Page 12 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2021 (English)

Millennials: Force for Change in the Region?
The generation of less than 40 years called millennials will be the protagonists of the transformations that Latin America will face in the post-pandemic period. This is a group that will soon be the world’s first workforce and, according to analysts, will change the planet from the dominance of technology and humanitarian activism. But they are highly controversial: some consider them true heroes and others a lost generation. Even so, they have already begun to exercise power in the Region.
Although millennials, that hinge generation that was born between the 20th and 21st centuries, between the 1980s and the mid-1990s, is one of the groups with the greatest demographic weight and current capacity for influence, it is also one of the most controversial in history.
Today these people represent 26 percent of the world’s population, that is, around 1,8 billion, of which more than 80 million are in the United States and 50 million in Europe. As for Latin America, the percentage is even higher: 30 percent of the region’s population is millennial.
It is and soon will be America’s first workforce globally, and predictably its members have already begun to occupy positions of business and political power. In addition to all the above, it is the first generation of digital natives, who used the internet in each and every one of their daily activities.
It is a highly questioned group: for some they are destined to transform the West from the domain of technology and humanitarian activism, but for others they are a group of people condemned to become the new lost generation.
The well-known American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff are lapidary; they treat them without any indulgence in their recent essay “The Transformation of the Modern Mind”, edited by Deusto. For them, millennials are “hedonistic and passive in their private lives and violent and uncompromising in their actions in the public sphere.” Haidt affirms that: “They are the result of the overprotection of their parents” and that when that generation entered university from 2003, it brought with it their inability to deal as “adults with adult problems”. Millennials, according to Haidt and Lukianoff: “They don’t know how to argue constructively; they do not manage discrepancies well and demand unconditional respect for what they perceive as their own identity and personal vision of the world ”.
Hope is passed on to the next generation, that of the iGen, the true digital natives, who perhaps will be able, as Haidt and Lukianoff suggest, to make “fertile” use of technology and organize themselves politically to provide an effective response to their own problems and those of others.
As the journalist Caroline Beaton explained in an article in Forbes,
p12 Montt Latin American Magazine