The Reason Behind Surprisingly Rational Self-Absorption of Digital Natives.
Spoiled children could be not-so-spoiled after all.
For the last two years every week, I read a post with a new intriguing story about a millennial who was hired for a great position in a good company, but after a week they just quit saying that the job is not interesting for them. Their parents are furious, the employer is confused, the responsible HR manager is in shock because of the third millennial quieter this month. It would be nothing if it was a one-time event, but it is starting to feel like a new normal we don’t understand.
The first emotional reaction of society is to blame the irresponsible generation raised by Instagram, games and emojis. Some cold-headed experts talk about a peaceful and wealthy 30 years period in developed countries which brought 20 years old infants as a result. There are many more theories about different seemingly unrelated issues. Usually, it means that all of them are instances of the same phenomenon staying out of the light. And it’s going to substantially influence the workforce market soon so let’s try to figure it out before starting to lose money.
What would you say about the person who is constantly pursuing their interest while ignoring the interest of the people around them? There are many unpleasant words, but let’s dive deeper into the core of their behavior. They have a strong sense that their interest-based choice brings more value than the choice baked by interest of no-matter-how-important others. There are two options: it’s a misleading sense of an arrogant person raised in a malfunctioned environment or it’s a well-(probably unconsciously)-trained sense suited best for the current conditions.
The first scenario
is familiar to everyone. A person was raised in a twisted environment inadequate to reality. For the whole history of humanity, there was a noticeable amount of such people. Hopefully for humanity, their amount was limited because of the considerable resource requirements to build and contain such a twisted reality. Only sufficiently wealthy families could really execute it for a substantial time. Lack of resources leads to a faster and harder clash with reality fixing the main concepts in the head of the person. Third-World countries don’t even have the discussing trend, because young people can’t be sustainable enough to have any choices but survival-dictated.
The second scenario
leads us to the exciting question ‘Why choosing your own interests against experts’ advices is a life-winning strategy?’’ The whole previous experience of humankind tells that the world is a really demanding place teaching everybody to choose proven strategies to have a chance for success. What has changed?
As humans, we value predictive ability the most. How far a person could see the future defines their intelligence in our eyes. A one-year-old child knows exactly that a kettle will fall on the floor if she pushes it from the table. A professional tax advisor tells you exactly all the issues you will get in 12–18 months in case of refusing to pay taxes. Warren Buffett could predict the investment funds’ return over a 10 year period and was ready to make a bet with everyone on the market who disagreed. But just two challengers appeared and they’ve already lost.
We give a status of an expert to the person who can predict the furthest future of the complex processes. But we recall the status after they’ve failed a few times.
Failure is what turns respectful prediction into foolish guessing.
People follow prophets and experts but instantly leave the ones who failed behind. It’s part of the survival instinct to follow someone who proves to know where a tiger is and to throw a rock at the one who is constantly talking about a tiger without the tiger appearing.
Children follow grown-ups and students follow professors because of their ability to predict the future. It was a well-worked system, because, to be honest, the prediction was a simple extrapolation of current reality to the future. Life stays the same so giving a prognosis is not a rocket science. But what happens when technology has started to substantially accelerate the rate of changes? Has someone predicted cryptocurrency growth? Mobile gaming boom among grownups? Youtube blogging becoming a profession? What exactly experienced grownups know about the future?
Imagine a family raising a millennial. A parent demands the child to learn handwriting and claims it as an essential skill, but the child sees everybody typing without ever using handwriting. The parent failed to predict. First strike. The parent pushes the young men to learn human biology because becoming a doctor is a great opportunity for life. But the son knows that the doctor has to learn for 16 years to get a worse payroll than a youtube blogger with no education. Second strike. The parent asks to stop playing RPG games calling it an unhealthy and worthless activity. But could they answer what RPG stands for and the fact that game designer is one of the skyrocketing professions? Third strike. The parent is out. Let’s be clear, you’re out. The digital native child lives in a world of information and feels the lies on the tips of their fingers. For them you are not a credible expert anymore, but a street madman screaming about things that will never happen.
Same story for schools with an outdated curriculum that evidently for children has little real-life value. Same for universities claiming to equip students with ‘valuable’ professions which are well-known for them to disappear before graduation.
Following the advice of self-proclaimed experts became an obviously losing strategy. What choices of strategy does it leave for a person eager to succeed? Following only their own interests aggressively ignoring all the advices and environmental demands.
May there be minor changes in the existing strategy to avoid unnecessary revolutions? Unfortunately, there is no middle ground to adapt the previous strategy to the new conditions. So many failed opinions and the right ones are hard to distinguish from guessing. It’s like a banner blind when you see so many worthless ads, that your mind shuts the door for any attention requests at all.
As a result, in the world of rapidly changing reality, the most efficient strategy chosen by our mind is to rigorously follow personal interests. Could be not the best strategy, but the best from the options available.
Imagine how tremendous this shift is. Humanity was living for hundreds of thousands of years with one main rule of survival — ‘follow the grownups, they know’. And now we as a kind get to the point where we need to change it. It’s not a choice, but a life demand. And we are hardly ready for it.
Are employers ready for employees who can leave the company at any moment? Are schools ready to update their curriculums every week based on the changing student interests? Do parents have support to help them understand the changing nature of their kids to avoid never-ending family conflicts?
It’s going to be a challenging time for all the traditional institutions. There is still some safety margin to bend the system for the next 10–20 years. But there is already a countdown for the day when the workforce market will be so shocked that it pulls all other institutions to the free fall of losing social trust capital.
We already live in the new world of broken fundamentals with no way to upgrade failed systems and without a new one that properly responds to the challenges ahead.
The good news is the fact that such a system is already emerging.
