The Millennial Story - A Brief History of the Present

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom below the Vindhya mountains, there lived a young prince. He was the youngest child in the family. Naturally, he was pampered very much by his beloved guardians that he could never peer inside the well of his being and discover the gifts he was meant to share with the world.

He was tired of not knowing the answers. He was tired of the pretense put up by the authority claiming to know the answers.

Enough is enough.

One fine morning, he set out on an adventure to discover the world that lay beyond and within.

He crossed the forest and arrived at a fork in the road to find a witch awaiting him. He narrated her his tale and sought for help. The witch responded in her enigmatic nonchalance:

"Take the road to the right. You will find your journey long and easy. Take the road to the left. You will find your journey short and dangerous.

Forget not. A demon controls the short road.

If you choose to take the short road, befriend him, for your journey's sake.

Address him endearingly as your 'mama' (maternal uncle).

You have no other choice but to go across him by eliminating him. May you discover his secrets.

As much as destiny would have desired, the prince chose to walk on the short, but dangerous road. He reached the demon's castle to find a beautiful princess held captive.

Living under the demon's watchful scrutiny, he discovered that the demon's life is bound by magic to the life of a parrot kept in a secret chamber. Devising a way to enter the secret chamber, he killed the parrot with the help of the captive princess.

In one act, the Hero was born, killing the demon and becoming worthy of the love of the princess. The Hero finally returned to his kingdom as a complete man.

There are million ways to read a story. Who knows which way is right?

Why was the prince restless to fly by his own wings? What does the killing of the parrot symbolize in this odyssey of self-discovery? Who is the princess waiting for her prince?

What does it mean to live the Millennial Story?

Truth be told, I've never been comfortable with the "Millennial" label, strutting along like a pampered child gathering all the unwanted attention in a busy supermarket. When all the formative life energies of my early adulthood were spent running away from labels, how on earth do I take this label smacking a sense of mythic entitlement at the turn of the millennium seriously ?

It feels deeply ironic when Deloitte's Annual Millennial Survey lists the following criterion to be included as a participant:

1) The participant must be born after 1982.

2) The participant should have a college or university degree.

3) The participant is employed full-time; and works predominantly in large, private-sector organizations.

Now, where do I begin?

1) Am I a Millennial because I was born in the year 1985? Knowing my age to find out who I am seems as absurd as knowing my pulse rate to find out what excites me at the bottom of my heart.

2) Am I a Millennial because I have a college degree? Sure, as you can see, I've donned that funny looking hat - in Peter Thiel's memorable words, a "dunce cap in disguise"- and a colonial relic of a gown which made me look like a student from Hogwarts.

With a velvety magical scroll serving as a proof, I remember that day narrating to myself and the world a fantasy story that I have completed my Education. The world may be hoodwinked into believing every word of my story. But do I believe in it?

3) Am I a Millennial because I work full-time in a large, private-sector, organization? Sure, I have signed a contract with a large organization which spells the same. But does it reveal anything about my relationship with work? Is my relationship with Work inextricably bound to an organization? Or can it exist in a plane agnostic to an entity called organization? What happens when the future of work is no longer a noun, but a verb?

Of course, I get the point that the label "Millennial" simply describes a generational cohort with broad strokes painted to portray an entire generation with million possible faces and million possible voices.

Which of these strokes come close to resemble (and not necessarily describe) who I am and who I am not?

What does it mean to be me?

In every breath I take, I enact different roles, staging my identity to preserve an idea called "Me", which slowly embodied over time to define and protect myself.

"A person’s identity is,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated over the genes of the soul, “

"like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound."

Is it possible to draw the palimpsest pattern from outside and observe the sound of the drum? How would the contours look like? Will I be able to sketch those vibrant hues and more importantly not so vibrant ones I've been refusing to see?

As you can see, this is a personal project for self-reflection, but I hope some of my readers will find value in it for themselves.

The Greek Philosopher Heraclitus once said,

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

Is there any other generation other than the Millennials who are deeply intimate with the kernel of truth trapped inside this quote?

Every day as I wake up to work in the networked world, I find myself living in a number of consensual realities across multiple worlds, or, as I've visualized in my stunted 2-D world of imagination, exploding concentric circles of identity that goes round all the time everywhere.

Before we explore the game we, the restless millennials, play inside these circles, let me outline some basics about this playground, as I perceive it.

