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Labels abound, us pesky Millennials have been characterized by innumerable traits and trends – some more accurate than others. The most ubiquitous of these is our assumed desire for a wholly connected lifestyle – one that positions Millennials in a willful state of constant and continuous interaction. Enabled by today’s robust array of social networking sites, services and the technology that underwrites them, Millennials have the native tech savvy needed to pursue perpetual contact with our peers and the world at large.

Whether we’re live-blogging our bowel behavior on Twitter, updating our relationship statuses to ‘swinger’ on Facebook or disseminating videos of our cats dressed like grandmothers on YouTube, Millennials – by all indications – sincerely enjoy our unprecedented level of connectivity and interactive sharing. Yet, while younger generations are surely heading toward unforeseen levels of digital-physical convergence, Millennials are still uneasy with the idea of a fully integrated lifestyle. This unease is beginning to coalesce around a conscious resistance to universal connectivity.

Although we undoubtedly desire higher levels of general connectivity in our everyday lives, we still draw distinctions between the digital and physical world. We still yearn for those rare ‘vintage connections’ that involve personal, face-to-face interaction. With these experiences becoming ever more scarce, Millennials can be expected to place an increasingly high premium on moments of selective disconnection. While generally welcomed by the Millennial generation, this constant state of interaction has proven difficult to avoid and, as such, carries with it a unique opportunity space: the disconnected experience.

Capitalizing on this white space, innovative products and services that straddle the connective divide are emerging (in addition to existing analogue experiences) that provide Millennials with unique opportunities to disconnect from their assorted technologies in hopes of facilitating heightened moments of immediate, human interaction. Whether it’s a nightclub that requires guests to check their cell phones at the door along with their coats, a spa that strips away technology as well as dirt and grime or a local cafe that encourages customers to knit a scarf while they sip their lattes (as opposed to browse the web on their tablets), user experiences are being designed with disconnection in mind.

Even a modern digital device such as the Kindle shows signs of following the philosophy of disconnection. Although its latest and most expensive iteration incorporates more robust connectivity, Amazon’s original eBook reader restricts users to one specialized task (ie. reading): precluding broader capabilities and their associated distractions. Judging by that model’s continued sales success, users appreciate the product’s singular focus. Dedicated devices like the original Kindle,the Kobo, and the Nook can, therefore, be interpreted as strong signals of desirable disconnection and its successful application.

Facilitating this kind of desirable disconnection can also involve resisting the urge to add layers of interaction to existing products and services that are: a) traditionally isolating; and b) appreciated as such. Air travel, for instance, has traditionally necessitated the ‘powering down’ of personal mobile devices; producing a disconnected in-flight experience that many users, Millennials among them, have come to expect and enjoy. With the advent of new technology, however, some airlines are offering in-flight wireless connectivity and other services that represent an affront to what was once a reliable sanctuary of disconnection. Weary business travelers the world over now have one less opportunity – and excuse – to unplug from the digital cacophony that is our modern, interconnected world. It is little wonder, therefore, that many airlines have been slow to integrate these capabilities into their own in-flight repertoires.

While we will undoubtedly continue to tweet, blog and IM the most intimate details of our lives, Millennials will always desire – and indeed, luxuriate in – those rare moments of disconnected tranquility. Critically, this desire should not be viewed in stark juxtaposition to our concurrent cravings for connection. These dualities respond to each other and must be integrated and harmonized to better accommodate the nuanced values of post-irony Millennials.

Their show, named for the Mathew Arnold poem, The Buried Life, plays on its title dually: the idea that by identifying and achieving the things you want to do before you die, you excavate your true life buried within.

The Buried Life documents the boys’ travels across North America as they attempt everything from “help deliver a baby” to “attend a party at the Playboy Mansion.” For each item they check off their list, they help a complete stranger achieve his or her own goal. The random acts of kindness have included helping an environmental activist organize a protest, reuniting a homeless man with his daughter and helping a girl
get over her fear of roller coasters.

Recently renewing their production deal with MTV, the stars of The Buried Life are filming new content in Los Angeles. MISC caught up with half of the group, Jonnie Penn and Ben Nemtin, to discuss what their show reveals about the Millennial generation.

