Cracking the Millennials' Code

Everything you need to know about how Millennials think and act can be found in assessing LeBron James' career moves.

Just more than five years ago, LeBron James sat in a chair in the gymnasium of the Greenwich Boys and Girls Club and announced to the world he was joining the Heat, spurning his hometown Cavaliers for an opportunity to play alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach.

The next day, the hot takes flowed like magma. Elder sportswriters labeled LeBron a quitter. They questioned his commitment to greatness. He took the “easy way out.” He’d never be Michael Jordan now.

“James does not have the heart of a champion,” wrote Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg.

And the fury in the sports press went downhill from there. There was similar "outrage over Kevin Durant’s jump to rival Golden State last summer."

The article's writer, Daniel Popper, says that the players' decisions make little sense unless they are evaluated from the POV that LeBron and Durant are both Millennials. Within the general worldview of that generation, they make perfect sense.

I went looking for an objective view on this phenomenon, and I discovered Anna Liotta, a generational expert, keynote speaker and author of “Unlocking Generational Codes.”

Liotta — who earned her Masters in communication, psychology and sociology — ... comprehends the Millennial athlete as well as any human on Earth, and her explanation was direct and engrossing.

It's a matter of understanding the way that different generations comprehend the world and how to act and react within it.

There are six generations that currently make up the world’s population of 7.4 billion people.

The exact birth-date bounds for those generations vary slightly depending on the source, but using the Strauss-Howe generational theory, developed by historians and authors Williams Strauss and Neil Howe, the generations are defined as such:

GI Generation (born between 1901 and 1924)

Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1942)

Baby Boom Generation (born between 1943 and 1960)

Generation X (born between 1961 and 1981)

Millennial Generation (born between 1982 and 2004)

Homeland Generation, also known as the Global Generation (born 2005-present)

Each of these generations approaches various aspects of life in different ways. But the key point is that individuals within the same generation tend to have very similar worldviews, and therefore opinions, a result of growing up in a shared societal climate and enduring common formative experiences.

But, "The gap in worldview between Millennials and the rest of the generations is bigger than any gap in modern history, according to Liotta," and the reason is the megaphone called social media. Read the whole article, but here is a bullet-point summary of what Liotta calls the "Millennial code:"

• They are "are loyal to themselves, not to [an] organization," and so do not derive their self-understanding and identity from their employer, whether a pro athletic team or a corporation. They consider mobility between jobs and social organizations to be normal -- because they do not see themselves as part of a company or a group, but almost the opposite.
   
• Millennials did not grow up in times of want. For their parents, "the focus became about [giving them] an extraordinary childhood. Everything was about making the Millennial children feel safe and seen and heard in the world."

“You’ve been told your whole life you’re the rising star,” says Becky Ahlgren Bedics, the Director of Leadership Development for Collegiate Sports at the Janssen Sports Leadership Center. “You’ve been told your whole life you’re wonderful. You get a trophy and a medal and a certificate for everything.”

• Millennials think that what they do should always make them happy. Life should be fun, in other words. 

Finally, Millennials insist that they are individually unique because “They see themselves as the brand,” according to Liotta.

“But is there some individual factor at play?” I asked, exasperated. “Each person is different, right? Individuality." ...

“The question you’re asking is a very Millennial question, and this is why,” she said. “Because Millennials, at their DNA generational core, believe ‘I’m unique. I’m an individual.’ And so I promise you in almost every audience (I speak to), there will be somebody that stands up and goes, ‘But I’m unique. I’m not like everybody else.’ But by that fact that you’re saying that, it actually demonstrates the Millennial code.”

I paused, bewildered. In trying to learn more about the motivations driving Millennial athletes, I had conveyed my own generational code without even knowing it.

Like I said, read the whole thing. Then these two essays, which will help you understand a lot more about Millennials, including why the riots since election day.

The ruins of the Meathead Generation

The empty abyss of emotions and feelings: Ignorance is power for rule makers

Update: Want to know why critics of Millennials refer to them often as "snowflakes?" Well, post-Trump election,

•  The University of Michigan offered its traumatized students coloring books and Play-Doh to calm them. (Are its students in college or kindergarten?)
•  The University of Kansas reminded its stressed-out kids that therapy dogs, a regular campus feature, were available.
•  Cornell University, an Ivy League school, held a campus-wide “cry-in,” with officials handing out tissues and hot chocolate.
•  Tufts University offered its devastated students arts and crafts sessions. (OK, not kindergarten — more like summer camp.)
•  At campuses from elite Yale to Connecticut to Iowa and beyond, professors canceled classes and/or exams — either because students asked or because instructors were too distraught to teach.

Sadly, these events are real.

And that was at a law school, mind. More here. And this:

Once upon a time, we thought universities were supposed to produce adults, but now they produce children – weaponized children accustomed to getting their way with campus protests. Tom Knighton at PJ Media chronicled some of the worst idiocies of the week: A Yale professor allowed students to skip their midterm exams to deal with election grief. The University of Kansas trotted out therapy dogs. Cornell held a cry-in. The University of Michigan gave the students Play-Doh and coloring books to work out their Trump grief.

These children emerge into the adult world thinking speech codes, trigger words, and safe spaces still count for something. 

All of this is to illustrate another frequent observation made of so many of the Millennial generation: they are frozen at the emotional level of a child. They demand "safe spaces" where they will be unchallenged by and protected from uncomfortable ideas, even at a university.

This is so pervasive across campuses now that earlier this term the dean of students of the University of Chicago, one of the most respected schools in the country, actually felt compelled to inform students,

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

Yes, this letter's expression is now considered a radical thing on many college campuses of America.