First things first. The contents of these marker categories have been deliberately left blank because honestly, they don't really matter. So do the plethora of markers I've listed above. Some of them may mean nothing to you, and some may mean everything, depending on which side of the Earth you identify yourself with.

If there is one marker whose contents could influence how I situate myself and play this game, it has to be the bottom-most Work-In-Progress Self driven by deep presuppositions and beliefs determining the rules I set inside my inner, mental game.

Remember this.

Every time I trawl through a circle, its contents are not necessarily filled by the context I was born in. They are filled by the moving stories I've deeply empathized with, by the diverse experiences of the world which penetrated the pores of my skin and opened up possibilities to grow beyond my boundaries.

So much about the playground. What do I have handy to play in this merry-go-round game of navigating through exploding cultural landscapes?

I have a community and an idea of culture - with its own set of beliefs and rituals, to identify and share in every concentric circle of the network. Whichever concentric circle I choose to locate and play in a particular moment, I call it my home.

As my friend Kenneth would say, Where I go is who I am.

How did I come to play this game?

What has been my journey so far?

Born in a context enveloping not more than five concentric circles from the bottom, I grew up following the parroted middle-class life script, like everyone else in the nineties, heavily influenced by what was allowed inside the circle and what wasn't.

What was allowed became sacred, and what wasn't became profane. And back in those days, I was conditioned to respect sacred by abhorring profane. It took me several years of circuitous unlearning to discover true meaning of profundity through non-judgmental embrace of profanity.

What is more fascinating in the old game of "Revere-the-sacred-Kill-the-profane" is that when a particular circle feels threatened, the threat and the fear of the Other trickles top-down, all the way to the bottom.

When my nationalist identity is threatened, the fear trickles down all the way to my religion, my friends and family, and eventually, my self. As we speak, the pedagogy of the nationalist politics circa 2016 has reinvigorated and redistributed this old, dangerous game everywhere. India. Europe. America. Israel. Wherever you look, this is the hottest game being played in politics right now.

I think I am going slightly ahead of my story. Hold on with that thought. We will explore in greater detail in a moment.

To come back to my story, although the span of my concentric circles gradually expanded after India's tryst with LPG - Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization, six years after I was born in 1991, it took the tools invented by the "Boomer generation"- The Internet- and my "Millennial" generation - Social Media - to slowly liberate me from the polarizing Inside-Outside spell of influence wielded by the concentric circles.

The most vivid memory I have of those times, as I look back, is the powerful afterglow feeling from reading Tom Friedman's rah-rah paean to Globalization, The World is Flat, in 2005, just a year or two before I discovered blogging.

Today, I look down upon that book, with a shoddy pivotal metaphor that did more harm to the world than good. But, back then, in my less-informed view of the world, I naively believed in its euphoric narrative that the journey marking the end of history, of massive social and cultural change, is upon us.

Like many others, I sincerely believed that the "flattening" forces of globalization, driven by the liberalizing forces of technology would transform the world.

And guess what?

That old story of us creating a perfectly rational society through science, globalization and technology has been officially pronounced dead in 2016.

That old game we discovered at the turn of the millennium, in which we thought humans would evolve by a powerful liberating, techno-global, centrifugal pattern of forces (depicted by the blue arrow in my diagram above) from the bottom-most circle to the top has now finally confronted its shadow image: de-globalizing, nationalist, ecocidal, centripetal pattern of forces operating from the apex to the bottom (depicted by the red arrow in my diagram above).

Brexit. Trump. Modi. Marine Le Pen. Five Star Movement. Pro-Jallikattu Protests. What unites these diverse phenomena happening across the world is the centripetal pattern of political forces sweeping all over to upend the global world order as we know it.

If you pay attention to the retrograde nationalist, political visions uniting them, viz.,

a) Take Back Control - Brexit;

b) Make America Great Again - Trump;

c)Ram Rajya (invoking the mythical Hindu Lord Ram in a 21st century modern, political context)- Modi;

d)"On est chez nous"(We are in our land) - Marine Le Pen;

e) One is worth one - Five Star Movement;

f) "Naan Tamizhan da"(I am a Tamilian) - Pro-Jallikkattu Protests;

you cannot but miss the trajectory of centripetal, political counter-forces at play. As Yuval Noah Harari beautifully explains in this interview, when the story one lives on doesn't make sense any more, the gut reaction is to naturally go back in time to a certain moment in history when the world made sense.

