DES154 | Message Campaign Design | Editorial

SomeMag. January 2017, Issue 3

MILLENNIALISM

BY MILLENNIALS A fictional contemporary lifestyle magazine for Message Campaign Design, taught by Gale Okumara.

Winter Quarter 2017.

A GENERATION STIGMATIZED AND STRESSED Meet Devin, an average Millennial. A peek into Devin’s life gives us insight into a generation working through the challenges of work-life balance during an era of heightened connectivity and stereotypes.

BY ADRIAN ANG, BELINDA HUANG, AND CHELSEA BEST PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELINDA HUANG

56 LIFE

A

t exactly 8:00 A.M. in San Francisco, Devin’s iPhone 7 starts playing a marimba tone, alarming him to wake from his slumber. His fingers silence the screen and flow into a habitual and brisk scroll through his Instagram and Twitter feeds before getting dressed and ready for the day. He beelines out the door and swoops up a Mocha Tesora from Philz on his way to the office.

At his desk, Adobe InDesign displays on the left monitor, Buzzfeed.com on the right. Hours pass.

After ensuring he’s the last to leave his workspace, he eats at the new fusion restaurant “just around the corner”, and then goes home, writing a ironic Yelp review in the hopes of attaining ‘Elite’ status before going to sleep and starting this cycle all over again the next day.

Devin’s daily routine isn’t that different from many other millennials throughout urban metropolitan areas across the United States. For millennials like Devin, 15-hour workdays that start at seven in the morning and end at ten in the evening are not unheard of, along with stories of young workers who take periodic naps in one of their office’s designated napping spaces, or others who choose to eat leftover catered food from lunch for dinner instead of heading home and figuring out what to cook there. This phenomenon demonstrates just how commonplace a blurred work-life balance can be.

WHAT IS WORK-LIFE BALANCE? Work-life balance is defined as a sense of satisfaction between how one spends their time at work and how they fill time in their private life. The concept of what work-life balance is has continued to change parallel with the evolutions of society’s views, values, and habits. Even just a few decades ago, it was seen as a strict eight-tofive in the day, dealing with meetings and phone calls, general workplace hierarchies, but being able to come home afterward to family bonding and exploration of other interests. Today, worklife balance has come to entail holisticallycultivating workplace environments and cultures to add a sense of life at work through flexible working styles, such as connecting to work remotely via email, or open office floor plans and engaging workspaces.

These new working styles and benefits blur the line between work and play, or work and nonwork life, thus probing questions about workplace burnout. Where does work end and non-work life begin? Along with the stressors of a modern work environment, millennials have to adapt to mixed generation environments that have been bombarded by the media with negative stereotypes.

MILLENNIAL STEREOTYPES: A MISINTERPRETATION

T

he topic of millennials in the work force pops up in weekly headlines, laying claim to millennial generalizations and how their generation compares to others. Generally speaking, millennials tend to be negatively stereotyped, as controversial news sells well. While these stereotypes seem pervasively negative, they may actually provide insight as to why society simply misunderstands and misperceives the ‘working millennial’, like Devin.

Two of the most common stereotypes claim that “millennials are narcissistic” and that “millennials are lazy”. Regardless of how these stereotypes surrounding this generation arose, studies that probe into these stereotypes have shown that millennials, as a labor force, might just be severely misunderstood. “ M I L L E N N I A L S A R E N A RC I S S I S T I C ” Millennials are narcissistic, but that doesn’t have to be viewed as a negative trait.

According to Stacy Campbell and Jean Twenge in a 2010 report, millennials do score higher than previous generations in individualistic traits such as narcissism, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In longitudinal studies, over 80% of millennials said that they are “important”,

The City is constantly moving and updating, such is life.

as compared to 12% of other generations in years before. This thinking could relate to how millennials view themselves in the workplace. As millennials have grown up in eras marked with economic downturn, symbolized by the Great Recession and growing college debts, they have adopted mentalities of working hard to not seem replaceable and not be in a position where they are without a job during another very possible era of economic downturn.

Millennials are also not the first generation accused of narcissism or individualism: Baby Boomers were the original Generation Me, showing higher individualistic traits than their parents. According to Stacy Campbell Millennials are narcissistic, but that doesn’t and Jean Twenge have to be viewed as a negative trait. in their 2008 article “Generational Differences in Psychological Traits”, generational shifts are a normal response to the upbringing of that new generation. Baby Boomers were brought up in a more affluent society that, while grounded in conservative and communal norms, were also exposed to new freedoms as young adults which resulted in their generation being more individualistic as they aged than their parents. This same sense of

LIFE 57

freedom and choice has continued to increase over the years leaving millennials, or “Generation Me Me Me”, with more options and in response scores higher in individualistic traits.

Another study done in 2010 by Campbell and Twenge reveals that millennials have more choice, more autonomy, and care less about social opinion. This leaves them with less assurance other than their own judgement to navigate life and if there is one constant in life, it is that the more you learn, the less you know. Having more choices isn’t always a good thing: data shows that having too many options can be overwhelming and correlates to an increase in stress levels.

Millennials make hundred of micro-choices each day just by going online and wading through their newsfeeds. Data from Media Insight Project notes that millennials begin their search for news on social sites such as Facebook, and then continue to research the topic further through trusted news sources. This report also shows that millennials, more than any other generation, read news that conflicts with their own beliefs thanks to social media networks and general access to diverse sources. This kind of access and research adds to uncertainty to the daily tasks of millennials, as opposed to being raised with one set of beliefs that would not be questioned in previous, less-connected generations.

