Millennial Generation ready to rise

Josh Tetrick
is a graduate of Cornell University and University of Michigan Law School.

Lost generation? Not so fast.

We are “bright, eager, and unwanted,” according to a recent Business Week cover story about the record-high unemployment rate and career anxiety among our generation.

Our generation is inheriting a damaged future and a series of problems that are of crisis proportions. We’re coming of age in a world where global-warming pollution is dumped by the 70-million-ton truckload into the sewer, formerly known as our atmosphere, every day; where billions of people live on less than $2.50 a day; where billions of animals suffer from cruel and inhumane treatment inside factory farm walls. And now — a job crisis of our very own.

As the aforementioned Business Week article says, “For people just starting their careers, the damage may be deep and long-lasting, potentially creating a kind of ‘lost generation.’”

If you’re reading this, that likely means you.

We’ve seen how the potent mix of apathy and anger leads to neither effective solutions nor mental comfort. While the unemployment rate (18 percent) among this generation is the highest since World War II, our capacity to embrace the big, selfless and profitable career paths of tomorrow has never been higher. We have no choice other than to innovate our way out of this social, ecological and economic mess.

Born between 1982 and 2001, the Millennial Generation includes almost 100 million young people from 8  to 28 years of age — the biggest, most diverse and best educated age group in the history of the nation. During 2007 and 2008, a major research study into the values and attitudes of our generation was conducted. Its conclusion? Older generations see needs as opportunities to volunteer; we see needs as opportunities to emotionally and financially thrive. We have a commitment to common good over individual gain, an ethos that reaches across traditional divisions such as race, ideology and partisanship. We’re radically pragmatic. We’re ecologically intelligent and socially tolerant.

And more than any generation before us, we get this paradox: selflessness is profitable.

Millennials refuse to be constrained by past conventions.

This is manifested in the thousands of young people who are creating the tools, laws, vaccines, buildings, codes, fashion and food that will allow the planet to grow stronger while empowering those living in poverty.

Despite our current economic frustration, Millennials understand that yesterday’s jobs are ignorant to the reality-bending demands of zero-emission cars and zero-waste shopping malls and zero-poverty communities.

While the press (and our parents) lament the present, we’ve taken a moment to remember (and live) a story from the past, that of Thomas Edison.

He once said, “I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”

Billions of dollars and one hundred years later, Edison’s answer captures brilliantly how the “lost generation” is embracing the future in the vice grip of this economic downturn. We’re not only making Edison proud — we’re making him envious.

We — the Millennials — are not lost. We’ve only just arrived.