Who’s In Charge Now? Move Over Boomers!

What makes today’s young families different from my own back in the eighties? Don’t parents still want the best for their kids…a great education, nice vacations, a safe and decent home? Sure they do but there are things they don’t want…like confrontation. Millennials look for compromise and are prepared to give and take in order to resolve issues before moving forward. That’s politics, business, marketing, opinion leadership…everything…in the most significant state of flux ever witnessed…and I am a sixty-something boomer who’s seen both sides!

I watched a video recently in which a highly respected radio programmer I’d met reminded me that the baby boom no longer pilots the pace car…that job has been handed to Gen Y, the kids my generation produced, born between about 1978 and the late nineties…so young families with parents in their early thirties are the leading edge. Singles, and there are many, count too. It’s the next great generation, making up about 25-30% of the population and now the largest component of the work force and of the population. We can’t underestimate the importance of millennials…it’s why social conservatism is fading away and why my fellow boomers are having some communications challenges.

Experts say millennials are a product of their environment and the prevailing conditions of their early years… more like their grandparents’ generation, not so much like their parents’. Millennials are more community-centric, both locally and globally. They want to contribute but, unlike Mom and Dad, not via the Rotary Club or the Elks! Millennials enjoy broadened friendships and communicate using the tools they’ve had from birth and that have been refined and improved ever since. While boomers look back and long for the “good old days”, millennials (50%) say the best years are yet to come. Perhaps it’s what happens when you inherit unemployment and student debt as compared to the great post WWII boom times our parents gave to us.

Baby boomers still talk about same sex relationships, abortion, legalization of marijuana, and universal health care. Millennials are well past those issues and are now well down the road onto newer concerns like creating wealth. They’re changing politics as we know it. Millennials are money-conscious…not extravagant…and socially, have become extremely liberal. What does this say about how society is going look in the future? How will the new ‘in-charge’ group develop good government in the next ten, twenty, thirty years? If you’re thinking compromise, you’re on the right track.

Millennials have significantly delayed a number of things we boomers faced in our late teens and early twenties…leaving our parents’ homes; getting married; having children (if/when/how many); seeking meaningful work (which is far less plentiful). Millennials are, for the most part, neither concerned with nor tolerant of organized religion…no surprise that Pope Francis, in an effort to relate, is more interested in having gay couples show up than dispatching them from church altogether by criticizing orientation.

It’s hard to entertain or inform millennials because they self-deliver content whenever and wherever they like. City dwellers are less concerned with cars; more concerned about who their friends are. Gen Y demands authenticity, a sea change, a curve ball…because they get it. Truth is expected as is admitting when we’re wrong because being wrong sometimes is okay…nobody’s perfect.

Millennials are more easygoing. Hype them and they run the other way. That changes how things are decided, advertised, sold, or discussed. Think of a traditional menu…”farm fresh eggs” must be fresh from the farm!

Millennials are optimists and hold onto their dreams because, unlike us boomers, they were born into a truly difficult period. Dreams make us happy so dreaming is a happy pursuit. Baby boomers were handed a lot and taught to expect more. Millennials were handed less. So, they just put a higher premium on being liked and being fun to be around. I look back at myself and my friends in our thirties, We demanded respect and control…being liked was the nice (but not required) extra benefit.

Millennials thrive on diversity – different kinds of people, different fields of endeavor, different ideologies. It’s been a remarkable transition in fifty years, right? The result of it is that my generation which is living longer either gets with the program or has a less than enjoyable time watching from the cheap seats for the twenty or thirty years we have left.