Why do you think a show like The Buried Life needs to exist? People talk a lot about the idea of ‘life getting in the way,’ what is it about life – the pace, the multiplicity, or greater ideologies – that keep people from the goals and aspirations that they actually care about?
Jonni: I think there’s a massive turn to simplicity right now. Our generation is increasingly minimalistic, I hope. I think the reason our show had success is, to some degree, because we boiled everything down to simply doing the things we want to do before we die. Just doing whatever it is you love to do.

Why is that resonating so much right now?
Jonni: I think people want to keep in touch with themselves now, because there’s so much pulling them in the opposite direction. We get marketed to so much these days that you can live for a long time, then wake up one day and realize that you’re not even living your own life. You’re living up to manufactured standards. To be able to check in and feel the power of knowing what you want is a really cool thing. And for a lot of young people, they want to be responsible for themselves and enjoy that responsibility, doing whatever the hell it is that they want to do. I don’t want to generalize for everybody, but I think, with simplicity, we’re talking about refinement. We all want to make sure we’re getting the most bang for our buck. If you can refine things down to their best, to the core of it, that makes people feel good. People are starting to realize that they don’t need as much stuff as they once thought. The basics can get you pretty far in life in terms of satisfaction.

You guys were at the beginning of what seems to be a large shift on MTV, from excessive escapism to programs with positive social messages or at least dealing with compelling human struggles. Why do you think that change occurred when it did?
Jonni: I think it’s more about subcultures. MTV wants to highlight sub-cultures, because, they’re often untapped and therefore more genuine. It’s happening all over in television. Visiting people in places that aren’t used to having cameras in their faces, so you get to have a real look into someone’s life who will open up to you and be uninhibited. That’s what MTV wants to do, looking at teenage parents, or kids from Jersey Shore, or kids from Canada who want to cross things off their bucket list. Little groups or pockets of people that all feel the same way. The prosocial movement is up to the audience. MTV is going to show us what we want to see and the lines are becoming increasingly blurred. I think prosocial is a dangerous word to put next to entertainment, because you hear it and you don’t want to work 12 hours a day and then come home and watch a documentary, you want to be entertained. It’s a good thing that the lines are blurring so that you can make a really fucking hilarious show, and still have a good message and morals in every episode.
*Ben:* Audiences just want something new. So much has already been done. Just make something new.

You guys are obviously an ambitious bunch, is that characteristic of this generation? To be career-oriented or entrepreneurial?
Ben: I think our generation will be defined by our ambition. It’s whether we can follow through on it. And I hope that people will actually do the work to follow through on it.

What was the most fulfilling / or meaningful thing each of you crossed off your list?
Ben: For me, I’m most proud of the show. It was number 53 on the list. It took so much work. It was three years of our lives, focusing every ounce of energy and all the time we had, into making this thing something we felt would be excellent on television. When we put it on the list, only about 2% of me thought it would actually happen. It was pretty cool to actually see it come to fruition, and then say, “now what can we do?”
Jonni: Playing basketball with the president was electrifying for me. It took eighteen months from coming up with the idea to pulling it off. It was awesome. We played at the White House courts. President Obama surprised us. He was supposed to be in Indonesia. It was the day before the big healthcare vote. He had every reason not to be there but he came out and did it, and he said he did it because he liked that we helped people. We just shot around and chatted and cracked jokes.

The Mathew Arnold poem that the show was inspired by describes, “A thirst to spend our fire and restless force / In tracking out our true, original course.” Is there an element self-discovery that occurs with each successful or failed attempt to check an item off the list?
Jonni: I think of a lot of it comes down to taking yourself where you don’t want to go. When you find comfort in your life, and you’re young, it’s easy to hold on to that. But we found that sometimes pushing away from the shore, and going to the places you’re scared to go to, is the most rewarding thing you can do. And that’s part of growing up.
Ben: We were lucky enough to do this with three other friends, and that helps when times get tough as well as when things are good and we have to step up and do this stuff. It’s the other guys on the team that force you to go big. I don’t think we’d always have that strength if we were just doing it solo. That’s been the most rewarding part – when I did the shit that I really didn’t want to do and then realized that it wasn’t so bad.
Jonni: That’s now a relationship that we share with our fans. We don’t want to do anything for our fans that isn’t brand new, bigger and better and in a new direction. We want to continue to risk everything to make this thing grow. I hope it’ll always be that way.

