Those Darn Millennials and Their Refusal to Buy Stuff

Gotta love stock photos!

I read a really interesting-sounding article that turned out to be not as interesting as it sounded, but still thought-provoking.

Click through and read the short article.  Go ahead, I'll wait.  Don't worry, it's not one of those New Yorker articles that goes about twenty paragraphs too long.

Back?  Okay, can I just say one thing now?

Can we just STOP talking about MILLENNIALS.  Oh my gosh.  Young people have always been young people.  Some grew up during extraordinarily hard times, and met the challenge (The Greatest Generation).  Some grew up during extraordinarily prosperous times, and those are our parents (Boomers).  All were young people, finding their way in the world.  All were admonished by the older generation, who would invariably shake its collective fist at the young'uns and say, "Those darn young people!  Why, in my day, blah blah blah..."  The current crop is no different, on both counts.  My favorite example is a Time magazine cover lamenting the new Millennials as self-obsessed nincompoops.  Someone then took the time to gather Time cover photos of EVERY SINGLE GENERATION of the last several decades, all lamenting young people.  Yeesh, give it a rest!  Let's all band together and make each other's lives easier.  Same goes for you, feminists and non-feminists, and the Mommy Wars!  Enough already!

Anyway, sorry about that.  I'm calm now, and looking at this stock image of a happy consumer happily toting around three purses has made me all the calmer.

The article says that youths don't require things just for ownership, as previous generations.  They like to have something that does something, something that they can share (#instagramhashtag, anyone?), something that they can use as a way to express who they are, or who they want to become.  I agree with that, but I think that this is the case for ALL consumers, to some extent.  Or, if you want to poll youths through history, that is probably the case for all youths since the dawn of consumerism.

I am more interested to hear what makes Millennials so different than youths before them, if that's the case.  I think there are a lot of things at play here, and it is far too complicated to be summed up in a blog or article.  Here are my thoughts on some reasons us youths may be slightly more averse than average about consumerism:

• We have seen the previous generation or generations just become swamped by their possessions, which brought them no joy, but did bring them a sense of dread that they now had to do something with all this junk.  Extreme cases saw us have to help go through elderly relatives' homes and sort through all the possessions.  Even more extreme cases saw us watch as folks from the older generation went bankrupt to afford whatever status symbol was designated to them.  All these events have turned us off of acquiring things just to acquire them.
• We spent our formative years (depending on age, that meant high school, college, grad-school, or some combination thereof) trying to find our way as young adults while we faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  For many of us (myself included), this involved a stint of unemployment.  It made money tight, and recreational shopping and consumerism something looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism.
• Many of us youths (myself included) don't have broadcast television.  Now, we do have a TV at our house, and a fair amount of time is spent watching it.  However, since basically everything we watch is on-demand (YouTube and other video sharing sites, Netflix streaming, HBO Go...), we have much more control over what we watch, vs. just channel surfing.  This also, more importantly, means that we don't get commercials!  Now, advertisers are still trying their darndest to make us watch commercials before watching the content we clicked on.  But for the most part, such commercials are largely ignored, and this lack of advertisers being able to tell us what we "need" to buy has left us with less consumerist drive.

Now, these are just my opinions.  What do you think?  Any reasons I left out?