Want To Rule The World? Talk To Millennials Like They’re Human
The Article: The First Person To Talk To Millennials Like Human Beings Will Rule The World by in Esquire.
The Text: The results are in: Millennials are going to change the false two-party dichotomy that is currently destroying America.
But it’s not because they’ve seen the waste and corruption that a two-party system brought with it, ruining an economy that Millennials now have to inherit. According to The USA Today and the Third Way think tank, it’s because they love Netflix.
“Millennials have come of age in a period of expansive customization of goods and services,” the report concludes. “Their experiences have led them to an á la carte worldview, including in politics.”
This is not what’s happening.
The country has used a generation as its creative core and its industrial motor and its soul and guts, it has wrung it of its sweat, and then it has asked it, slapping paddle to palm, why it wasn’t working harder.
They’re sick of it. And why wouldn’t they be? No one is listening.
This month, the RNC put out an ad on Youtube to appeal to the youth vote. It was, it appears, made by a madman who had once been to a Starbucks and did not like it.
The ad’s creators picked up the first three items they could find at an Urban Outfitters, unearthed a bearded young man who sounded whiny and incredulous — because this is the only kind of young man they could envision — and placed the clothes about his body like so.
They then fed him stock Republican talking points and wondered why it did not work.
Other voting demographics have had their wildest dreams actualized or personified or at least pandered to. A few weeks ago, Mitch McConnell walked onto the stage of the Republican Party’s convention with a shotgun, for example, to extoll the virtues of being endlessly afraid.
Millennials, in turn, got a reprimand in the form of an advertisement aimed at them. Instead of getting listened to, they got caricatured.
Even when the messaging is done right, they’re being marketed at, not catered to. The President went on Between Two Ferns last month to get the kids to buy health insurance and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says her department “got the Galifianakis bump” this week.
Nothing screams “We’re listening!” more than a member of the government reminding you that you are just a number.
Remember, the technological revolution that put a computer in almost every American’s pocket in less than a decade was spawned by brilliant, young developers. So were Facebook and Instagram and Google. All of these companies will determine the future of our world and they were born of kids that punched through the malaise.
Do not worry about the developers. They are well taken care of — either by corporations who understand their value, or angel investors who had the money or vision to allow for great risk in the first place. Worry about the people who can do just as much good for the world in any field other than software development, but — with three jobs in their 20s — will never get the time or the chance to do it.
Millennials are driving the economy and they are being remanded for it. Then they are being asked, “Why are you so despondent? Why are you so distant? Our generation had an identity. Where is yours?”
There is good news: Millennials will likely shift the two-party paradigm. They have the tools to do it. The numbers aren’t wrong. There is a desire to fix the mess.
But they’re not doing it because the two-party system isn’t Netflixy enough.
They’re doing it because the rich are getting exponentially richer and it is taking longer than ever for the hardworking young to be allowed to thrive. It’s academic.
And that’s just it: Identity has become something that the rich allow for.
This is not about how life for young people should be more like iPhones and Netflix. This is about an older generation that only thinks about iPhones and Netflix. And it’s about their effort to define a generation through the stuff it values more than the people they’ve made no effort to understand.
