#30 Generation Me: Chasing Butterflies

I've been reading Gene M. Twenge's book, Generation Me… It's helping me understand this void that follows me around. The one that says, you are a very special person who had been born to share yourself with the world. Buy an iPad, it will help you along your quest. I thought it was just me. 

But it's not just me. It's my generation. I like her use of iGen, "This generation has been profoundly shaped by technology, including the Internet (which is what the "i" stands for in "iMac") and of course iPods. The "i" also captures the essence of my description of Generation Me: it can stand for the first person singular or be "i" for individual." (G.Twenge) 

It's very true. We have been shaped by the internet, the i: individualism, identity, iPad. This leads to a high level of narcissism and entitlement and a low level of actual desire to do work. Especially in North America. In Europe - in Italy, people don't have that choice. They don't have the same opportunities to live back home after University to figure out "what they want to do" with their lives. They are forced to stay at home through the whole experience because there isn't any work. 1/4 are unemployed. 

And yet we all feel the same way. We all feel like we need to make a difference, do something with our lives, live in a proper way. Be happy. 

I was discussing the key to life with a friend the other day. We went on a walk and commented about how grey the weather was, how no where is open, and how all our friends are out of town: how boring life is! What a terrible way to start the day, lamenting that we're not plugged in to something entertaining. 

That's when we realized that we weren't plugged in. We were looking for stimulation. We had become Curt Cobain, yelling, "here we are - entertain us"! Our generation relies on stimulation to exist. We look at advertisements and the way that other people live on TV. We wish we were having the same wonderfully funny experiences as the cast of Big Bang Theory. 

In 1972 we saw between 200 - 500 ads a day. "Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today. About half the 4,110 people surveyed last spring by Yankelovich said they thought marketing and advertising today was out of control." (NYTimes, 2007) 

A person living in a city sees 5, 000 messages a day?! Consider that article was printed in 2007 and it's now 2014. We live in a time of YouTube Ads, and Blog Ads that didn't exist in the same way a few years ago. I tried to find studies for today, but I couldn't. 

And we wonder why we are running around feeling unfulfilled, wanting to be movie stars and famous singers. Everyday, 5000 times a day, we see something that someone else has, that we can't have. That we need. Desperately. Because people will only like us if we have glossy, shiny hair. 

Who are we without what we buy? And what we want is enough money to choose. That's what it comes down to. Recently, a mutual friend won about $3000 betting online. It spun quite a discussion about free money and what one would do if one could just have free money for life. In the end, after all the clothes are bought and the parties created, what would you do with your life? Endless money to buy endless stuff?

That's not a life worth living.