If someone told you that "humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness" you’d obviously tell them to pipe down and buzz off back to the 1960s where they belong. But in his article for Fast Company, Josh Allan Dykstra may be on to something.
What’s got him thinking is that young people today – the so-called ‘Millennials’ or ‘Generation Y’ – are behaving rather strangely:
In fact, as another piece in the Atlantic demonstrates, it’s not just that young people aren’t buying cars anymore, they’re not even learning to drive – at least not in the numbers they used to do:
Josh Allan Dykstra comes to much the same conclusion:
Dykstra then goes on to elaborate his argument about the "death of ownership":
This is a somewhat questionable theory – after all, the idea that consumers buy things to use them, boast about them or show them off hardly represents an evolution in human consciousness, just the same old consumer culture translated to the digital age.
If young people are buying fewer things perhaps it’s because they can’t afford them. That shouldn't come as a surprise – they’ve been loaded down with debt, ill-prepared for work and had their minds nurtured by a series of electronic screens. In other words we’ve deprived them of agency and purpose, but provided them with an almost limitless supply of absorbing, often addictive, online diversions.
Granted, the Millennials are hardly the first generation in history to find themselves short of opportunity. However, they are the first to be deprived of that indispensable spur to action: boredom.