Snowflake Generation? - Editorial By Chris McCahill

I wrote this because it was snowing outside.It’s a name attributed to millennials and seems synonymous with young people today. In the past I would have argued against this generalisation of my generation as maybe unfair or inaccurate. However more recently I’ve come to understand why older generations, or even our own generation attribute that name to us. It’s because we’ve become more close minded and then we find ourselves unable or maybe even unwilling to comprehend why someone else might think differently than we do. Despite attempting to portray ourselves as liberal or open minded young people, in reality, we’re rather the opposite. We saw this with Brexit and with Trump, young people refusing to accept the results, failing to understand why people could vote the way in which they did or the reasons behind them. We saw protests and movements with both attempting to overturn the results, which to me seemed neither fair or right. You may argue if either or both were flipped the situation would have been the same, possibly, even likely, but even still, the point still stands, we’ve become close minded and can’t or won’t accept when things don’t go the way we want. Social media is doubtless a major factor in causing this, we can and, in some cases, are even encouraged to create echo chambers online, we surround ourselves with like-minded, people, groups, views etc. And unsurprisingly we then find ourselves out of touch with reality and with other people and groups. What makes it worse still is our reaction to that, we become angry and upset, we insult those with contrasting views, dismiss alternative ideas and don’t take the time to consider them, we then retreat back into our self-made echo chambers and then the cycle continues. I feel this is a major reason why so many young people struggle to deal with the world today: we create a vision or idea of what the world is like and while this illusion may hold for some time it is inevitably shattered, and then we find ourselves unable to understand why.