SW203

Philippine Social
Reality
Reflection Paper on Millennials
of today

Submitted by: Aiyana A. Martinez

Submitted to: Prof. Rebecca T. Valerio

 Millennials are the generation of people born during the period of 1980s-2000s. They
were born on the edge of the millennium and had a number of distinctive features, which
differ them from the people born before. Under the influence of technological progress and
other factors influencing the development of personality they have become a distinctive layer
of society, having a special attitude towards life. They have their own, fears, problems,
insecurities and difficulties.

Primarily the speaker supplied the target audience with the millennials definition.
Ma’am Levinia used a positive, humorous tone, which added special coloring to her speech.
Using simple language, but the very relevant wording, she managed to render the main idea
behind her speech and analyze all the peculiarities of newly came generation. By applying
examples and scenarios, the speaker managed to illustrate both positive and negative sides
of the personality of a typical millennial generation representative. Speaker managed to
appeal to an older people and asked them to reflect on this generation. Ma’am Levinia
applied plenty of stylistic devices, making her speech colorful, emotional and appealing.
Firstly the speaker discussed generally what Millennials are. Millennials are the new
generation of people, who were born on the edge of the millennium. That is why they have
gained this name. The previous generation calls them narcissistic, selfish and frames
obsessed. However, according to the position of the speaker, they have reasons for such
behavior and life position. Family, society, technology have made a great impact on them,
making them prisoners of their own prejudice, fears and frames. Younger generations keep
claiming that Millennials are ungrateful and not able to appreciate what they have. The
speaker claims that the way these people live and perceive themselves were influenced by
the conditions, in which they were raised. The new people have distanced themselves
greatly from the previous generations and have established new standards of living, striving
and achieving. Millennials generation representatives are special people. Primarily, it
concerns the ways of their upbringing. These youngsters were born and raised in the
families were the uniqueness and specialty of each child was highly cultivated. They were
told, that they are special, deserving only the best. Even in schools, in the most primitive
competitions, the last participants in the rating received participation medals. While those,
who paid efforts to occupy the first position felt embarrassed and confused. The reality told
them “you cannot just have what you want”. Because of such differences between the home
and external reality, millennials have low self-esteem, which may cause depressions and
lack of confidence. Another factor, which influenced reality the formation of the personality of
the millennials representative, is the technology development. With the appearance of cell
phones, Internet and social networks, these people lost the engagements in social life.
Social media addictions equal to drug and alcohol addictions. Unfiltered access to media to
medial make young people isolated. They are so close with their devises, that they are not
able to interact with each other without them. They are not able to build relations, having no
practice of these skills. It provokes stress. To fight this stress they turn to social networks,
which create an illusion of sharing emotions with other and getting relief from feeling that you
are understood. The second part of the speech about millennials, she switched from listing
of weaknesses to enumeration of their strong points quickly. She said that millennials are the
new species, who have just started to adapt to a new environment. Their way of thinking and
interacting with the world is too modern for the current time. They’re the first generation to be
raised using digital technology, social media, and mass media. People born in this
generation are now college students, and college graduates that are struggling in this tough
economy. The millennial generation has limitless information at the tip of their fingers.
Millennial are “always connected” with social networks like Facebook and twitter they always
know what friends are doing. People have said millennials are parent dependent and don’t
know what reasonability is, which I think could go either way. Some millennials are very
parent dependent but I see others very independent going to school and working without the
guidance of parents. It’s unfair to generalize millennials as slackers that don’t know how to
work for something, it all depend on the person. The way millennials are living their lives are
different from other generations most because aren’t thinking about marriage or kids there
more focused on their financial future. Millennials could be one of the first generations that
will not achieve the same standard of living that their parents did. The millennial generation
has many unique characteristics: like achievement oriented and pressured, less devoted to
faith, and multitasking. They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults.
They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military and advocacy, and are on
track to become the most educated generation in history. Millennials are team oriented, this
generation is social and does well working in groups. Millennials are confident, “With so
much positive reinforcement from parents and other authority figures, the Millennial
Generation is confident about the future. They believe success will translate into success for
their environment and society as a whole”. Millennials are achievement oriented and
pressured, they want to achieve success in every part of their lives, they like to be
challenged, and they participate in many activities. Most Millennials embrace educational
challenges and think that school standards should be higher, and the participation in
advanced placement classes has been greatly increased with this generation. Millennials
work well under pressure and they like to be challenged because they know how high the
requirements for college are. They are pressured because they participate in many activities
and they still have to do well in their schoolwork because they are achievement oriented.
Also many millennials are pressured to do well by their parents. I am fit the stereotype of my
generation by having the characteristic of being achievement oriented. I am achieving in
many ways. One being that I am currently taking master’s degree major in clinical social
work right after I graduated, after this I aim to take other course for I believe that life creates
endless opportunity for us to better ourselves. I like to challenge myself. I am also pressured
by my parents to do well in school, and I do because I like to please them. Sometimes I even
am rewarded for good grades. With TVs, computers, MP3 players, cell phones and instant
messaging as an integral part of their lives, the Millennials have become masters of
multitasking. Millennials do not have a problem with using many different types of
communication when they are doing things like homework, hanging with friends, and music
lessons. Even if someone has the ability to do multitasking does not mean they are retaining
any information they are getting and their learning does suffer when they are multitasking.
One of those traits is multitasking. I don’t like to multitask because I can never get anything
done because I get distracted easily, and I only like to do one thing at a time. Unlike other
millennials who can’t handle being unstimulated, I like not doing anything and just relaxing
using no technology at all and just sitting there in silence. I can’t do homework when
anything else is going on or it doesn’t get done or it isn’t of quality. It annoys me when I am
with a friend who is multitasking when they are texting and trying to talk to me at the same
time. I also don’t multitask because I know I want retain any information when I am
multitasking, so I feel there is no point in trying to learn something I won’t remember.
Multitasking just doesn’t work for me. For the most part I am a stereotypical millennial by
being achieving oriented and pressured by taking advanced classes and trying to please my
parents. But I am unlike other millennials by not liking to multitask by only doing one thing at
a time and enjoying my downtime without using technology. The speaker had also
differentiated the millennials from other generations which I totally agree with especially on
the generation Y since I have personal observations and direct experience with them. The
speaker used similes to enforce the effect on the target audience and render her thoughts
maximally accessible for the audience. Throughout the whole discussion, she used plenty of
humor stylistic devices. It evokes a various feeling within the audience. The real-life
examples enforce the position of the speaker and enabled the audience to understand the
message better.