Having checked off most of your bucket list, what do you still want to do before you die?
Ben: We just signed a new deal with MTV to shoot new content. It’s not going to be as it was in season one or two. We want to make something different. We have a really unique situation with MTV where they’re giving us creative freedom to shoot pretty much whatever we want. We’ve always been of the mindframe that good content takes time. And we feel comfortable enough with our brand and our audience that we want to make something that’s good enough to take a bit of time. We’re shooting a bunch of new stuff that we’ve always wanted to shoot and we now have the freedom to do it. We’ll be cutting together some new content for MTV and other networks as well.
Jonni: We just crossed a big item off the list, involving Major League Baseball, and we’re always working on number 100 (“Go to Space”) We’re also opening up the brand-new frontier of this audience we have of more than a million Facebook fans each with their own story and thing they want to do before they die. We’re finding and documenting these people and they have every dream that you can imagine. We’re looking forward to sharing them with other people.

Is there anything you’ve identified lately that you want to do, that you hadn’t thought of on the previous iterations of the list?
Jonni: I would like to own no more than 100 items.
Ben: I want to go to India and be in a Bollywood music video or movie production.

Jonnie Penn and Ben Nemtin are co-founders and producers of the MTV series The Buried Life (www.facebook.com/tbl).

It was at The After Show where Jessi Cruikshank honed a very unique interview style and persona, where she interacts with her guests as a quirky and exuberant fan, rather than as the typically collected ‘Hollywood correspondent’ – though that happens to be precisely her job title with the entertainment show eTalk. Re-setting the tone through surprising and often awkward circumstances, Jessi has been able to bring to surface a hilarious human-side to her subjects, de-celebritizing everyone from Bill Gates to Sarah Jessica Parker.

A Network like MTV is constantly re-adjusting to youth culture. As someone who produces content for MTV, how do you go about researching and deciding what’s ‘of the moment’ to young people?
There’s so much talk at MTV about what the young generation wants. And ‘who are we making this for? What are they doing now?’ It’s funny for me, because I feel so in touch with all of that. When I was doing MTV Live and The After Show, I was surrounded by the viewers all the time on set. Now, they’re Tweeting at me and Facebooking me. They’re present everyday when we shoot a live show. So you really do get that connection. For a Network Executive that’s kind of sitting back and trying to guess these things, I honestly don’t know how they do it. But there’s certainly millions of dollars that go into market research. We’re about to shoot the first episode of my new show and we’ll have to test heavily, among audiences all across the US in every weird city and big city coast-to-coast. They really rely on market research to see what people are liking, but then again – you see what happens. Jersey Shore comes out and it’s a huge hit. Now there’s Jerseylicious on Style Network and several other Jersey-themed shows. A lot of reality TV is about quickly jumping on the bandwagon of what’s hot right now.

And the pace at which those things trend and fall out fashion is faster than ever. You’ve said that your fashion taste changes daily. Are we Millennials the most aesthetically minded generation?
Everything happens so fast now. At the risk of sounding like my mother, we live in a completely digital age where if there is a new trend that hits the runway in Milan, I’m getting an image of it in my pocket, in Canada, in Arkansas, in New York. Then the H&M’s and Forever 21′s are carrying it and other stores are creating the knockoffs of the knockoffs. As a result of things moving and changing so quickly, you gotta keep up. And that has made us a more aesthetically minded generation because everything’s moving so quickly. I have a great fear of getting married because I have no idea how I would ever pick up a wedding dress, I would want something completely different the week before my wedding versus the day before. I’d see something on a blog or a magazine that could completely change my mind leading up to the day. We have all these images and messages coming to us on so many different wavelengths and forms of technology that in order to keep up, we have to move so much faster.

At The After Show, you cut the time between the show and the water cooler talk…or locker talk, to almost nothing. You’re chatting and critiquing, almost exactly as its happening. It reminds me of the way that Twitter saved award shows. We watch by responding directly and you can really follow along without actually watching the footage.
Yes! I was watching some award show the other day and my friend said, ‘I wish that I had my Twitter feed synced up to my TV so that I could have a sidebar while I’m watching this award show or the presidential debate or whatever it is, I could watch what people are tweeting about on my TV next to it.’
And I was like, dude, ‘we’re months away from that.’ That’s how we watch TV. Even Dancing with the Stars which has a much older demographic has the hashtag #DWTS in the corner of the screen, so you know social media is saving TV by getting people to talk about it online.

Tell me about your interview style and how you cultivated the element of surprise that you bring to the celebrities that you interview.
I think it started out just wanting to do something different. I remember my first junket, where 50 reporters from all over country are interviewing the same movie celebrities one after the other after the other. And I literally watched people asking questions like ”how did you like the movie? … did you like … working?” I wanted to slit my wrists. Like I don’t care. I’ve seen that on every entertainment show. I wanted to shake it up. I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I wanted to give all the viewers something different. The mentality of The Hills After Show also changed my idea of the interview. The Hills changed reality TV by making it look like expensive scripted television. It was lit, it was beautiful it had helicopter shots. On The After Show we took it down a notch, broke it apart and got under the gloss. I try to do that in my celebrity interviews. Instead of pretending that it’s a natural set up for me to be in a hotel room sitting across from Tom Cruise, we found a way to make it real. I’m going to meet a celebrity just like you would. And I’m going to ask the same questions. And I’m going to tell you what happens behind the scenes and pull the veil back on that glossy celebrity world that so many entertainment shows try to uphold in a way that’s so absurd to me. I think that’s how you turn a celebrity into a human. You just act like a real person around them.

How do you see the current landscape of MTV programming?
Shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Moms are very real-life documentary style shows that give a voyeuristic look into these worlds, and how they work. The show that I’m working on is also very controversial. That seems to be what resonates with people. The new generation of MTV is semi-scripted dramatic reality programming. That genre has kind of changed everything. Personally, I’m still so in favor of smart and funny. I think there are a lot of shows on MTV that sometimes underestimate the intellectual capacity of the viewers. I’m a proponent of elevating what a viewer watches and making them think a little bit, but certainly there has to be a component of something emotional they can feel an attachment to, in order for a show to really catch on. ////

Jessi Cruickshank is an actress, producer, journalist, global ambassador for Free The Children, and writer for HelloGiggles.com – a website positioned as the female “funny or die.” She lives in Los Angeles where she is currently working with Ellen Rakieten (Executive Producer of the Oprah Winfrey Show) to produce an original series for MTV.

How do you get the most out of the Millennials on your team?
They crave leadership. Not just having someone in charge of the department, but in terms of, “what do we stand for?” and “where are we going?” and “what are we trying to achieve?” They’re more in tune then any other generation to the need for vision statements, a clear message regarding “who are we?” and “where are we going?” and “how are we going to get there?” They buy into it because they’re action-oriented. They find credibility not in the financial or metrics-based performance of a company, but in the grandeur of the vision and the intelligence in which the plan to achieve is laid out for them.

So an authentic mission is appealing to Millennials. If you’re an employer, how do you brand yourself to attract Millennials?
They just get it. They’re all on LinkedIn. The traditional ‘send us your resume’ or ‘fill out this form’ doesn’t fly with them. If you ask them to fill out a form, or attach a CV or give us examples of experience — it’s almost like telling them that you’re not on LinkedIn and that says volumes about your understanding of the social media 101 concepts. If you’re not doing that – then what else do you not get? You’ve got to have a liberal or progressive social media strategy in terms of the internal acceptance, usage and tolerance. These companies that lock it up, that keep the employees away from (their social media accounts) are doing a disservice to themselves and probably causing more productivity problems than they’re solving. So much information, from search, to the exchange of ideas, and collaborative thinking is happening on social networks – you’ve got to unleash Millennials.

What are some of the other expectations from Millennials of an employer that an organization should be aware of?
I think it started a couple years ago with ‘Top Employers of the Year awards’. A lot of companies saw value in making these lists. As those became more prestigious, and sought after, inevitably the criteria to be eligible or to compete started to get more fierce. “Oh you give your employees this? We’re going to give our employees that.” It allowed a lot of progressive companies to stand out, but it also started to create an expectation for Millennials – who are very information media and web savvy – to say “well, if these top companies are doing these things, why aren’t all companies doing these things?’ ‘Who is opposed to these kinds of things?” Flex-time is important to Millennials. They want to work hard but work on their terms, when they think they’re going to do their best work.

