Do you want to restart your Millennial?
January 2019
Original
By: Miladin Stojadinović, Content Specialist, Fusion Communications
Reluctantly opening your eyes after the alarm’s third attempt to notify you that the new workday is starting, you realize that it’s time to change the ringtone — the favorite song you tasked with this has now become the most irritating sound in the world. In a daze, you take the phone and first check the notifications and whether any texts came during the night.
You’re frantically checking Whatsapp, Viber, Messenger, Telegram, Insta, and Twitter DM… and wait — do people still send texts? You check the weather forecast, because windows are so passé and they don’t have those cute animated clouds and rain drops rolling down the screen. If it’s going to rain, there’s the fake Uber app to send a car to your location in a single click; you quickly remind yourself to first check the bank account balance using the smartphone’s online banking feature. Maybe there’s actually not enough money.
Google Calendar tells you about the meetings scheduled for the day, and Outlook notifies you of unread emails from panicking clients who are changing the brief for the third time one day after the campaign kicked off. A deep breath in and an even deeper breath out.
Before you even brush your teeth, you already ran through miles of Instagram and Facebook feeds.
Everyone looks perfectly filtered, selfies are posted from fabulous destinations (of course, a throwback to more than half a year ago), friends are promoting their ascension to the C-suite (without us knowing that they actually work at their aunt’s company — a non-VAT registered business with a payroll of five employees), and an occasional boomerang from the club poured over with a bottle of something expensive (which was shared between fifteen people and snapped by even more).
The first morning thoughts start buzzing around your head. Do I travel enough? Is there a point to my career? Maybe I should get out more? I’m late. I’m late. I’m late.
Your third attempt to get on the bus yields results. The image is exactly the same every time: young people with headphones on and the cool blue light from the phone screen shining into their faces, completely indifferent to the world around them, and senior citizens drowning in tote bags and practicing for The Hunger Games, which in their case means competing for the last empty seat on the bus.
You work 8–10 hours with your laptop. Excel. Power Point. Photoshop. Word.
Emails, emails, emails.
Save. Send it to the cloud. Share with the team. Send a reminder. Mark as urgent.
Check out next year trends — it’s video again. Of course.
The phone rings — who talks anymore? What’s hard about texting? This is going to turn into a yelling match any second now.
Lunch. The obligatory instastory from the office or elevator (whichever has better lighting) hashtagged with #ILoveMyJob.
Check-in. Review because the waitress is unbearably rude. So what if fifty people jerked her around with nonsense before you came in?
An unpleasant meeting with… Who the heck gave her that role, for God’s sake?
Have you heard about the reality star who wrote a smash-hit bestseller? This has to be fake news. Who could tell anymore…
End of workday. Plans with friends. Maybe another time, but FOMO FOMO FOMO.
What if they get mad? What if you miss going to that awesome new place everyone’s posting pics from?
A few more hours of a freelance side hustle because a new phone isn’t going to buy itself.
Overdoing it at the gym. Cigarette. Beer. Xanax. A Netflix show.
Something has to slow down the wheels that never stop.
This is the average day of an older Millennial. This is their reality and the world they live in.
As much as digital technologies have done good, at the same time they dragged them on a rollercoaster that seems to never end. Before they even realize that they’re at the top, with a loud shriek they fall into the abyss of their own obsessions and habits, entering a dark tunnel where the future is uncertain and unknown.
Before we write a piece analyzing their consumer habits again and criticizing them as spoiled and so different from their predecessors, let’s think for a moment about how the digital revolution affected them and why anxiety became a demon that’s holding their hand day after day because we’re certainly not.
Although, why bother?
Let’s check out what’s Gen Z up to.
