whY? Because marketers say so!

Marketers continue to try to figure out how to get each generation to buy their clients' stuff. In doing so, they label each generation in a way that helps them direct their marketing efforts. For the students in high school today, some marketers call them Generation Y (as in the excerpt below from adage.com),

GENERATION Y
BORN BETWEEN 1985 AND PRESENT
Anyone born from 1985 to the present falls into Generation Y. More than 90 million strong, they've surpassed boomers in size. They are consuming at 500% of the rate of their boomer parents in adjusted dollars, age for age, when you take into account their unprecedented influence on family purchases. Generation Y is the first U.S. generation that routinely has had brand-new cars in high-school parking lots. One-carat diamond engagement rings are the norm. Apparel sales will spike as Generation Y seeks mates. Wal-Mart will have difficulty serving them because its retail model cannot bring fashion to market fast enough to satisfy this fickle group. In addition, they will not buy products from retailers and manufacturers with dubious ecological or humanitarian records. They'll fall prey to no amount of greenwashing. Difficult to reach with marketing messages, their principal medium is cyberspace. Unlock the formula for efficient marketing to Generation Y, and you will print money. One anomaly: They love snail mail and anything with their name on it. Converse figured them out. Check out the shoe brand's site and its unique sales model.

but others call them the "millenials" and according to this 60 minutes report, today's teens and twenty-somethings can't handle criticism.
Does this describe your generation? Do you think you peers have not learned valuable lessons from failing and losing?

Mixed Income, mixed blessing

Here is a series of reports from Chicago Public Radio about the new mixed income housing on Chicago's south side.

They stand no more: high-rise public housing buildings that once pierced the cityscape have been demolished. So-called “mixed-income” communities are growing in their place. The largest and oldest of these communities is a place called Oakwood Shores on the South Side. Here low-income blacks have moved in next to middle class blacks. It’s all part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s billion-dollar plan to deconcentrate poverty. Other cities are eyeing the Chicago experiment because of the enormity of it. Thousands of people have been removed from CHA homes. The question is whether the new living situation has improved the lives of CHA residents.

If you listen/read the report(s) look for signs that the social environment shapes the residents. What are the factors that shape their life's chances?

What do you live for?

I read an article over a month ago that still has me thinking. It was by Ken Potts in the Daily Herald. In it he is addressing teen suicide, but he refers to an important psychologist named Rollo May who says that too often we talk about the reasons why someone would take their own life and instead we should be talking about why the rest of us don't.

May contended that our society is doing an increasingly poor job in imparting to our young people any sense of positive meaning to life. We more often stress quick and easy answers, short-term reward, conspicuous consumption, getting ahead at the expense of others, ends justifying means.

Whether these values get played out in our families, our jobs, television, politics or organized religion; whether they lead to drug abuse, white collar crime, or "whoever dies with the most toys wins," the message eventually gets across to our youth: this is what life is all about.

"If, indeed, these do reflect our reason for living, is it any wonder that some of us choose not to?"... We as a society, and as parents, must begin to teach our children the values that we truly believe give meaning to life. Of course, we must have discovered these for ourselves if we are to pass them on to others.

May certainly offered no simple solution to the tragedy of adolescent suicide. In fact, he predicted they will continue. Yet he did suggest that there is hope if we can begin to more clearly express to our youth that there are indeed reasons to live.

Young people are in such a bubble during their high school and college years. They don't really have a meaningful place in our society anymore. Years ago, a young person would be expected to help the family by earning income, helping around the farm or running the family store or business, but now young people work to earn their own spending money usually at a large corporate conglomerate (Old Navy-Gap-BR, etc...) There is less of an opportunity for them to feel as though they are a meaningful part of their community or family. That is one of the goals I have for our community service experience. I want to help students realize that there is necessary and meaningful work to be done, and they can do it. What do you think? Is there a meaningful gap in young people's lives? Does community service help to fill this gap in meaning in young people's lives? And if it is not related to community service, what do you live for? Where is the meaning in your life?