What about Flex Tasks?
I talk about ROWE – Results Only Work Environments. To keep Millennials really happy and productive, it’s about focusing less on how and when; and more on the results of their efforts. We’ve got a ROWE environment with my team: I don’t care where they work. If they need to take an interview at home and have some quiet focus, fine by me. If they need to be around a busy buzz of people at a Starbucks to get the right energy for a task, I don’t care. I care about results.

Millennials are switching careers more frequently than any previous generation. Are we less loyal? Or do our careerist ambitions have us expecting better positions almost instantly?
Without stats to back that up, all you have to do is collect a random sampling of Millennial LinkedIn profiles to see that that’s exactly true. There are no more golden watches. You’ve go to work 20+ years to earn that old golden watch or even retire with that company. Loyalty can be bought by more progressive liberal and open-minded organizations who get Millennials, who get their thinking. I don’t think it’s necessarily that every company needs a foosball table in the lunchroom, but every company should be prepared year-after-year to think about what the new progressive work environment looks like. Willingness to experiment as well as curiosity are going to increase loyalty. It’s not a checklist of consistent things. Employees can smell that a mile away. No one is leaving because the other guy’s office has the better foosball table. But the fact that they decided to introduce that, in response to what people are asking for, is what counts. There is definitely an expectation from Millennials that they will climb the proverbial ladder quicker or at the very least will require a very clear career path framework put in front of them. I’ve seen it from day one, many times. It’s not unusual to get a really effective and efficient Millennial who’s really driven to come and say, “How do I get to here?”  Or what would it take for me to earn X or achieve position Y. They like to know the path. I just think that they have a certain standard. They’re clear on their objectives and they know what it’s going to take.

How do you see business environments transforming over the next five years to adjust to the expectations of Millennials?
Right now most employers are failing to truly unlock this generation’s potential. If you do, it will require some heavy lifting – this is the generation that’s going to transform business, manage economic crises, and other problems in the world because they’re a ‘tuned in’ and intelligent group. You’re going to see over the next five years, maybe sooner, that the typical nine to five environment will evolve significantly. And it’s going to look like something different for each Millennial. ////

Christopher Bennett is the Director of Corporate Communications & Community Relations for Best Buy Canada and Future Shop. He is based in Vancouver, Canada.

But perhaps we’re too willing to attribute the emotion behind this consumption to nostalgia. What might a different perspective on our collective reach for the recent past teach us about this generation’s political and aesthetic aims for the future?

Millennials represent a reversal of six decades of inter-generational relations, and we’ve done a great job repressing the desire to rebel against the politics of those who came before us. As children, we experienced grunge, slacker films and even the Clinton Administration – apolitically, or at least without an active consciousness of the political investments of Generation X, such as they were. Now, we consume the aesthetic of the 90s (especially the early ones) without sharing its politics. We claim to want the experience – the cultural legitimacy – of dropping out, without the messy parental conversations. We have become too sincere not to care and too invested in institutions to be cynical about them.

This produces the tension that we have falsely described as nostalgic – a tension that has found its creative expression in the idea of re-ordering and re-consuming the past as a form of creative expression. We liked our childhoods, and now we want to fit them into our adulthoods. We don’t want to go back to childhood. We want to integrate it into our mature, productive lives.

Baby Boomers rebelled against their parents by conducting (at least in their estimation) a wholesale overthrow of the political and cultural establishment. Gen X rebelled against their parents, incensed that trickle down economics gutted the middle class and that AIDS wrapped up the Sexual Revolution. Politics, it seemed, had failed. And so they moved to Seattle and wrote music about dropping out. Meantime, we Millennials were busy getting coddled by contrite and obsessive Boomers. We did our homework and went to college, convinced that our parents were right: it was good to obey, to live in the suburbs and listen to the Beatles. If we rebelled, it’s because we went to College X instead of University Y and majored in poetry instead of engineering.

All the while, we became master consumers, hackers, file sharers and downloaders of music. The cultural production of our childhood was always a click away.

Simply: we have never been nostalgic for the Nineties because they never left us. Nostalgia involves painful recognition of loss: the realization that it’s impossible to return to the past. Millennials are gleefully exempt from having to experience the painful side of nostalgia, at least when it comes to the reconstruction of childhood media consumption habits. We can watch Freaks and Geeks and original episodes of Beavis and Butthead while listening to Gin Blossoms and playing Streetfighter 2 online. The Internet doesn’t cause or exacerbate early-onset nostalgia; rather, it enables us to reconstruct whole aesthetic environments in the virtual space, allowing us to avoid nostalgia by eliminating our sense of having a past.

Instead, we use virtual space as a way of reconstructing and re-experiencing our childhoods. We are remixers, twenty-first century fans of Art for Art’s Sake, and we share our love of our childhood with everyone. The pain of loss becomes obsolete (or at least, easy enough to ignore) when one can find 898,285 other folks who have clicked ‘Like’ on the Ren and Stimpy Facebook page.

But if we want a future – if we want to move forward – we need to figure out how to rebel. We need to own up to the broken parts and fix them. For Millennials to grow up, we may need to let go and learn how to hate (at least some of) the 90s.

By examining changing genres, new lyrical constructions and trending images, critics reveal insights about people’s activities and attitudes. It’s no secret that songs are rich artifacts for analysis. Look to the endless citations of Dylan and Cobain for past examples of how musicologists have read into cultural codes and conventions. As for this generation, the Millennial one that so much business literature seems to characterize as ‘elusive’ – well – song lyrics have never interpreted culture so exactly as they do right now of us. Take a listen. You’ll find the work of interpretation is already done for you. Where yesterday’s lyricists communicated a sense of the day by collaging its metonymic parts – juxtaposing timely images and references that piece together the generational spirit – today’s pop performers just state it outright. The gap between the text of the song and the activities it imitates thins out of existence.

Cultural commentator Sarah Liss draws attention to this trend in songwriting, specifically in those lyrics recounting the party. Citing Lady Gaga’s Just Dance and LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem as examples, she calls it “Absurdly Literal Party Pop.” In the more manufactured-feeling, top-down pop, it’s a trend that seems to have resisted the generation defining ‘indy-fication’ of everything else. Formally, it tends to be house or electro music, restructured to the traditional verse-chorus format, usually with elements of rap. There are clear conventions of content too, as evidenced in the similarities among Katy Perry’s heroic couplet “yeah we danced on table tops / and we took too many shots,” Gaga’s inquisitive “I’ve had a little bit too much…what’s the name of this club?” and Ke$ha’s determination in “pulling up to the parties / trying to get a bit tipsy.”

Conventions? Yes. Codes? Not so much. Millennials like to think we’re authentic. We are just so comfortable sharing our lives with everyone, including our ‘peer-ents’, that we no longer feel the need to encode our party. So instead of titles like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, we get Shots (shots, shots, shots … shots, shots) and Rihanna’s Cheers (Drink To That). The literal lyrics are not just designed to describe what Liss calls “great feats of partying” though. They also relay the more mundane details. Why do we need to know that Miley Cyrus “pulled up to the club in a taxi cab?”

These songs aren’t composed of symbols so much as they are of tweets, the sort of banal ones that are the reason you haven’t been on your Twitter account in months. ‘Absurdly Literal Party Pop’ reflects the greater trend that makes life easy for those marketers trying to understand Millennials: our unprecedented willingness to share. We go unashamed of our social activities. We self-actualize by being honest (proud) about our recklessness as well as our ordinariness. And we leave nothing to interpretation about our shot-drinking rituals.

The absolute directness of poetic intention is telling in itself and reveals insights across the pop-scape. Contemporary R&B had its last golden age around the turn of the millennium with Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Aaliyah. Since then, the genre has been more or less static with the exception of megastars Usher and Beyoncé dominating the 2000s. But recently there’s been an R&B resurgence disrupting some of the conventions of the last decade. The new performers are mostly male, the sound is uncharacteristically dark for the genre and the mood is altogether maudlin.

Associated with the down-beat and down-tempo sounds of The Dream, How to Dress Well, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, the Dark R&B trend owes much of its woozy vibe to UK dub-step/R&B acts like Burial and SBTRCT as well as mid-west drag artists like Salem – and on a deeper level the Texas chop-and-screwed movement that’s influenced all of the above.

In contrast to Usher and Beyoncé’s at-the-club records and the sweeter bedroom-ballads of the 90s, Dark R&B is distinctly ‘after-hours party music.’ Characterized sonically by deep, synthesized base, skuffing syncopated percussion and eerie disembodied vocals, it’s a mopey take on subjects that musicians usually celebrate as part of the good life: sex and drugs.

