I have been looking over the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey. One interesting find is that the millennials more than any preceding generations make up the largest share of the US labor market which means that a growing number now occupy senior positions and could have an unpredictable impact on future generations.
The survey represents a broad brush stroke of the world’s millennial population which essentially says nothing seismic. It reminds me somewhat of the so-called "Millennial Whoop" that has dominated pop music for a few years. Don’t look for Beethoven here. The Whoop simply signals that pop music is in a state of transition—it's in an uncreative holding pattern at the moment. This is also where many millennials are today: an uncreative holding pattern.
This time reminds me of the pop music scene in the late 50s and early 60s that was also in a state of transition, just before the Beatles came onto the pop music scene along with other groups that were played on what then was called “underground radio” (always an FM station). This was the signal of a new creative period that was to last into the late 1970s.
Back to the millennial population.
There are profound cultural and political changes taking place in the US and the rest of the world. They have been to a certain extent sanitized and even ignored by the corporate media but they are profound, nevertheless, and can be detected if you know how and where to look. What is now taking place would make a Tom Clancy novel seem boring.
Many millennials are just waking up to their ideological conditioning by the multinational corporations—the high cabal—that represents a new comitern but one with a completely new jargon, but dangerous to the human spirit, nevertheless. In this world, each millennial is more like a node than an individual.
This node-being stands somewhere in-between the group (tribal or national) and the isolated individual. If the group pressures our node-being he or she usually caves in. Any resistance is felt psychologically and that is where it usually stays in which drugs often become an outlet for frustration and depression.
As odd as this sounds, this might be good for Buddhism, in general, offering the individual a way to transform their limbo like state into an active search for the self (i.e., who am I?) and the self’s place in the world among other dedicated seekers.
This is what, initially, Zen Buddhism did for me back in the mid 1960s. I was aware of the socialist ideological conformist push as well as the nationalist conformist push but I was also aware of the frailty of life and the need to answer a few, important existential questions which the Zen masters seemed to know from my reading of their words. This put me on a spiritual adventure which through the practice of Zen became an experiential journey. This journey was not without amazing rewards such that I could see what the Buddha was actually teaching and how it has been totally distorted and has become something it was never meant to be. This includes Zen as well. It is truly a case of the inability to see the forest for the trees. A few will see the forest for the trees turing away from the conditioned. They will look straight into the face of the unconditioned and be amazed.
Comments