Milennials: the (economically) bi-polar Generation

Huffpost blogger Adam Blickstein ponders the twin yo-yos of Irrational Exuberance and, now, belatedly, Rational Anxiety.

We are the first generation where mass media certitudes have ingrained within us certain irrevocable, perhaps unrealistic, assurances about our financial well-being. Invest young in order to profit when old, minor stock fluctuations pale in importance to the inevitable long term bonanzas, prosperity wasn't to be earned as much as it was an inherited societal right. But over the past 8 months, all that has been cast asunder. And while our parents are ostensibly the main victims of the current financial crisis, one has to wonder about what the long-term psychological consequences are for their kids of the financial rise and fall from the past 15 years.

You can't tell me that Jim Cramer barking financial assurances of wealth each day on cable followed by sober laments of a complete confidence failure in our financial system won't screw with our minds...

As if; for sure.

Okay, I kid. It is an important vector of generational zeitgeist to wonder about. Unlike their Gen X siblings, Milennials launched into their formative years somewhat unconflicted, perhaps even comforted, by the virtuality of digital life--the "perfectibility" and control via ubiquitous technology that pleasure-and-stimulation-on-demand offers. X-ers, on the other hand, still had one foot in the pre-web, analog world of sensation. The storied fatalism of Gen X was "earned" as much by practical experience of the world--viewing the rough-edged beginnings of Boomer and Mature Gen failures (Watergate, Gas lines, racial busing, etc)--as by some fashionable teen-angsty pose.

Given what might be called the Nintendo fault line, maybe "undo," "cut-and paste" and the like tend to weaken the blows that are the tangible markers of progressing into a certain kind of mental sturdiness or hardiness. Maybe suffering through tough times, refracted and amplified by digital media glut will, as Blickstein wonders, make the current times even harder-seeming to Milennials than those suffered by their grandparents in the 30s.

Maybe. But I doubt it will paralyze most of them, simply because their "elders" have no freeking clue either. After all, don't conflicted views (or conflict) come from two strong wills or cosmologies meeting? In this case, one of the cosmologies is wheezing and sputtering in the way of a very aging prize fighter. Blickstein sees cognitive dissonance between the official line of "the fundamentals of the economy are sound" and the rantings of meltdown! from Jim Cramer. Well, all those grownup "smart guys" formed by the zeitgeist of the 1920s had no clue either as the verities of their world spun apart. [And, their offspring turned into, ahem, "The Greatest Generation."] I think it's a tad overdone to suggest that just because we didn't have YouTube, blogs or Twitter in 1933 that there wasn't a profound and widely shared sense of the "world turned upside down."

But I do know that Boomer parents have done their offspring no favors in the hardiness category. As we point out to our clients, that "trophy for showing up" that many 40-, 50- and 60 year-olds often lament (loudly, and with sarcastic glee) wasn't thunk up and paid for by a mediocre soccer-playing 9-year old. And yeah, those 9-year olds turned into today's staff, Mr. CEO.

In this vein of digital plenty and analog naivete, "No child left outside" is a term most appropriate to Milennials and, possibly, to their successors, what I call "Renewals" (2001-2020). These two generations span 40 years (1980 - 2020). They'll be providing a lot of the manpower and brain-power necessary to make or break an American 21st Century. And, as predicted, they inherit a social framework that is both broke and busted. (Highlighted in the graphic below, click for larger).

Huffpost's Blickstein seems worried. I think they have what it takes, and more. But guess what? In order for them to rewrite and re-form the rules, a certain prior generational mindset is going to have to step off and admit something that parents or elders are often hard-pressed to do: "We tried. We had high hopes... But that didn't end too well, did it?"