Millennials Video

Tonight I watched a video on the Millennial Generation, and began relating many points in the video back to sustainability. The speaker in the video is Simon Sinek, and he discusses the main problems with this generation. He does not directly relate the problems to sustainability, but they potentially could be related back in many ways. Sinek believes that millennials are the way they are mainly due to their upbringing. Their parents give them what they want and they never have to put in effort for it. They get trophies for participating, and they always receive instant gratification for mostly everything. When these kids are then put in a work environment, they don't see the value of process, and if things don't happen immediately they fear that they are not doing a good job because they don't get the instant gratification. They are impatient and as Sinek puts it, they only see the summit and not the mountain in front of them. The millennials also rely on their technology for this gratification, and this allows them to avoid forming relationships, and keeps them from the possibilities of letting the mind wander. It should be the corporate employers job to tech the millennials this skill set, but they are not concerned with specific workers, but the overall product as a whole. These problems will lead to future problems for millennials unless they are fixed.

I kind of happened upon this video randomly, but I ended up choosing it because it can indeed be related back to sustainability. By creating these problems with the millennial generation, and not fixing them, we are creating a very unsustainable future. If everyone is seeking instant gratification, no long term goals can be achieved or even realized. We as millennials will do what we do best and live in the moment, always seeking things now, and never looking at the bigger picture. Applying this to the world around us, we won't want to go through the process of developing new things. the phrase "Rome wasn't built in a day" will show no relevance to us because if we can't build Rome in a day, we wont build Rome. Nothing that has any long term timeline will be achieved. This is a very unsustainable path we are headed down.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPaQPWfqjmw