Centennials, the iGeneration, Generation Z – call us what you want. We are seen to be the most selfish, obnoxious and shallow group of people ever to be born. The ‘ME’ generation, absorbed with self image and addicted to technology. Tragic.
We have been called the lost generation, too online to be helping with problems or creating anything new. Not completely true.
We have seemingly founded a new culture. Full of hashtags and selfies. But this isn’t inherently a bad thing. We are exponentially changing the world. In 2013, people lost their minds as ‘Selfie’ was named word of the year because God forbid we validate modern speech. It’ll just add to our own personal gratification. But liking how we look to the point we want to document it should not sum up our selfishness. We understand that you didn’t have these narcissistic selfie sticks back in the day, instead you paid someone to come to your house and paint you surrounded by your possessions. Yes, that’s not obnoxious at all.
Things like Snapchat, Vine, Selfies and Instagram are this generation’s commodities and we should be allowed to love them just like how our parents loved THEIR commodities. They had things like hammer pants, platform shoes and the disco. They were all things that made the 1970s so unique so why should we let adults pester us and take away our chance to experience the uniqueness of right now.
We are using technology now more than ever but this thing about ‘too online’ doesn’t exist. You need to understand what it means to be online. It means we have access to information anywhere in the world, reachable in a matter of seconds. It means we can change the lives of people we’ve never met with a simple hashtag. It means articles can go viral – reaching tens of millions of people overnight. Too online doesn’t mean too quiet. This isn’t a problem we have.
A problem my generation does have, however, is that we are soon going to inherit a world that baffles us, a world of hypocrisy and a world of crisis.
Imagine being one of us, if Millennials are soon to become the first generation to earn less than the generation before, what hope do we have?
Do not let adults steal this generation from you. No one wants to actually up to their hand in the destruction of this economy and it’s downright pathetic. We are not blind to this generation’s flaws, but we are not blind to it’s potential.
We understand that we don’t have complete equality, we aren’t buying in to the fact that all countries are in fact not sovereign or free or democratic. So curse the Centennials all you want, but we are going to have to navigate a world where power and media will conflict with everything we stand for. We may have to fix the mess Trump makes. We’re going to have to fix the mess as a result of Brexit. We’re going to have to fix a world that we didn’t vote for, because we weren’t allowed to.
