Some digging around on the newsfeed today led me to an article by Penelope Trunk, who has written a book and maintains a blog. She’s pretty damn fascinating — and a good writer –, and I imagine I’ll be linking to her stuff a fair bit.

Today, though, I want to focus on her claim that Gen Y is inherently conservative. Penelope isn’t using the word in the political sense, of course, instead speaking of the fact that, when you get right down to it, Gen Y really isn’t asking for that much.

But here’s what else is going on: Gen Y does not admit it, but their top priority is stability. This is a fundamentally conservative generation.

Her point is well-taken, but I still struggle with it a little bit, perhaps because I am Gen Y and refuse to admit things. Stability, it would seem to me, is pretty high on the priority list for everyone, regardless of generation. (And, to be fair, Trunk says as much.) To really get at the heart of the issue, you have to break down the idea of stability into more precise chunks. That is, is it financial stability we crave most? Career stability? Social & personal stability? Intellectual stability?

To get the obvious out of the way: everyone needs financial stability. It’s impossible to disregard that, even if some of the Boomers actually did for a while. (The 60s will never happen again.) But Gen Y tends to approach it a little differently, since we’re not starting our career while simultaneously buying a house and paying for baby food. As such, we’re able to focus more on other types of stability, particularly the intellectual.

This isn’t ‘intellectual’ in the sense of reading a lot of books or doing science experiments, but rather it’s framed around the notion that Gen Y is, generally, unwilling to sit at a desk and be bored out of their mind for their career. That’s not to say we won’t work menial jobs — I’m pretty sure Gen Y is driving the call centre industry in North America — but we’re very reluctant to do so under the banner of ‘career’ simply to achieve financial stability.

Instead, we’ll work the bad jobs to achieve money to put towards those intellectual pursuits I was talking about. Be it seeing the world, or starting a business, or just taking a summer off to write a novel. I’d frame it as emphasizing individual stability over career stability. And I think it might even be that the latter is a concept that no longer even exists.

All that said, something Trunk writes earlier in her post really struck a chord with me:

[These companies] get the best candidates because these companies have been the fastest to react to the new workforce conditions that place young people in the driver’s seat .

The driver’s seat is it. There’s the intellectual stability. There’s the individual stability. There’s that continual movement forward. There’s that meaning that Generation Y needs.

Photo by Ozyman. Licensed under Creative Commons

Tags: generational shift, money, penelope trunk

Related: February 25, 2008: Gen Y & Banking | June 8, 2008: We’re not all about money, but money IS important | March 23, 2008: Opposing organization |