Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Millennials & Nones Refuse to be Programmed

I confess, I'm intrigued by millennials. I'm even more intrigued by nones. I didn't know I was one—a none, not a millennial—until I discovered a "label" has been coined for people like me. (Nones are those who embrace "spirituality" while claiming no religious affiliation with Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other organized religion.) So ... in this my second blog series on spirituality (the first being Sunburned), I'm going to be including more musings on nones, and how they might just be the crest of the wave of the 2nd Age of Enlightenment.

But today ... I'm just going to riff on voting since the United States 2016 presidential election is next month!

There are a lot of articles around the internet about non-voting millennials/nones.

The main question being: Why—aren't they voting?

Generation Y, Millennials, Nones
Could it possibly be because ...

They know it’s complicated.
They know life is not a soundbite.
They know the whole purpose of talking points is to manipulate.

Politics, okay, the world, is suffering from the application of “marketing strategies” designed to manipulate the target. Vote. Buy. Like. Follow. Sign up.

Millennials/nones recognize the shallowness, dodge the bullet, and avoid further invasive interaction at all costs.

Why?

Many (most?) millennials/nones grew up in divorced (let’s talk about being sick and tired of divisive rhetoric!), single parent, and/or blended families. Parents break the family vase (or simply never have one) and amazingly expect their children to look the other way.
Broken Home, Child Abuse, Child Neglect
Suck it up, Buttercup.

While I destroy your life, I’ll go out and fulfill mine. While you’re deprived of the basic nutritive ingredients upon which human-beings thrive: attention, security, and the savoring of a child’s unique history, we’re gonna focus on this stranger (new guy or gal) who's—guess what?—moving in with more strangers (kids). And we’re going to create this new family (vase).
Broken, Homes, Parental Alienation
What’s that stinky smell beneath the rug? The corpse of your first family—or just the corpse of your other parent, who after all, wasn’t up to snuff. Oh, well. We’ll just spritz it with some nifty lemon-scented air freshener. BECAUSE mommy and daddy are happy—and really!—that’s ALL THAT MATTERS, because we’re in charge. OF YOU.

Why would kids raised in that kind of environment buy into any system? Once a kid figures out the “family system” is a convenient ruse to gain buy-in without any/much/reciprocal investment or consideration on the parents’ part, it’s not a leap to extrapolate that equation to (any) (all) other systems.

Millennials/nones are self-protective. With good reason.

Ironically, as much as the human brain has been compared to a machine, and just as we get all swept up in the glamor and the “maybe it will fix-it-all or maybe it will destroy-it-all” siren song of artificial intelligence … Millennials/nones are refusing to be programmed.

By family—“It is for many almost [obvious] how difficult it is to pass religious passions from one generation to the next.”
By religion—“nones have outstripped the single largest religious group of Americans: Catholics, who are now 21 percent of the adult population. The next largest group, white evangelical Protestants, represent 16 percent.”
By politics—“the religiously unaffiliated is no voting bloc”

Droids, robots, can't do that, by the way.

REFUSE TO BE PROGRAMMED.

AI
Perhaps it will be the millennials/nones who tear down the media mind-meld-wall and envision/create a geo-political future beyond the banal-baiting marketing strategies which increasingly reign supreme around the globe. To its obvious detriment.

Will millennials/nones vote in the upcoming presidential election?

“They could have considerable impact on the political direction of the country but have so far chosen not to do so.”
2016 Presidential vote count
All quotes are excerpted from this RNS article: More ‘nones’ than you think, but many won’t show up on Election Day by Lauren Markoe

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