Guest Post: Millennials and the Meaning of Life

This is a guest post by Ruthie:

I work as a teaching assistant at a large Midwestern research university, where I also attend as a graduate student.

Last week, in a meeting with one of the professors for whom I work, the touchy topic of the Millennial Generation arose. The professor lamented the fact that the new generation of students seem entitled, self-important, and perpetually plugged in. Realizing that I’m 23, she quickly added: “Not you, of course.”

But she’s right—the new generation of 20-somethings, myself included, are beginning to see education as a right and not a privilege—and they have never known a world without instantaneous communication. I had my first cell phone at 15. I can hardly remember life before the Internet.

We are, some say, a generation adrift—devoid of purpose or meaning in a poststructuralist, postmodern world. We have been taught that culture is relative, that truth is subjective, that the self is a social construct.

The logical conclusion of these base assumptions, paired with an ever-evolving spiderweb of technology, has led our generation to be more image-conscious than any generation that came before. The very hearts of our identities are shaped by people’s perceptions of us—we are self-indulgent, cripplingly open about our private lives, even narcissistic.

In a lab section that I lead on Fridays, several of my students were required to take the VALS test as part of a marketing assignment. We discussed their lifestyle categories, and I asked them if any of them had ever taken the MBTI assessment. To my surprise, many of them had, and their responses and comments about their categorization within the two tests were among the most enthusiastic and interesting I’d seen all semester.

This, I think, is because we are a generation that prides itself on individuality—we see it as the highest good, the most sought-after goal. The students in my lab section are like the rest of us—dying to know themselves at some true, essential level, apart from social constructs and other people’s perceptions. Looking for meaning within the ephemeral and the subjective.

And so the meaning of life for the Millennial generation is expression—the only way to validate a fleeting existence limited by perception.

We are experiencers and consumers, learning to craft our public images via Myspace and Facebook, seeking to better market ourselves to universities and prospective employers. But in the context of a brave new 21st-century society, I think most of us realize that neither consumption nor personal experience can give us ultimate, transcendent meaning. Our lives, both public and private, are particular to us, and one day both they (and we) will be gone.

I believe this is what we’re afraid of. We, who have spent our lives immersed in instantaneous technology since infanthood, are afraid of fading away unnoticed. We are afraid that our tiny voices will be swept away in the mad torrent of this information age.

We are afraid of becoming obsolete.

And so expression—the validation of our existence by preserving it in some form—in pictures, Myspace and Facebook pages, blogs, journals, music and art—has become the highest good, the purest form of meaning.

I hope the older generations can forgive us our flightiness and our narcissism, our iPods and our text messages.

We, like every generation that came before, crave permanence, fulfillment and meaning—meaning that, for many of us, can only be attained through expression.