Dear reader,
I remember having to choose from three very boring topics for my final German oral examination at school.
I chose ‘der Generationenkonflikt’ – the generation gap.
The least boring option.
I started my unprepared speech off confidently, introducing the topic by explaining what exactly the generation gap is – careful not to forget the guttural ‘G’s and rolling ‘R’s, but I soon noticed the invigilator starting to flap her skirt around her calves.
I hadn’t considered that I would offend her; yet somehow I had.
In hindsight, I assume it had come to pass because I had inferred that the generation gap is largely due to “older folks’” struggling to come to grips with technology.
I didn’t leave the generation gap behind underneath that anxiously flapping flannel skirt though. No, it followed me into adulthood.
“Millennials (those born between 1985 and 1996) are entitled, and have an attitude problem,” I saw one women write on social media under an article discussing the benefits of employing the youth.
Similar comments, such as; “Millennials have no clue what hard work looks like, and are unwilling to pay their dues” and “Millennials don’t take work seriously,” also floated around in the comment section, lost between the ‘memes’ and humour that the ‘evil millennials’ had already flooded it with.
Some of the perceived generational conflicts come from real demographics.
Millennials are already the largest segment of the workforce, and that dominance will only grow in the coming years.
It is estimated that millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025.
But property prices, pensions and austerity will pale in significance compared with the effects of global warming on the next generation.
Australian scientists recently found, in a study titled ‘Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach,’ that by 2050 more than half of the world’s population will face 20 days a year of lethal heat, crop yield globally will drop by a fifth, the Amazon ecosystem will collapse, the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer, and sea levels will rise by 0.5 metres (they rose by 0.19 metres over the 20th century).
In the worst case, “the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.”
So; this is for the flappy-skirted baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) and Gen Xers (those born in the early 1960s to the early 1980s) out there – before you accuse a millennial of being lazy for refusing to work for less than what you earned at your holiday job during the school holidays in 1976; think about this… You might have to contend with jeans in the workplace, but millennials have to deal with the crumbling eco-systems and environment you’ve left behind for us to inherit after decades of apathy and ignoring global warming warnings.
Anxiously yours,
Aimee
