Instagram Star Pamela Reif. Jan Woitas/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In January, an interview with marketing consultant Simon Sinek went viral on Facebook. Raising the hackles of millennials everywhere, he branded them “tough to manage, entitled, narcissistic, self-interested [and] unfocused.” You can imagine my delight when my mum sent the video to me: “this might explain why you have so many problems,” she said.
Sinek puts the pathologies of Generation Y down to “failed parenting strategies”, the nasty shock of realising you can’t have something just because you want it, and the unhappy pairing of entitlement and low self-esteem millennials carry about with them. According to Sinek, these problems have been compounded by growing up in a Facebook and Instagram world: “we’re good at showing people that ‘life is amazing – even though I’m depressed’.” Absent from Sinek’s account is the politics of why millennials might feel this way. Are we just sluggish, lazy, stupid and unconcerned? Or, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues in his new book Filling the Void, are we buckling under the strains of late capitalism?
Social media monetise our distraction. We let them burrow into our lives, and now we’re hooked. These platforms are designed to bypass all impulses to self-control. 1.79 billion of us log onto Facebook each month, Gilroy-Ware reports. According to the digital agency We Are Social, the average social media user spends two hours and thirteen minutes on social media every day – nearly 15% of our waking hours.
