by The Sunday New York Times had a piece on Millennial Searchers that sought to dispel the myth that they are lazy, selfish, narcissistic, etc. Remember when their predecessors, the Xers, were “slackers?” Seems like the generation “in power” has issues with those coming up behind them.
The authors suggest tough economic times have forced them to rethink success along the lines of it not being about material prosperity. ConsumerShift readers might have a different take on that. We’d say that the long-term trend to postmodern values has been leading people in that direction for decades, and that the Great Recession has reinforced and perhaps “sped up” the process. The Great Recession is not the root cause. If it is, we should see a return to materialism as the economy recovers.
The authors make a nice distinction between seeking “happiness” and “meaning.” One could say that conventional ideas about happiness are morphing into what they are calling meaning — right on! The correlation with our thinking on values gets real interesting here. They discuss how the Millennials are searching for meaning. As you see in the ConsumerShift summary graphic, postmodern values are summed as “what’s it all mean” – essentially the search for meaning. The piece also observes that “they report being less focused on financial success than they are on making a difference (italics added).” In the graphic, below, I sum up Integral values as “make a difference.”
The postmodern and integral orientations are somewhat mixed together in the piece. I would suggest that the postmodern phase is more along the lines of the active search for meaning and that the integral phase is when the search is concluded along the lines of making a difference providing the meaning. The authors note the inner and outer focus – the pattern identified as the “spiral” in Spiral Dynamics, but it’s not clear if they see that as part of an going back-and-forth over time or as a more static shift. In sum, some affirmation that researchers coming at questions involving values are finding what we’d expect they find, but interpreting those findings differently. Andy Hines.
[…] of the major themes of my work as a futurist has been tracking the emerging shift to postmodern and integral values. A key manifestation of that shift is growing concern about wellness, which I’ll define simply as […]