic, doesn’t it? With a mutating global pandemic still on our hands (thanks, conservatives), social upheavals revealing the racist and sexist undertones of western society, and a runaway greenhouse effect burning and flooding more of the Earth with each passing year, the world is in turmoil. Society is splitting at its ideological seams. We are at the tipping point. We are beginning to visualize the limitations of our day-to-day lifestyle.
Our actions today determine how we tip the scales. We need to decide where our priorities lie. Will we base our decisions on political parties? Tradition? Or the planet and its inhabitants? Go ahead, you can argue all you want about how humanity has seen great hardship before. You can call this a dramatic overreaction. But “overreactions” like this are what have kept us alive and improved our well-being throughout history.
It’s times like these when the progressives come out of the woodwork to pull society from the brink and steer us in the right direction. Unfortunately, the 2020 presidential race proved that our society is not yet mature enough to feel ready for the progressive change it so desperately needs. Thankfully, we prevented further regression into a barbaric authoritarian autocracy by electing Joe Biden over Trump. However, I would argue that Biden’s presidency serves primarily as a mechanism to pause the hateful lunacy the GOP would have continued to unleash, rather than enacting the progressive leap forward we need.
At least the candidates with the innovative ideas got the conversation started during the 2020 presidential race, and are continuing that conversation on their own accord. For example, Andrew Yang pushed the Universal Basic Income discussion into the public sphere and helped birth a powerful movement to invest in the American people through Humanity Forward, despite his somewhat hidden track record of neglecting strategy.
And of course Bernie is still out there being a champion of The People, restlessly pushing for fair wages, affordable education, and adequate access to basic services and resources. And I suppose Biden has done a moderately good job of setting the stage for a smooth transition to progressive leadership in 2024.
But it’ll still be an uphill struggle for a while, and a progressive future is not guaranteed. Celebrity politicians alone cannot free humanity from the stranglehold of regressive conservative values. We all need to step up to deliver humankind from Conservative Backwardsism. Cue the millennial spotlight.
First of Our Kind
It looks like our government is not yet willing to take on the responsibility of systemic change. So, we as a society have to fill those shoes and inspire change from the ground up. Luckily, my generation, the Millennials, are gifted with what author Peta Kelly calls “Divine Intolerance.” We arrived on Earth with an innate distaste for business-as-usual. We are more ambitious than previous generations. Working a safe nine-to-five desk job and settling down with a house and family we never get to see (just because that’s what we’re supposed to do) is not the only future we can envision. We came here with a deep-seated purpose to restructure and better optimize a world that no longer works.
Progressive change was led by individual public figures in the past, whose ideas either got them killed or stigmatized. We, as a generation, carry that same fire in our hearts. But this time we have strength in numbers. Sure, statistically we are the first generation in American history to be worse off than our parents at our age with an equally bleak looking future, economically speaking. But that’s why this is a collective and collaborative effort. We need to push from the ground up to elect progressive leaders so that they can lift us all up, together. As long as we stay focused (because I know plenty of people my age have ever-shortening attention spans), we can achieve real change.
90s Kids
Divine Intolerance makes us Millennials highly adaptable. We grew up in the age of the internet and smart technology. The reality we have known our whole lives is that of networks, development and change. We are accustomed to things being in flux. A strong wi-fi connection is the closest thing to “stability” we’ve ever enjoyed.
No previous generation experienced so much development so rapidly. It took decades for computers to become consumer products. It took centuries for currency to replace bartering. Now we have a hundred types of cryptocurrency that we can master after just a few hours of research using the supercomputers in our pockets. And we’ll master augmented reality and renewable energy just as quickly as we mastered burning CDs and DVRing M*A*S*H for our parents as they watched in awe.
Divine Intolerance makes us innovative. We are the first generation yet to truly look at the world from “outside the box.” When we watch the news and learn how the world is falling apart, our proposed solutions are drastically different than those of older generations. We refuse to continue trying to make problems go away by throwing more money at them, taking more pills, working more hours, or ignoring them. These solutions have done more harm than good. They’re the reason for our current mess.
No more band-aids. No more masking the symptoms of deep cultural problems.
Millennials solve problems by taking a step back to look at the big picture. We understand context. We understand how everything is connected. And above all, we respect that connectivity.
We’re Angry Because We Care
“Santayana famously declared that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, but those who don’t understand the distant past are condemned to live lives structured in ways that conflict with our deepest human appetites and tendencies.” -Christopher Ryan
As Peta Kelly would say, we simply give a shit. We care about the planet and we care about other people. We know that the hyper-aggressive, winner-take-all outlook on life that’s expected of us does not work. We know what truly works because we are the ones researching and learning about the nature of humanity, not just following along with what our parents and grandparents did. We know that there are numerous ways we can approach life on Earth. We are not tied to tradition. And we are spearheading the uphill struggle to make “our deepest human appetites and tendencies” trendy again.
What exactly are our “deepest human appetites and tendencies?” If you ask a fundamentalist, they’d likely list things like competition, violence, greed, lust or superiority. You know, all the things that are glorified by western society.
But we know from sources like Christopher Ryan that humans are compassionate egalitarians by nature. This is what works for us. It’s in our genes thanks to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in egalitarian social structures. The more we research our distant past and observe the destructive, stressful lifestyle we’ve been sucked into, the harder it is to deny the truth of our unhealthy relationship with the world, each other and ourselves.
One Oat Milk Mocha For Me, Please
Life is about so much more than earning a paycheck. So we are ready to stand up for what’s right and natural, not just what’s profitable.
And we’re not fools for paying extra for sustainable, ethical goods. We haven’t been tricked into a marketing scam. We are swimming against the current in a society that puts profit before people or the planet. So naturally it takes a little more effort, a little more money to pay for consciously crafted goods. It’s worth the extra cost because we know that our contribution makes a positive difference in the lives of others. We look at it as investing, rather than “spending” or “wasting” money.
Older folks scoff at the amount we shell out for our favorite sustainable goods. Sure, our stuff is more expensive. But things balance out when we spend consciously, meaning we spend less on unnecessary things elsewhere. Plus, our investments are generally reserved for local or otherwise small businesses, rather than the corporate empire that destroys human lives and the Earth.
By investing in the planet and humanity, we are in turn investing in ourselves. Numerous studies show that we feel better when we help others. When we feel better and live compassionately, everyone feels better. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Done Waiting
When older generations say Millennials are impatient or never satisfied, they’re right. Virtually every credible scientific study on the planet strongly indicates that our way of life is not sustainable. We are causing ourselves and those around us unnecessary harm just by living the way we do. And if no one else is going to do anything about that, then we might as well take on the challenge ourselves. We’re done waiting around.
But when they call us ungrateful, they are sorely mistaken. We behave this way because we are extremely grateful for our privilege to live in this beautiful world. We are grateful for our creative human spirit and our capacity for abstract thought and innovation. Why throw all that away just to make ends meet doing something we don’t care about? We are so grateful that we can’t stand watching our way of life deprive us of the things that make us human. Our choice to step away from wasteful practices is a choice born of gratitude and respect for something bigger than ourselves or “the market.”
It’s a shame to see people forfeiting their natural ingenuity just to climb a meaningless economic ladder, living up to only a fraction of their true potential. Moreover, it would be a shame to continue trudging blindly toward an elusive, artificial promise of material happiness while the byproducts of our daily grind destroy what truly matters in life.
So call us what you want. But we’re inviting you to join us in the vibrant, fulfilling world that exists outside the box.
