Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of these Gen Y blogs. I seem to be particularly interested if they have a strong entrepreneurial/start-up thread. This is even though I suspect I’m outside the Gen Y age-bracket, and despite the fact that, for the time being at least, I’ve shelved the idea of starting my own business.
So why do I keep coming back to them? Why are they the ones that clutter my Google Reader, rather than the hiking/running blogs that I probably have more in common with?
I think it’s to do with the notion of striving for the life you want to live. These Gen Y bloggers, they’re all about their search for their path in life, their striving to stay true to their dreams and passions, and they’re putting their dilemmas and initiatives out there along the way, for others to follow, and comment on, and discuss.
It seems from some of these blogs that they think it’s their generation that defines them in this search. I say that it’s not. That quest is not specific to people born between year X and year Y (as stipulated by the dubious definitions that litter a google search on the subject). What is different for their generation is that they’ve come of age with the internet, and see their lives through that lens.
Every generation of 20-somethings has a significant number of souls who struggle to find their paths and wish for something different and better that the norms offered by conventional society. The majority ‘grow out of it,’ a minority don’t and become the hippies, radicals, artists, drop-outs, nomads, and independent thinkers of their generation. We could play alphabet soup if we wanted, assigning a letter to each generation past and future, and making judgements about their characteristics. What’s different, and appealing, about the recent crop of Gen Y blogs is that for the first time this process is out there, globally, for all to see in the blogosphere. Support and reinforcement flows from blog to blog. And it’s also interesting that the Gen Y bloggers don’t aspire to be artists or drop-outs, but high achieving internet-based entrepreneurs… That, I think, is what’s different.
A few examples of these Gen Y blogs? Here’s a good three to have a look at:
Jun Loayza
Matt Cheuvront
Luke Snedden
What do you think? Does Gen Y have something the rest of us don’t? Or is it just that they’re the current bright young things, to be supplanted by the next batch sometime soon?
Image by jetheriot