Why is the centripetal pattern of forces ecocidal in nature? Because Climate Change is a pan-global problem in scale and dimension and the nationalist political forces are therefore naturally blind to it. No wonder Trump is in denial mode, because nationalist solution for climate change doesn't exist in anyone's scheme of things.

In case you are finding it difficult with the forces metaphor I have used, here is an easy, illustration to visualize things.

Grappling with the rise of this centripetal counter-reactionary pattern of forces has been a painful one for many millennials, including me, because it ruthlessly invalidated many pet theories we held in our early adulthood.

Harvard Business historian, Geoffrey G. Jones expressed this sentiment in a recent interview, when he said

"I think that the millennials—or the older millennials—are rather lost at the moment. They are lost in the sense that they were born into an age when globalization was ongoing and a good thing. Diversity was ongoing and a good thing and they have an entered an age where this appears to be falling apart. "

Thankfully, this transition has been less painful for me, because my life underwent an unscripted, radical change- or, call it self-disruption, if you will, thanks to my violent encounter with these centripetal forces, which tore me apart and blew to smithereens every thing I once held dear.

This is how it happened.

It was 2011. I was in the verge of completing my MBA education - my Level 0 introduction to neo liberal economics, when I signed up for an experiential, "Wake-up-to-the-Matrix" course (in hindsight, of course) on Science, Technology and Ecology taught by an organic farmer. (I wrote a note of gratitude to that organic farmer here) Little did I know then that my world would turn upside down.

I underwent a brutally painful period of existential crisis, appalled by my own discovery that my teenage wet dreams of a globalized techno-future in which the world would be my oyster, freed from hoary institutions of the past, were nothing but childish, fantasies borrowed from techno-utopians, out of touch with reality.

Can anything be more ironic than being deceived by hallucinated visions of avowed techno-rationalists dreaming of algorithms outliving the self?

My journey of recovery took me to many places. I deepened my Yoga practice; went all Walden with 10-day Vipassana meditation sessions and worked a lot with my hands in organic farms to connect with my own self and bring back my semblance of sanity to my world which went astray.

I slowly began to appreciate the deep yin-yang forces at play, where the outward-oriented, centrifugal forces of technology operating at a planetary scale were balanced by inward-oriented, centripetal forces of ecology, operating at human scale.

Old, worn-out cliches such as, "Think Global, Act Local" suddenly acquired a new meaning, as I began to focus on bringing a synergy between my centrifugal work involving technology, platforms and networks and centripetal work involving restoring ecologies, natural learning and handicrafts.

And mind you, it is extremely difficult to work in harmony with these two mutually opposing forces. The former requires grokking algorithms, models and analysis through indirect perception, while the latter requires deep observation, meta-cognitive learning and honing skills of intuition through direct perception.

And if that weren't enough, you are bound to be in perpetual conflict with hard questions of what can scale and what cannot.

Gregory Bateson, in one of his books, argued that the history of our time can be perceived as a history of malfunctioning relationships.

The political instability we are witnessing today is a direct outcome of this dysfunctional relationship in which the centrifugal forces of globalization screwed up our only habitat called Planet Earth and left out millions of people with massive income inequality in our mad, unsustainable race to generate infinite wealth in a finite planet.

With the upcoming rise of automation and Artificial Intelligence, we can sadly be rest assured that things are only going to get further worse.

If you are a Millennial like me, you should be nervous and excited about this. We have solid work cut out for our sustainable futures.

Few months back, a very close friend of mine told me in an intense-but-exhilarating moment of intimacy that if somebody can dream of bringing a new child to our planet in such times, he has to be an optimist.

I choose to be an optimist. What do you choose to be?

What can Millennials do to navigate these uncertain futures which await them? What does Purpose really mean in these scheme of things?

I will address these questions in my upcoming post.

I appreciate you patiently taking time to read this. I would love to hear from you, Millennials and other wise.

Since the new LinkedIn UI doesn't help me see who shared my articles, it would be great if you could tag me when you are sharing this article. That would help me join and learn from the dialogue you are facilitating based on this article.

Line Break Image Credits: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Notes (his recent one about saving the planet with Facebook)

Centrifugal/Centripetal visualization credits: Powermasters.com