Take, for example, The Weeknd. His music is centrally about his numbness to and from sex and drugs. It serves as a mood enhancer for the regret and anxiety one feels as his high comes down. Read this as an effect of the value system so bluntly expressed in our first trend, the fact that Millennials are over-partied. As a result, we have a whole genre of sinister pop music padded by a bassy motif of numbness. Frank Ocean’s “Novacane” is about painkillers only so much as it’s about not feeling anything about anything. It contains elements of humor, but there is an underlying awareness that I would generalize is held across our generation. We’re worried about the numbness of our own apathy, our apolitical tendencies and our nihilism.

On his song We All Try, Ocean croons with hope and concern, “I just don’t believe we’re wicked, I know that we’re sick, but I do believe we try.” The signs behind the genre are entangled with complex and contradictory Millennial attitudes and behaviors. If you’re looking for an insightful and actionable takeaway, here it is: For Millennials, ‘being cool’ falls at the recognition of our own alienation, loneliness and disaffected  yearning…and freaky but meaningless sex. In other words – Millennials like vampire stuff (but you already knew that).

Whether it was the open-air festivals of the 60s and 70s, the park parties of the 1980s, the block parties and roller-rink revivals of the 1990s or the post-rave mega clubs of the 2000s – music and party events have long been set in massive spaces and attended by masses of people. Today, we’re seeing a distinct shift in that relationship to size and space with an apparent shift in Hip Hop from the club to the dinner table. Call it the ‘miniaturization of the party.’ Artists like Drake and Kid Cudi (who also partake in the Dark R&B trend) are delivering images of fine dining with their curated friends. Their respective videos for Headlines and Pursuit of Happiness feature small groups of people arranged around long, elegant wooden tables that are set with silverware and bottles of wine – a far cry from 50 Cent’s 2004 In Da Club.

Gone are the days of inclusivity, the makeshift Bronx block parties, the fridges full of forties and bikini girls for all. And going are the days of grotesque mega clubs. Hip Hop is the litmus test, and today’s celebrations in that genre are taking place in private rooms with very short guest lists. They’re as decadent as ever and still about displaying access to resources, but doing so with an air of grown-up sophistication that has upped the ante by once again switching the currency of cultural capital. Anyone can go to the club and act
out a circa 2005 rap video. Not everyone can get a private table on an intimate hotel rooftop. Who really wants to swag-surf in crowded public spaces anyway? That’s what the Internet is for. Life is a photo shoot, not a live show. Millennials are both model and photographer, eager to broadcast every moment through TwitPic and UStream.

Conspicuous consumption persists in the age of social media, but that’s not particularly unique to Hip Hop or Millennials. If there’s an insight behind the shrinking of the party, it’s about cultivating meaningful relationships. We want to spend our time with our real friends, not strangers, acquaintances or ‘contacts’ in big anonymous nightclubs. So when Drake brags about making “reservations for twenty” or blowing “like 50K on a vacation” for all his pals, it’s about more than advertising the benefits of being part of his exclusive tribe. It’s about spending quality time, a personal expression of gratitude and reciprocation for the loyalty of best friends. And, in typical Millennial fashion, it’s one that you can experience for yourself on his blog.

Consider that a bunch of us have put together a series of articles such as this, in a venue such as this; it’s illuminative of several things, we love to share; we are less rebellious than Baby Boomers; more unabashedly ambitious than Gen-Xers and more willing to collaborate with ‘old people’ than either. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” simply doesn’t apply. Yet, we’re called ‘Generation Me,’ having grown up in the age of instant gratification and information on demand.

In part, this magazine feature – whose objective is just to tune into the tone of things – plays out a narcissistic ritual that repeats every generation: the desire and subsequent activity of a social group to explain itself.

The objective here though, we’d like to think, is a more pressing kind of ego, bending into the notion of (self) improvement and looping again to the expression of it. We’re a culture of perpetual learning and enhancing, manifested in how-to youtube videos, the popularity of TED talks, self-help literature and DIY activities. What’s often termed as Millennial ‘entitlement’ instead comes from an ingrained sense, an escalating level of expectation. There is a feeling – probably because of the rapid technological progress that we’re used to – that things must always be better. Everything. Our cities. Our selves. Even our iPhones should be better. In products and transactions, we expect ease, elegance, efficiency and effectiveness, and notably inexpensiveness. Your generation can make compromises. Ours will, politely, make stuff better.

