Millennial Madness – The Students Who Never Graduated

Millennials are a heavily scrutinised generation, coming in for a lot of criticism on the one hand and also receiving a lot of praise for generally demonstrating enough boldness to try and challenge the system and change the status quo where it needs changing. Perhaps a big part of the reason why millennials are so heavily scrutinised is the fact that they tend to put themselves out there and open themselves up for all this scrutiny. I mean if you take a look at the biggest and most popular inventions coming out of the generation of millennials, the likes of Facebook come to mind, which is perhaps the one platform most responsible for millennials “putting themselves out there.”

This digital life which millennials so willingly love to live provides a big window into their lives, how they collectively think, what drives them and what they generally tend to believe in. If we go back to the Facebook example and zone-in on its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, this is perhaps the epitome of what a millennial is all about — someone who never graduated from their college studies because they essentially “found a better way than that which is suggested by ‘the system’“, dropped out and became extremely wealthy essentially doing what they love doing.

While not everybody who belongs to this Generation Y is going to follow a similar path of what they define to be success, it appears as if any flavour of that kind of life is more than enough.

If you think about it in more a general sense, the typical millennial just doesn’t see themselves slaving away at a cubicle or in an office for what is considered to be the standard corporate career spanning around 40-45 years. They want to travel more instead of having just one or two vacations every so often, and they just want to have more time to spend on enjoying some of the things which make them truly happy.

So in a sense, millennials never really graduated — they continue living a life which resembles what life was like during the college years. The only difference is that instead of attending academic classes (something which was done occasionally in the case of some students), these “students who never graduated” gravitate towards little gigs, short contracts and projects for their source of income. They then proceed to spend whatever little money they manage to make on making themselves happy instead of trying to mould a life which is dictated to by the establishment. That student bus pass has simply taken a different form — it has become a reduced plane or bus ticket as part of a group savings deal through sites like Groupon and the likes, while those nights spent crashing on a friend’s couch for a bit have turned into crashing on a stranger’s couch through platforms such as CouchSurfing.

Whether the establishment agrees with it or not, millennials seem to be making this never-graduating thing work out just fine for them.