While analyzing the whole approach of the speaker, it is possible to conclude, she
made the right choice. Ma’am Levinia approached her task seriously. She elaborated a great
strategy for applying various stylistic and lexical means and techniques enabling to hold the
attention of a target audience for a long time. Apart from that, the speaker managed to grasp
the attention of an audience and hold it until the ends of the seminar. Among the effective
techniques, applied by the speaker there is the implementation of humor, techniques of
contrast and comparison, parallelisms etc. apart from that Ma’am Levinia managed to
impalement successfully statistical data and other facts, helping the audience to develop
their opinion about the millennials. Summing up, the speaker expressed her position
towards the millennials generation. All the information presented in the article is mainly
aimed at depicting of the strength and weaknesses of people born between 1980 and 2000.
Numerous repetitions, comparisons, facts, statistical data are mainly aimed at demonstration
of how different the millennials are in comparison to other generations. They have to interact
with the world, which is not ready to accept their ways of thinking and perception of this
world. Finally, the speaker claims that this new generation of people came to this society to
save us all. In conclusion, the millennial generation is one very interesting group of people.
They have many unique characteristics that we have never seen before. This generation is
also the first to have experienced things like the internet their whole lives. The millennials
have a bright future ahead of them because they are the most intelligent and educated
generation ever. The millennials will continue to be the generation that sculpts the character
of the future.