Skip to main content

The Proverbial Canary

There won't be a Toys R Us because millennials are not having babies. I personally know of several members of that generation who are choosing not to take off as adults. At my place of work we did a millennial trend study that confirmed much of what we casually observe of this generation. They either live with their parents or share a place with an assortment of roommates because those are cheaper options. Neither is conducive to family building or long term relationships. The partners come and go along with the changing patchwork of gigs that form their income stream. There is no desire to own anything of substantial value and to that end not much desire for professional stability or advancement. 

If there are only three bills to pay each month and that too shared with five other people there is really no need to work too hard. If this becomes the pre-dominant lifestyle of choice for young people going forward, the implications extend well beyond toy stores. The desire to own tangible, material things coupled with that to form a family made the whole job driven economy possible. If both those needs are gone, people have very little to lose and a great deal of flexibility. There are obviously great positives in being free to take risk and afford change. But there are serious downsides. One gig can replace the other, roommates can be swapped, romantic interests can stay short and varied as nothing needs to happen next. 

The only limiting factor today is that the available jobs are mostly created by older generations and to that extent they have some control over this very nebulous millennial workforce and the nature of economic output created. In a few years, it will become their turn to define what work should be and how it should be performed. In this list of top twenty companies started by millennials there is not a single core engineering or medical research business for example. The entire focus of these enterprises is gathering and sharing content, goods or services. None address any real human need. The world would not miss even a single one of these companies if they ceased to exist today. But if electricity had not been invented, the car and airplane not been built in its time, we would have been a very different civilization and planet than we are today. The news of millennials in engineering and manufacturing is nowhere close to the headlines and that is reason for concern. 

It seems that we should mourn for a lot more than the demise of Toys R Us. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...