Millennials Versus Old Generation: What the New Kids Need to Learn From their Predecessors

I was born in the year 1991. It was a time when people had to put themselves in a queue for months to own a land phone connection, cooking gas was still a luxury that only the elite could flaunt, and Internet, our best friend, was still not entirely born here.

In my life, I have navigated through tangled cassettes to CDs and iPods. I eased from the dingy internet cafe rooms to the comfort of my drawing-room. I watched telephone booths fading and vanishing. I saw my movie collections shrink from shelf to harddisks, from VHS tapes to OTT platforms.

Twenty-nine years later, I see boys caressing floppy-disk like an artifact, condescending at its meagre 1.2 MB memory, some even wondering why there is a 3D model of ‘save’ icon in Windows. My 5-year-old nephew scratches the Television in desperation, asking why it has no touch screen! Times have changed.

Being able to operate a screen by touching it, had not broken into my top ten dreams back in the day, while I fiddled with AA cells in the TV remote control. Replacing the battery made us feel like scientists! For kids today, any device that doesn’t respond to swipes is a technological catastrophe.

I see how people hailing from the 60s and 70s, struggle to grapple with the evolving tech. As if Candybar feature phones were not baffling enough, now there is a bigger labyrinth to maze through, with a screen registering even the mildest of touches and three dozen apps that stare at you.

They look at the young kids in admiration, who carelessly juggle with their digital toys, the devices the old hold in great reverence. “The kids are smarter than us,” says some, while a few grumble about how technology ruins the next-gen.

Are the kids now really smarter? I am no expert to give you an informed opinion, but I have been tailing behind this puzzle for a while, and a few facts caught my eye. I have seen how technology has messed up two essential aspects of our life, particularly the Millenials’ and some of the 90s kids, including myself.

PATIENCE IS ALWAYS A VIRTUE

Imagine my father was reading an English book in the 1960s, that’s when he was doing his school. He came across a word that he couldn’t understand. Let’s assume this was during the summer vacation, and there were no school teachers at his disposal to clear his doubt. What’s the natural arc of actions he had to take up to solve the meaning of the word?

Refer the dictionary, you might say, but my dad tells me that in those days, there was only one household that could afford a clock in his entire village! You can forget dictionaries. He would have had to look out for a library, and if he is fortunate, he will find one in a 40-kilometer radius. He will have to board at least two different buses, walk a bit, enquire about the exact location of the library to a few so that he could zero in on his destination. Then, he needs to take a membership, that probably comes with a rude fee, before he can get his hands on a dictionary. That’s almost a day’s hard work, and for what? To understand the meaning of a particular word!

Most people would rather not ride on this arc of actions. The whole set of processes has a terrible output/input ratio. You are giving in half a day for the meaning of a word, you might as well guess the meaning from its context.

Cut to 2020, and all of us own a dictionary, but it rarely leaves the shelf, for googling the word gives you enough and more. From synonyms to pronunciation in different accents, it feeds you with information that a dictionary can only dream about.

This ‘easiness’ is carried over to almost all walks of life. You like a movie; you don’t wait until it appears on TV, you are downloading it already. This generation is growing up on the premise that desires, big or small, get instant gratification. They don’t want dictionaries, and even if they owned one, ‘waiting’ is not a word they want in it! It works for the most part until they arrive at certain spots, where the old rules of ‘wait and watch’ still holds good.

Relationship, Job satisfaction, making good money, body-building, such arenas of life are still spread wide before you, where the rules have stayed the same. You have to play a patient inning.

You can’t find a partner yesterday, fall in love today, get married tomorrow, and expect the rapport between to be perfect. You don’t sign up for a job and come back telling “I am not making a change to this world” with my desk routine. You don’t open the Internet and hit the ‘jackpot’ button on your keyboard to fill your bank accounts ( although many Youtubers might want you to believe its as easy as that). You can’t expect yourself to be healthy with protein powders and steroids powering your muscular body. That’s a short route to six-packs and even shorter way to the graveyard.

You build your relations brick by brick. You take time to fall in love with your job, your online endeavors to make money consumes time and energy, there are no healthy short cuts to building packs. Everything takes time. The new kids, smarter with computers and tech, are so used to finding what they want at the snap of a finger, cannot digest the tedious process behind substantial achievements. Not every kid, but many.

What else have they lost with the overwhelming presence of technology around them? I would say ‘critical thinking.’ They never had to think for answers, the answers appeared on a silver plate, even before their neurons could fire. They are smarter by possessing more data, and they consume content in large chunks. They can write a para on subjects the previous generation has not even heard of.

Internet arena is seething with video tutorials on literally everything, from sewing to building atom bombs. If you have information that no one else holds, you are a Youtube star. You can create a brand for yourself with a mobile phone and nothing else.

People rush to watch these videos the moment they need something, and even their brain is now hardwired to push the guy to consume these content without a second thought. I wanted to make a new website and a Youtube channel with some unique material in it. Every time I searched for novelty, I found myself inadvertently typing ‘new ideas for website and youtube channels’ into my google search bar. Answers did appear, but a million people were already working on that.

I had to re-learn to think for myself, trust my whatever IQ, meditate, get hold of my thoughts, and back my brain to give me answers. It took time, but ideas did sprout.

I am not saying one generation triumphs another. The vantage points you took when you grew up will determine your strengths and weakness. But new kids need to remind themselves that technology won’t do everything for them.

Thirty years from now, robots might do all our job, and we might live a life that’s hardly life! You should really teach yourself to think if you want to feel alive then…