How Millennials Have an Opportunity to Change the World

It's the 1960s. The beginning of the baby boomer generation is coming to an end. Parents are done celebrating coming home from the WWII with endless amounts of sex and popping out babies. The sex was the easy part, then came actually having to raise them all.

In a world where most men were factory workers with little pay and most women were stay at home moms, you can imagine that money was tight for these blue collar working families. Then add anywhere from three to ten hungry mouths to feed, and financial pressure must have felt like a trying to squeeze a pimple that just won't pop.

So when baby boomers asked their parents for the latest toy, the extravagant dining the experience or the brand new car, I'm sure the response was "Money doesn't grow on trees!" or "What Do I look like, the Rockefeller?" In short, go earn it yourself!

Then during the baby boomer generation came college. College was the gateway out of the factories and into the offices. Trade in that blue collar for a white collar cause the money is going to pour in, but only if you were willing to work for it, because money still doesn't grow on trees and daddy ain't paying (ironically, money is made from paper, and paper comes from trees - just saying).

So baby boomers had to learn how to work hard to get what they want, and guess what? They resented the fact that they had to so work hard for money, and I'm guessing because it brought them zero satisfaction. With their new white collars and bigger sized wallets, baby boomers decided that they wanted a different life for their children. Their children would enjoy the new toys. Their children would eat at the extravagant restaurants. And their children would drive the new cars.

Now this obviously doesn't apply to everyone's story, but for the majority of the middle class it does.

When I was growing up, my dad told me tales about how he used to wake up at 4 am every morning to walk 4 hours to work. If he was lucky, a creepy truck driver would pick him up and take him a little closer to his destination. In the same breath he handed me a new car at the age of 16 and said "Congratulations you turned 16!" Everyone older than 16 turns 16 so not too big of an achievement, but hey I got a new car!

"A new car! No way! What kind of car? Oh, a Pontiac. I wanted something nicer." The lack of appreciation came from a lifetime of being handed things without ever having to put in the labor to earn it.

People complain about how lazy millennials are all of the time. And I can admit that I grew up to be one of the laziest humans of all time, so I definitely used to fit this stereotype. Even millennials who weren't raised in this kind of environment complain about how their generation just doesn't care.

But if you give a dog a treat every time it licks its own ass, it will lick its ass all day long. If you reward people for being lazy, they will become being lazy all day long.

Fast forward into the real world and you can obviously see this laziness in the millennial generation today. That's because when you are handed things your entire life, you adopt the belief that every thing should be handed to you with little to no hard work. When people believe they should be handed something for existing, they don't work hard for it. They would rather complain about not be handing it.

We live in a world of instant gratification. We send a text, we expect a reply instantly. We want a date, we swipe until we're matched. We post a picture online, we refresh until we're satisfied with how many likes we got - which we never become satisfied. When we want to buy something, instead of putting in the work to earn it, we buy everything on credit cards so we can have it now.

Millennials will never work hard for money, things, or outer achievements. If they do, it's only because they want to be famous, approved of, or well-liked. They want to post their fortune for the gram, smiling in the picture but frowning in front of the mirror.

So what will millennials work hard for? Self-worth.

Three years after college, I had gained eighty pounds, piled on an enormous amount of credit card debt, had one friend, and had zero self-confidence and self-esteem. Instead of getting outside my comfort zone to meet new people and putting in the work to better my life, I decided to sulk in loneliness and swipe on Tinder instead. Eventually, I became so sick and tired of being sick and tired, I decided to do something about it. In came hard work.

At the beginning of 2019, I started working out every day, changing my eating habits, getting outside my comfort zone to meet new people and working hard to earn my way to financial freedom. I have since lost sixty-five pounds, have friends all over the world, and have written a book about my journey.

What I discovered was that hard work isn't meant for us to earn a bunch of money, fame, status, or achievements. Hard work was meant for us to earn our self-worth.

People don't really tie self-worth to hard work. But in a world of anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and an excruciating amount of unnecessary emotional stress, what seems to be lacking in our generation is self-worth. And the correlation between laziness and a lack of self-worth isn't something that should not be ignored.

But the problem is no one has ever taught us how to work hard in the first place. Baby Boomers just assumed and expected us to know how to work hard without ever teaching us how. We all start off with blank canvases. We only know what we have been taught! Either that's through other people or our own experiences and self-study, but if we haven't been taught something then we don't know how to do it.

Life isn't about what people have or haven't been born with. Life's about what we have or haven't been taught. So let's not blame baby boomers for our shortcomings, because no one taught them that they had to teach their children hard work. Instead of waging war against baby boomers, let's be grateful that they worked hard to give us everything we wanted. Because their end goal was to show us love, not to unknowingly deprive us from the self-worth that hard works bring.

Working hard is a skill, and it's a skill everyone can learn.

If you do decide to work hard to earn your self-worth, what you'll find is that there becomes a threshold. Eventually your sense of self-worth will begin to plateau. Being fulfilled means there is nothing left to fill. So then you won't work hard to get more self-worth, you'll work hard to sustain the self-worth you already have.

When people work hard for money and outer achievements, they can never get enough of it. There's alway more to go out and get. This leaves them with the constant feeling of being unsatisfied and unfulfilled. It causes people to become greedy with what they do have and to be jealous for what they don't have. They'll have an endless amount of titles, degrees, and things all while feeling empty inside.

But when people work hard for self-worth, they don't need anything else and yet they'll have everything. They'll have almost the exact same amount of titles, degrees, and things because they become more opportunities to sustain our feeling of being fulfilled in our earning of self-worth.

We won't need to hoard or be jealous of anything or anyone. We'll give generously and freely, and encourage others to do the same. This whole shift in which our generation has the opportunity to spearhead can change the world as we know it. Because if enough people feel worthy and fulfilled, the need to feel better than everyone else will cease to exist.

We'll start to do things not out of fear of someone being better than us, but for love of who we are.

If you decide to start earning your self-worth, you'll become amazed at how different your life has changed. When you are able to look around your house and say "I earned that, and I earned that, and I worked hard for that" instead of saying "I bought that on a credit card, and my parents handed me that", you'll realize that your self-worth was never meant to be handed to you. You were meant to earn it.

Whether it's our wealth, health, or relationships, everything worth truly having in life was meant to be earned through patience and effort, time and trying our best. Because if it comes overnight, what does that mean? Do we fully appreciate that? It's never the goal that matters, it's who we become in achieving that goal. Otherwise, we'll continue the same poor habits that got us here in the first place.

If you want to develop the skill of working hard, go check out my other article titled "How to Learn to Work Hard".

Go earn that self-worth my friends. You''ll be so happy you did.