'Millennialisms'
A word I invented & embracing the dynamism of millennial life.
Millennialisms (noun): the unique set of beliefs, values, behaviors, and cultural markers characteristic of the multi-hyphenate millennial generation, particularly in their approach to life, work, wellbeing, community and social interactions.
I made a new word!
Millennialisms (noun): The art of turning selfies and avocado toast into a viable Instagram-worthy lifestyle.
Millennialisms (noun): The practice of balancing a yoga mat, a reusable coffee cup, and crippling existential dread, while posting about self-love and self-care.
Millennialisms (noun): The mystical ability to make every major life decision based on whether or not it will spark joy, as decreed by Queen Marie Kondo.
Millennialisms (noun): The spiritual journey of finding oneself through a combination of travel, gig economy remote jobs, and binge-watching Netflix documentaries.
Millennialisms (noun): The perpetual quest to include new superfoods into morning smoothies that promise eternal youth and a better mood, despite never using up chia seeds from 2019.
This is the exact prompt I used on Dall-E: “A highly trendy good looking fit Asian influencer, who's taking a selfie, with their reusable coffee cup with an iced cappucino matcha latte and avocado toast in a trendy cafe with lots of indoor plants, in a trendy outfit, with an eco friendly yoga mat, with a facial expression that expresses a spark of joy with a radiant spark glowing behind her, with a bag of superfood next to her.”
Side note: it missed the yoga mat, but WOW, it’s both equally frightening and impressive that OpenAI’s Dall-E is able to create such a specific image. I can tell you from first hand experience that it wouldn’t have been able to create this image, with such accuracy, just three months ago.
All the hours of writing, pondering, and wondering is really about trying to make sense of this world through the millennial’s lens—reusable cups, remote working, and all. But, it’s also about navigating millennial nuances from the vantage of a Southeast Asian third culture kid.
Basically trying to adult, while also still trying to figure out who I am, what my why and life’s purpose is and why an iced cappuccino matcha latte and avocado sourdough toasts are the millennial’s splurge.
"We've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months." — Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
The world is changing at a pace we’ve never seen before, so shouldn’t the ways we live—lifestyles, communities, and health habits adapt to the changing landscapes too?
But, our biology is far behind, so it’s really up to us millennial’s to figure things out; hopefully before artificial general intelligence (AGI) takes over.
Millennials are the in-between generation.
We millennials hold the unique honor of remembering life before smartphones and social media, while also being the guinea pigs for the Internet’s rapid takeover. We're the generation that dabbled in amateur coding on MySpace, flirted with oversharing on Friendster, and ultimately unknowingly surrendered all our intimate secrets to Facebook and its ever-growing empire of data miners.
We’ve seen it all—going from VHS tapes to laser discs, CDs, floppy discs, USB sticks, and the cloud, all within a quarter of our lifetimes. We’ve been through more tech evolutions than a Pokémon.
But despite our digital upbringing, we still know what it means to truly play. We remember swinging on monkey bars, scraping our knees at the playground, zooming on non-electronic razor scooters and running, jumping, sweating, skipping, and climbing everything in sight. Our childhoods were a blend of digital introductions and good old-fashioned outdoor playtime.
But, the reality of our modern world is...
Many of us now live in sprawling cities, surrounded by concrete jungles. Some, like myself, don’t know what a life outside of a city is like.
We’re no longer confined to the small circles of our villages or forced to socialise and marry within our tribes. With a few swipes on our handheld smartphones, we can access the world’s information and meet someone on another continent, in under a minute, from the comforts of our living room.
We can create our own communities, both offline and online. We can juggle virtual and real lives, seamlessly transitioning from created avatars and crafted social media personas to intimate in person moments with our close circle of loved ones and chosen companions.
This is the exact prompt I used on Dall-E: “A trendy fit modern good looking Asian millennial solopreneur sitting on a desk running an online influencer merchandise empire, working remotely, living as a digital nomad, in a trendy creative coworking space with a gym and plants for designer and creative types drinking his iced matcha cappuccino latte, with a facial expression that expresses a spark of joy with a radiant spark glowing behind him, and a trendy travel backpack next to him.”
We can manage entrepreneurial empires alone. We can automate businesses for passive income. We can explore co-working settings, live in a different city each month, and take advantage of digital nomad visas across continents.
We can work from anywhere with an internet connection or a Starlink subscription. We have the freedom to decide how much we want to work and the luxury of choosing from infinite types of 'work'. We can work multiple jobs or we can climb the traditional corporate ladder with a budding side-hustle.
We don’t have to be stuck in one geographical place, unless we choose to be. We can create a chosen family through global relationships instead of feeling married to our immediate communities.
We can choose part-time cohabitation in shared spaces with childless couples and digital nomads alike. We can participate in collaborative, experimental communities both on-chain, off-chain, and in person. We can diversify our assets across different currencies and innovative divisions, including meme-coins, AI-coins, and other varieties not governed by a single entity.
Our world today is vastly different from the one our traditions, customs, and values originated from. The rapid changes and growing disparities between people—materially and knowledge-wise—are mind-blowing.
Even sharing the same lineage doesn’t guarantee anything anymore.
If living in the same city, growing up under one roof, and sharing the same genes can’t ensure that we’ll think alike, experience life similarly, or share the same worldview, can you even begin to imagine the diversity between me, you, and the next person on your morning commute?
The world is changing so much faster than our mammalian reptilian neocortical brain can process. Neuroplasticity helps, but the brain is like a non-judgmental friend who goes with the flow—the brain adapts to whatever it's exposed to, no questions asked.
So, our brains are frantically trying to keep up with all these changes while still trying to figure itself out and what the hell is going on in the world.
This is a millennialism!
That’s why, the only solution is to think for ourselves.
We need to slow down to define our values, independent of what everyone else is telling you. There’s no reason why we should abide by the rules of culture and tradition, if those values no longer makes any sense to us.
Those customs were invented in a different era by people who’s lived experience was drastically atypical from our current circumstances— a time where the world moved a lot slower, where change was less immediate and communities were a lot smaller.
Norms within a culture developed through limited intermingling of a small set of touch points, compared to the vast reaches and diversities offered through globalization, technology, and the internet.
Millennialsim is an attempt to accept and distill the ever-changing landscapes of our realities.
From a welcoming openness, the best place to sit in today’s world is to keep an open mind to the diversity presented to us at every given moment. The secret is out: there are no rules, aside from the manmade structures society has made you believe as fact.
Life is what we make of it. There’s no right or wrong way to live, reality is much more complex than the binaries of past generations. Human stories are much more dynamic.
With the convergence of a myriad of inputs these days, there’s no reason to contain ourselves within a small box. We are free to create the life we want to, so free yourself from all the rules! ;P
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