Millennials Sell Themselves

CBS 60 Minutes: The Age Of The Millennials: They are young adults and have been coddled by their parents to the point of being ill prepared for a demanding workplace. Morley Safer reports on the generation called "Millennials."

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4126233n#ixzz1eGW4lYaB

Editor's note:  What follows this 60 Minutes clip is a very interesting piece written by Bill Deresiewicz. This essay attempts to examine the soul of current 18 to 25-year-old's who grew up being bombarded by media images. Our media saturated culture - where everyone manages their own brand - has played a major role in this group's view of the world.


NYT - Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement. So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit.  Call it Generation Sell. Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html