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By Christopher Miguel Flakus

Generation Y, one of many terms used to describe our generation, along with “Millennial” (My personal favorite). We are also known as the Post-Baby Boomer Generation as well as“Echo Boomers.” This last being a reference on our birthrates being similar in some ways to the so-called “baby-boomers.” For sake of continuity, let’s just refer to this generation not as “Generation Y” just because the guys before us, those disenchanted, angst-ridden guys in their Jane’s Addiction T-Shirts, listening to Guns N Roses…. those guys were called Gen X. They are so close to us, still Millenials, but not quite children of the online world like we are.  Not to talk shit about the eighties and early nineties, everything can look bad in retrospect. Llooking back now, it all seems like regretting having worn those torn Jinco pants and a backwards baseball cap, well it must have seemed cool at the time.

Our generation is something else, on one hand a deeply progressive generation that prizes multiculturalism and tolerance. We also tend to consider alternate lifestyles and sexuality in a much different light than previous generations. I recently read a post from a mother on a College website, the woman is relating how her young son faked being gay in order to have girls sleep over without his mother’s suspicion. That speaks volumes, I believe. Kid didn’t care that his mom or friends thought he was gay…he just wanted to get laid.

Thanks to the availability of information, more people are moving away from the old way of Godliness and fear and disseminating information in a new way.

“In this day and age, God is a commodity, to me God is a form of self-satisfaction,” says Austin Texas Millennial, Justin Fritchy, a twenty-two year old Gas Station Clerk. “I just barely get by paying for an apartment. I am trying to go to School and hope for a good job, but it’s just not like we thought it would be out here. There is no one watching our backs, but I think for the most part, we’re all just good people in a bad situation.”

I have always heard an older person say: “In my time, we had to walk all the way up to school through the snow and we’re all the better for it?” I find it funny that our elder generations find our lives to be ‘pampered” just because in their times toil was considered a way of generating “character.” That is fine, though I personally fail to see the connection between being uncomfortable and having good character. I thought character was all about not being a dick. Is it fair to say that is how Millennials basically feel? Somehow we have been pigeonholed as being lazy, yet everywhere I look I see people our age producing something, either creatively or through their work.

So here we are: “The Millennial Generation.” I like this; because we are tied not to some terrible event, for example we could be called The 9/11 Generation, or Iraq War Generation. Maybe one day, we will be called that. History may ultimately reject the term. But for now at least “The Millennials” is a neutral term, it puts a sense of  space/time to our very name. It’s not a belligerent description, we’re not “booming” or “echoing”.

These first few decades of  this millennium can be a chance to progress or fall flat on our asses. Information is the new God, and we are its keepers. In the modern world, we must accept the realities of mechanized warfare, drugs, holocaust, genocide, an ever-changing and controversial online world, Healthcare, mass media, celebrity worship, advertising, Twitter, and as usual all fucking kinds of political upheaval…. and now it’s only a button away. Just log on to see the truth(s).

We Millennials perfected the possibilities of a global network like the internet, as a social tool. The impact this is having on our culture is easy to see. An easy example that everyone knows is You tube. In the last few years, it seems the whole world has visited this site. And everyone now knows where they can procure the rare, the dramatic, and most importantly the trivial. We collect the moments of life in a large bank, watching as a fat kid named Edgar falls in the water. And somehow, it is a profound experience because it is shared. It is no longer enough for us to see something, or read something. We want to interact with it, this is a characteristic of our generation. We want our comments shown, our opinion heard.  This is just the little part of something so much bigger, and all the pieces are going to fit. The simple seamless ability of this generation to adapt, quickly, to new technology…is an asset no generation before has possessed. We value a job that allows us to live comfortably and take care of our families. Every generation wants that. But where we differ is that we want our education not to have been for nothing. Many in our generation say that next to having a good job their deepest wish is to have “a job that makes a positive difference.” This has led to conflict between certain members of previous generations who may view this as being spoiled and having a misunderstanding of what the work they do entails. Millennials are for the most part assertive, wanting to be part of the decision making process. You guys tell me, maybe we’re lazy. Maybe we just have better technology. The answers remain to be seen.

Marc, a 23-year-old student and musician describes his views on millennial life as follows:

“I don’t know how I feel about my generation
Well I think in a very general sense
We are the apathetic generation
We learned that not ignoring our surroundings and just trying to make it easy on ourselves could lead to some very bad things
With our grandparents generation we saw this in terrible war and loss
But then we saw the wasted hopes and rhetoric of the following generation that tried so hard to “change” things
Our Parents generation
So this generation
Could give a fuck
Everything is shitty all the time everywhere
Might as well accept it and get on with your day

How I am different from my parents
I try not to spend time thinking about that
Which I suppose says a lot about my generation in itself, we hate reality

When it doesn’t seem to fit with what we expect we turn and run from it

Just look at drugs, an escape from our realities in some form or another…
As for a job
Any job in which I could spend my time doing something I enjoy doing, like music, and actually have a comfortable living from doing so, that would be a dream…”

Work is the priority, almost across the board, for every generation when asked what is of most importance in life. Work is the single most important thing, because from work comes possibilities. Options come into play, money to either feed your family or take a trip. Worlds unravel. Work is freedom? Sounds like “1984″

George Orwell dreaded a future where information was controlled. As long as the Internet remains what it is, we have a free zone, and the limitless possibilities are only beginning to be discovered. It must be protected, from the greed bags. The men with silver hair and shallow minds. Haters with yellow fangs, always looking to keep the money pumping into their bellies. They can’t see the promise of a net where a free sharing of information may propel us towards great innovations on so many levels. It took bright people, people with vision, to see the potential for money in the internet. Perhaps this is the single most important thing about our generation. The work is starting to go, not to the man who was best schooled or best raised. They are starting to go to the first generation to grow up with the internet, the first to truly understand it. And the changes that we are having on this online world are starting to be seen. The next step in flattening the world, bringing us closer together as a people. Perhaps it may be too much to say that being born “Millennials” we were dropped suddenly, into this intricate web of possibilities, a matrix of lives at your fingers. By simply logging on to our computers we can access the entire world. And that’s just the beggining.

Seen as being lazy, we have been anything but; we are pioneers of the real last frontier. What Borges would have called “The Invisible Library” an Internet where we communicate how we want with who we want? Where we keep the truth, in it’s many forms. Where we intend to keep it, safe.