We now have so much information at our fingertips and much of it conflicting and opinionated, which makes it exponentially more

58 LIFE

Can you blame millennials for feeling self-empowered, when they learn to navigate a conflicted world all on their own?

difficult to decisively know what decision is correct. What we really know is that there are a multitude of paths to get to the “right” result: can you blame millennials for feeling self-empowered, when they learn to navigate a conflicted world all on their own? If they didn’t learn how to assert themselves and how to function as individuals, we would see a lot more young adults wandering around with blank stares lost in existential crisis.

We can thank the world wide web and a generation brought up by different household structures for the millennial existential crisis and, on the positive side, their progressive independence. Assertiveness and the ability to make and complete tasks on one’s own is definitely a positive outcome of millennial narcissism.

“MILLENNIALS ARE S P E C I A L S N OW F L A K E S ”

S

o what are these special snowflakes I keep hearing about? This derogatory term is a poke at millennials who identify with their unique traits and crave the acknowledgement of their differences. The negative association is that identifying with one’s differences is asking for special treatment, but in the most diverse generation to date, it seems reasonable to recognize and respect people’s differences.

One amazing example of how workplaces

can recognize alternative characteristics of employees is the rise in autism awareness. Instead of shunning autistic workers who may be negatively affected by noisy and distracting modern open floor workspaces, managers are learning how to communicate, accept, and accommodate such differences. Just because someone does not fit in with the main body of society does not mean they cannot meaningfully contribute. Don’t forget, we have tried universal design as a global society, we are still reeling from its lacking solutions. This can be extended to a multitude of identities, we are a plural society and we are all inherently individuals who deserve to be recognized and respected. This is again an issue of more communal generations misunderstanding the newer generation where individualism need not be viewed negatively.

C

“MILLENNIALS ARE LAZY”

ontrary to popular belief, millennials aren’t lazy. Research has shown that millennials are more likely to prioritize having a work-life balance and also that millennials are more likely to become “work martyrs”, unwilling to use their allotted vacation time, and relate workplace goals and feelings as measurements of happiness.

In the same research compiled by Project: TimeOff, an American-based coalition dedicated to destigmatizing taking vacations and using their time as workers off, and GfK, they have found that 43% of millennials self-identify as “work martyrs” – workers who, for the basis of this survey, have adopted and internalized mantras such as, “No one else at my company can do the work while I’m away,” “I want to show complete dedication to my company and job,” “I don’t want others to think I am replaceable,” and “I feel guilty for using my paid time off.” In addition, in this same survey, 48% of millennials wanted their boss to positively view them as work martyrs, as compared to roughly 30% of Generation X and Baby Boomers, even though 86% of employers “believe it is a bad thing to be seen as a work martyr by their family.”

This could support further data of millennials being the generation least likely to avail of their time off, even though they, in comparison to other generations, earn the least number of vacation days.

In additional research compiled by Happify, an online-platform dedicated to increasing happiness within individuals, they found that four topics, when millennials were asked for “three things that happened today or yesterday that made [them] feel grateful,” they were grateful for were “positive interactions with colleagues,” “having a low-stress commute,” “getting a new job,” and “being satisfied with an existing job,” in noticeably higher rates than their counterparts in other generations. In regards to long-term goals and also in comparison to other generations,

millennials identified “finding a new job with better benefits, more pay, better hours, and more work life balance”, as well as “work that was more intrinsically rewarding” as priorities. Through these responses, millennials prove that they are actually thinking about work more often, devote a larger part of their life to their careers, and that the concept of work-life balance is further blurred.

Despite this information that actually debunks the stereotype of the “lazy millennial”, there may be a multitude of reasons that explain how this stereotype was able to become so commonplace: one of which is the adoption of technology.

Millennials have grown up in an era in which technology was able to become ingrained into every aspect of their lives, including their careers and professional lives. Because of developments in technology and societal attitudes in adopting and integrating technology into daily routine, millennials have accepted that work correspondence through e-mail and text messages are a norm while their employers have been using remotely connecting into the workplace as an enticing benefit. To other, older generations, the usage of these technologies could seem like laziness, especially in contrast to their traditional views and working styles at work. But to millennials, such is simply the way to adopt and satisfy their priority of work-life balance.

W

hile so much research has been conducted upon millennials within the labor force and how they fare in workplace efficiency in comparison to other generations, one question still remains untapped:

are millennials really happy?

With a look into how stereotypes of millennials being “narcissistic” and “lazy” have actually been misunderstood, it’s easy to see millennials in a negative light. Nevertheless, by pivoting and rethinking about how these stereotypes against millennials could prove as positive traits for this demographic, you can then see how millennials are simply understood and rightfully so; millennials have grown up in a different era, one heavily influenced by the integration of technology into daily life. In understanding millennials and their dynamic in the workplace, we are better able to understand the future of the American labor force in a holistic manner. As an age group that is rising in company hierarchies while entering the labor force en masse, millennial influence in company culture is coming quickly, if not already present. Sure, Devin might seem “lazy” for having his Adobe InDesign on the left and BuzzFeed on the right, and sure, maybe he could lay off being a foodie for a day, but maybe he’s onto something – like finding his own personal work-life balance – and that’s perfectly okay.

Sources: Twenge, Jean M., and Stacy M. Campbell.

“Generational Differences in Psychological Traits and Their Impact on the Workplace.”

Journal of Managerial Psychology 23.8 (2008): 862-77. Web. Twenge, Jean M. “A Review of the Empirical Evidence on Generational Differences in Work Attitudes.” Journal of Business and Psychology 25, no. 2 (2010): 201-10.

How Millennials Get News: Inside the Habits of America’s First Digital Generation. Issue brief. N.p.: Media Insight Project, n.d. Print.

LIFE 59