Why Generation Y is unhappy

Fantastic formula/explanation for Happiness( =reality - expectations)
http://brightside.me/article/why-generation-y-is-unhappy-11105/

This touches briefly on the generation of the baby boomer and how certain 

values change based on a variety of factors. 

With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy’s parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility. And they weren’t alone. Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.
Cal Newport points out that “follow your passion“ is a catchphrase that has only gotten going in the last 20 years, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time. The same Ngram viewer shows that the phrase ”a secure career“ has gone out of style, just as the phrase “a fulfilling career” has gotten hot.
Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they’re actually quite hard. Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has ”unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback,” and “an inflated view of oneself.” He says that ”a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting.“

For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, ”Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?“ He says that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief.”

– char. (Lucy)

lucy's extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit deluded about one’s own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early years out of college. And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her ”reality — expectations" happy score coming out at a negative.

Lucy is being constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.

Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation. This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery.

Here’s my advice for Lucy:

1. Stay wildly ambitious. The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success. The specific direction may be unclear, but it’ll work itself out—just dive in somewhere.
2. Stop thinking that you’re special. The fact is, right now, you’re not special. You’re another completely inexperienced young person who doesn’t have all that much to offer yet. You can become special by working really hard for a long time.
3. Ignore everyone else. Other people’s grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today’s image crafting world, other people’s grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you’ll never have any reason to envy others.

A Lovely Message from a Facebook Post

This is an honest and truthful post from a friend of a friend on Facebook!

The message is quite personal, as she usually posts photo's from around the waterfront on her way to work each morning; she seems to like to travel slowly and enjoy the scenery.

The fact that this person is appreciating the little things in life is inspiring and something to look up to.. This could be what we are trying to aim for; for everyone to be able to do this. Maybe not necessarily travelling to work slowly but appreciating what life has to offer in the simplist of things.

'The 10 Most Important Things About My Day'

As part of research this is the Photo Documentation from two young adults:

We asked our friends and people we know to take 10 photo's of the most significant/important and necessary things about their day.



1) First Example

         

                     

• A lot of this emerging adults life revolves around getting up and ready for uni, spending the day on campus and then coming home to start it all over again the next day, and her love of mugs. 

The makeup suggest either a personal fulfilment of feeling good from looking nice, but it could also mean that there are pressures from society to look good in public. Coffee suggests a need to 'wake up' after feeling tired, or it's a ritual that they have one every day (or an addiction to coffee). The light from the war memorial suggests a change in the time of day, having spent a full day at uni/work or wherever they have been.

• There is very much a 'day in, day out' experience from this insight into her life.

2) Second Example

• This insight into this emerging adults  life is again based around the morning routine, getting up early, then work or leisure throughout the day. This person seems to care about health and comfort (suggested by skincare, health food, cats and music). It seems like these photo's are of her favourite things about their day.

These photos offer us key points in which it would be most successful to form some form of intervention with emerging adults either through music, magazines and small moments of please i.e. coffee break within their day.

These insights are important as it allows us to move forward in the ideation in the right direction.


(links into IDEO tools personal inventory, Documentation and Camera Journal)

Think / Act/ Feel working on our young adult persona.

Profile characteristics/attributes of our TA.

We will present this on several A1 sheets of paper for class week 7.

We have chosen to create an emerging adult identity that has no sex or age. We don't believe that these are what we are looking at. It is the changing world which has created a new generation/ stage in a persons life. That person in that stage whoever they may be is who we are working for.

Life hack articles bossing emerging adults.

When searching for current communication/ advice towards emerging adult that is currently out there I came across a article on life hack that was in the same tone that many of the articles are. 
It is telling, bossy and instructive.
It is unequal/not on the same level as emerging adults. 
It makes it seem as if the reader is being talked down to and not on an equal level as the writer. It will not be the deliberate yet it is how it comes across.

It seems to be that our approach needs to be coming from emerging adults themselves to create an equal embracing tone of voice. 

You Don’t

You’re Not 

You Need To

You Will Not

You Must Eat Well

The age of possibilies . Emerging Adulthood.

I discovered an article which expressed emerging adulthood as the 

"age of possibilities"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How awesome is that. Yet those in emerging adulthood do not always feel this or embrace it as the pressure of money, family and failure overpowers this amazing age of possibilities 


http://nobaproject.com/modules/emerging-adulthood#authors
Emerging adulthood has been proposed as a new life stage between adolescence and young adulthood, lasting roughly from ages 18 to 25.
Five features make emerging adulthood distinctive:

• identity explorations, 
• instability, 
• self-focus, 
• feeling in-between adolescence and adulthood, 
• and a sense of broad possibilities for the future. 

Think for a moment about the lives of your grandparents and great-grandparents when they were in their twenties. How do their lives at that age compare to your life? If they were like most other people of their time, their lives were quite different than yours. What happened to change the twenties so much between their time and our own? And how should we understand the 18–29 age period today?

The theory of emerging adulthood proposes that a new life stage has arisen between adolescence and young adulthood over the past half-century in industrialized countries. Fifty years ago, most young people in these countries had entered stable adult roles in love and work by their late teens or early twenties. Relatively few people pursued education or training beyond secondary school, and, consequently, most young men were full-time workers by the end of their teens. 

It means that young people are dependent on their parents for longer than in the past, and they take longer to become full contributing members of their societies. A substantial proportion of them have trouble sorting through the opportunities available to them and struggle with anxiety and depression, even though most are optimistic. However, there are advantages to having this new life stage as well. By waiting until at least their late twenties to take on the full range of adult responsibilities, emerging adults are able to focus on obtaining enough education and training to prepare themselves for the demands of today’s information- and technology-based economy. Also, it seems likely that if young people make crucial decisions about love and work in their late twenties or early thirties rather than their late teens and early twenties, their judgment will be more mature and they will have a better chance of making choices that will work out well for them in the long run.

Controversial Survey post to Vic Deals, worry about ethics form.

Callum McCaul ( above) commented that he was going to fill it out yet it was too upsetting to him. This was very very concerning as our ethics form said that we would not hurt or make anyone comfortable. 

We gave our survey 5 more min to see if it upset any body else to much as we were so concerned we were going to break ethics. However after a while a great discussion came out of posting the survey and the comments on face book were as equally as helpful as the survey itself. 

We posted the survey on vic deals to make it open to more than people. The comments that we received about the post were both emotional and controversial. It was interesting to hear it from a non design point of view i.e. this is not going to get you statistics. Once we explained that we were looking for statistics I think people understood it more.

The amount of personal and emotional comments that we received about the post in the comments section confirmed to us that our topic is important and there are a lot of people who feel passionate about it, be it positive or negative passion.