Millennials Are Screwed - How Can The Millennial Generation 'Bounce Back'?

by Lucas Castillo

November 2nd, 2018

It seems that we are all facing a bit of a problem here. We have somehow forgotten how to communicate.

If you want my real opinion, everyone is afraid of each other. People are just scared to simply share a conversation. It’s pretty fucking sad.

Today's millennial - those born after the year 1984 - life seems pretty tough. I'm only 28, born in 1990 so this is my perspective.

I have had enough with the criticism lately. I have always felt so judged for being labeled as a millennial. It’s something that has truly gotten under my skin. Has it for you?

Just about anyone older than myself seems to always be cracking jokes about how different we are. Why? We were born in a very different social upbringing. Why do we get such a hard time?

Here is the truth.

We were dealt a really bad hand.

We spent our childhood in a very different world than our parents did. Our parents did not know how to raise us in todays ever-growing toxic society.

I am not here to slam our parents.

Any new parent simply has no idea what they are doing because well, they have never experienced it before. So of course it's not easy.

You can be quite prepared in advance. How ever, I don’t believe anyone can be truly be prepared 100% for parenthood.

I have helped my mom and dad raise all of my brothers and sisters (All 8 of us). I have even helped raise children that were not my own. I think any parent would agree with me. You could never be prepared enough. Kids are tough.

So for us millennials - what is the major line that's drawn between ourselves and our parents in our generation from theirs?

Social Media.

The other night I came across a video on Facebook that really breaks this down quite well.

Simon Sinek explains what’s missing in our millennial generation in the workplace. He highlighted some really unfortunate truths. Simon honestly nailed it when he spoke on how exposed we were as teens when the internet began to evolve.

The internet changed everything about the world and we honestly had no idea how significant the impact would be for our generation. It was new to every one so no one knew what to expect or even that a negative outcome would arise.

First there was AOL. We all would sit together huddled up with friends in front of the 50lb computer screen for 15 minutes awaiting internet connection.

I remember fighting to get on AIM just so we could socialize with friends.

Then came cell phones. We were already texting at home on the computer screens, but that simply wasn’t enough. Cool tech flip phone were coming out with features like "T9' so you could communicate faster.

Blog websites began to gain popularity. People could put their words out there for other people to read. It was a major source of communication and a way to express yourself.

Then the social media ball began to roll in 2003.

MySpace. Where they made us rank our friends on a ‘favorites’ list. Before facebook, I really thought of all of my friends as equals.

I believe the top 8-24 friends you created started quite a bit of drama. No one wanted to be second, or third, or fourth....it was a nasty trend.

To add more fuel to the fire, Mark Zuckerberg created the worlds largest social media platforms. He created algorithms that changed the internet forever.

Facebook. It was basically the sailing ship to our social lives.

The old ways of communicating were swept under the rug and we didn’t even consider the long term damage that we are now facing today.

It destroyed our way of communicating

face to face. We lost our ability to talk to each other.

I grew up very close to my family. Family is MOST important to me. There is such a level of empathy in my family that I don’t see too often in other homes. We just love that way. So growing up I applied that same love with every relationship. I treated everyone how I would want to be treated.

A simple hug or telling your friends you love them when you depart is something that is important to me. Every now and again I get a very different reaction. Especially when it’s a new friend. Some will act quite surprised. Hell, they might just be going with it.

I just know that expressing that part of me has to show an emotional level that most of us are not used to seeing anymore.

I meet too many people that are afraid to express emotion. I never really understood it. Until my eyes began to open of course.

I graduated in 2008, 10 years ago…I just had a panic attack.

Anyways after graduation we all went our separate ways. Our only line of communication was Facebook, right? We were thrown into the world without any real communication skills. The only socializing experience we owned was through our computer screens or our cell phones.

We would rely on our technology to communicate instead of getting together more often like we used to.

We stopped making time to see each other because we had cell phones and social media.

The old fashioned way of hanging out simply went out the door.

The old fashioned became boring to us. I even got bored of it. Of course. Talking on the phone seemed so much better than making the effort. I was pretty content with the people I already knew and I had the internet to 'meet new people' right?

I was wrong.

I had no idea how to communicate with the outside world.

As the years went on I only grew farther away from critical communication skills. I think we all did. Those that continued schooling/college after high school made out better than those that did not, surely.

There is still a gap that social media created that permanently damaged our emotional capabilities.

This is about to get deeper.

Suicide rates are the highest they have ever been. I think you would have to be stupid to think that social media wouldn’t have anything to do with this.

It has everything to do with this.

Simon Sinek in his interview, brought up a very good point about how the human brain receives information when we use social media.

We are addicted to it. We are addicted to the likes. We are addicted to the comments. All of it.

Social media really is no different than a drug. Dopamine is released every time we refresh our apps. It’s fucking horrible. When we start to lose that attention, we get sick. We get mentally sick. It is very similar to withdrawal in some ways.

When you consider the fact that so much dopamine is exhausted from your brain when you use social media, your brain loses more serotonin, causing a horrible ripple effect. When your brain can no longer produce more 'happy' cells, it can only make things like depression worse.

Social media is a contributor to anxiety and depression all day long.

I can’t tell you how many failed romantic relationships I have had due to my lacking ability to communicate. I have been horrible; I mean just fucking horrible in my many relationships simply because I didn’t know how to express myself.

I can’t say it was all me though. I wasn’t the only one struggling with this.

I have lost many friendships as well just because we didn’t know how to talk it out. Everyone seemingly fills up with anxiety and shuts down because well, they aren’t used to facing the emotions in person.

So you and that friend or romantic partner 'break up' over text messaging and the real problems never get resolved.

It’s pretty much the same as running away.

Communication is so fucking important. I hate how I am just now realizing how piss poor my social skills have been. I hate how difficult it is to find new deep meaningful relationships.

Making new friends is seriously hard enough these days. We are constantly judging each other by our photos and the things we repost. No one can just saying hello and accepting even a friendly invite to a social setting, because now, 'well that's just too creepy.'

We need to change.

This system we have today is crippling our society because our human face-to-face social skills are out-ragiously broken. We don’t know how to talk to one another. Many of us lack compassion.

No one can feel emotion through a text message. Things we are reading or sending are getting either misinterpreted or are over thought.

These are easily huge triggers for anxiety and depression.

There is no escaping it unless you get away from it entirely. It really is a problem that truly isn’t easily overcome.

It's addicting. Overcoming addiction is hard.

To help yourself get over your addiction and to better your communication skills, here are a few things I think we should all practice with our devices:

1. Talk, don’t text about important or meaningful conversations.

2. Don’t charge your phone next to your bed. Buy an alarm clock.

3. When spending time with family or friends, stay the hell off of your phone.

4. Call more often than you text.

5. Mandate yourself to take breaks from your social media apps.

6. Remove your social media apps from your phone so that you can only access them from a desktop.

7. Stay off of your phone at work.

8. When someone asks you to get off of your phone, just do it.

I hope this has shed some light on some of your relationships. We all allow hate to enter our lives all too often.

We have to focus on bettering our communication strategies. We have to also better ourselves and utilize our voices more than our keyboards.

I think we all starve for the same emotional attention. We just have to start allowing ourselves to be apart of it.

If you’re a millennial reading this, please fucking share this. We are all quite wounded. More need to be aware of this.

I know I wasn't.

Thanks for reading!

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hER0Qp6QJNU&t=150s

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