This is my dad, with my niece Katherine and my nephew Ethan, in January 2006. I visited them in North Carolina, seeing my niece for the second time, and my 3-year-old nephew for the first time. It was cool being an uncle, and having Ethan keep asking me, "Uncle Steve, let's watch Dorwuh (his pronunciation of Dora the Explorer then). I watched about 20 episodes of Dora that week, and went home saying "Oh maaan!" when people cut me off in my taxi back home in Huntington Beach.
When this photo above was taken, Katherine was 5, and Ethan was 3. At the same time, Google was 7 1/2, Amazon was 11, Facebook was almost 2, Space X was almost 4, Tesla (the car company) was 2 1/2. You Tube was almost 1, Shopify was just starting, and Twitter would be founded two months later. Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, Pinterest, and iPhones didn't exist yet. Think about how big those companies are today, and how much they have changed how we live our daily lives. The Generation Z kids, like Katherine and Ethan, grew up with these businesses.
Now, in April of 2021, my niece Katherine is graduating from college, and Ethan is graduating from high school. Another young woman I met on the bus two days ago is in her first year of college. These "kids" Generation Z, the post Millennial crowd, are hitting adulthood, and they're hitting the adult world at a REALLY crazy time in history.
I saw this young woman sitting in the back of the bus with a copy of Robert Kiyosaki's book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and asked her what she thought about the book. I read the book around the time the photo above was shot, I think, and have read most of Kiyosaki's books since. The young woman, Diana, turned out to be super intelligent, and it was a really cool conversation. I was wondering what a person her age, and about my niece and nephew's age, thought of Kiyosaki's ideas on money, work and investing. She told me she was in college, on an academic scholarship, and had a 4.0+ scholarship in high school. But she was also the daughter of a hard working single mom, and grew up where money was really tight. She had some really good thinking on money for an 18-19 year old. When buying clothes, or most other things, she said she'd think, "How many hours work will this shirt cost me? Is it really worth trading that much of my time?" That's a great way to think for a person her age. She really impressed me, being book smart, but realizing that money was a whole different type of learning, so she picked up Robert Kiyosaki's book, to learn more on that front on her own, as well as her college studies.
Diana also talked about the notion of working to make a living, something nearly all of us have to do, yet thinking about what she was passionate about in life, and the struggle between doing what makes you happy in life, as well as doing what's needed to make a living. That's something we all have to struggle with our whole lives. Overall, it was cool to see a young woman motivated in learning both her official education in college, but also about money and finances, on her own. The world needs a lot more people like Diana coming up. Talking to her gave me more hope for Generation Z.
As a Big Picture thinker, who has written a lot about the long term trends happening right now, I'm looking at the 2020's as probably the craziest decade anyone alive will see. I've gone into more detail on these ideas in my online book, Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now. One one hand, I think we are in the late stages of the collapse of the Industrial Age, and the rise of the incoming Information Age. There are several ultra-long term trends, all combining, and I see the 2020's as a decade of massive change. Old systems are breaking down as new, tech-enabled systems are being built up, and changing how we live, day to day. So these older Gen Z people, like Katherine, Ethan, Diana, and their friends, are beginning their adult lives in the midst of great change. I told Diana, "The world today isn't normal, it's really crazy. It's will be crazy for a while, but what gets created in this decade will shape everyone's future for a long time to come."
One big trend I'm watching, is the way new technology is replacing human jobs. An Oxford University study in 2013, estimated the 47% of U.S. jobs could be lost to new technologies by 2035. That's around 75-80 million jobs disappearing, in a 25 year period. My personal thoughts are that the future will hold a lot less high paying "traditional" jobs, and a lot of people, of all ages, will have to either have side gigs, micro businesses (one person businesses), or small businesses to survive. I think Gen Z will, just by necessity, have to be one of the most entrepreneurial generations in 150 years or so. Ethan has been making some money streaming content about video games, so he's already doing that to some extent.
As old people argue about ideas from 30 or 40 years ago, I think Millennials and Gen Z are, and will continue to, build a new world right under our noses. It's a big job, but I'm beginning to have more faith in these "kids" hitting adulthood now. The world needs all kinds of improvement, pick a theme that's important to you, and starting making the world better. Us old geezers need all the help we can get. ; )
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