The articles that follow are light-hearted but critical, of organizations, of entertain-ment and of our Millennial selves. If you can believe it, ‘worry’ emerges as a pervasive mood of Generation Y. It’s what propels the accelerated innovation and improvement culture that we’re known for. Here, albeit with tinges of sarcasm, Gen-X residue and that post-ironic hipster thing we can’t seem to shake, the Millennial voice is a voice of concern, worried not just about the things we’re supposed to be worried about (the environment, the economy, the either volatile or impotent political climates), but frequently, worried that we’re not worried enough. That given the state of things, the tone should be ‘worried to the point of madness,’ but is instead lightly complacent.

Indulgent as it may be, the project of a generation to articulate itself is a significant one. Millennials do it constantly: the generation that de- and re-constructs itself, curates itself into some sense of itself – screaming ‘existence’ as we push forth feelers into the friend-worked air. Our energy shows itself circuiting. Gravely concerned and outwardly happy, the Millennial current galvanizes where worry and optimism move in conjunction. ////

Tell us a little bit about yourself as an insights person.

Good insights are developed through the integration of various points of information

I have made various transitions from the client to the ad agency side, small entrepreneurial companies to larger fortune 500 companies, packaged goods to retail, and brand centric to center of expertise roles across portfolios. All of these perspectives were very different, and ultimately helped to solidify why taking a 360 view is so important when trying to uncover core motivations to develop something that will truly delight consumers. Ultimately, these transitions brought about stronger insights, and elevated the importance of business application/translation of insight to execution.

At Clorox, what is an insight? What does the word ‘insight’ even mean? And what makes an insight valuable?
Keeping it simple, an insight is only as good as the action taken. Good insights are developed through the integration of various points of information (consumer, customer, marketplace dynamics) to develop a unique understanding of the motivations, behaviors and desired experiences of the consumer. We use our collective experiences and business acumen to then formulate what it means for our brands. However, it doesn’t stop there; the development of the insight and recommendation is not sufficient. It has to then translate into relevant execution to be a truly meaningful insight.

How are insights cultivated at Clorox: internally, through a partner and why?
At Clorox, we take a 360 approach. The 360 view plays out throughout the process, from early development through final execution of an initiative. We develop insights taking a collective view including: the user lens (desired end user experience), the shopper lens (desired shopping experience), the external lens (forces, factors, trends that influence behavior), and consumer lens (core motivation and relevance). We partner with R&D, Brand Marketing, and Sales throughout the process to ensure that the insights are leveraged from the kernel of the idea to the execution of the consumer-facing proposition. The key to success is the integration of insight and business partnership that leads to initiatives that truly delight our consumers.

How are insights socialized and brought to life at Clorox so that people not involved in cultivating them feel invested in them?
The business partners and leadership teams are integrated into the insight process using regular check-ins to build on ideas, and to discuss issues and concerns. Insights are socialized in various forms depending on the audience and topic. Presentations can range from visual story telling (quotes, videos, pictures) to numbers and graphs depicting size of the opportunity. For all of our brands, we post 360 views on an internal portal to keep everyone grounded in the fundamental consumer truths and dynamics of the business.

Can you share an example of an insight that has led to a specific business success at Clorox?
An example of this 360 effort in action is the recent work on the Glad business. There were diverging trends and behaviors that created the challenge – an overarching sustainability movement, yet consumers weren’t able to pay more for a more sustainable option with the economic downturn and they weren’t willing to make tradeoffs in product performance (there is nothing worse than a failed trash bag experience). Our 360 approach enabled us to crack the code. It allowed us embrace the diverging trends and behaviors, integrate and translate them into a positive proposition for our consumers. As a result, this fall we launched a new product improvement on the Glad Tall Kitchen trash bags that are now “stronger with less plastic waste” (at no extra cost to the consumer). The most important part of the process was developing the insights to ensure that the execution of this proposition was done in meaningful way – through strong product delivery, relevant marketing communications, and elevated presence at retail. ////

Wendy Fitzgerald is the Director of Global Insights for the Specialty Division at Clorox. Throughout her career she has developed new processes and practices for new product innovation, customer experience and marketing communications. She is based in Oakland, United States.