As Millennials find maturity, traits Boomers found so insufferable—work-life balance, collaboration, sharing personal details—are the same qualities that manifest the change needed for society to move towards The Great Turning. ¹ 

• Work-life balance enables focus. We need to immerse ourselves in what we’re doing so we can produce quality performance and enrich our experience. We find focus in short supply amidst the distractions, but by achieving work-life balance, we carve out the bandwidth and energy to focus.
• Collaboration enables creativity. Our ideas aren’t ‘ours’, we are part of shared conversations and movements. We contribute to these by figuring out the best ways to collaborate.
• Sharing personal details enables collective healing. Shame grows in darkness. As we open ourselves with poise, we cut through that shame. We’re better able to work together, replacing the hesitant energy of hiding and feeling each other out with the can-do spirit of connection and acting for humanity’s highest good.

The last item is the real sticking point. The mere idea of sharing personal struggles makes many squirm in a big way. When I started writing this blog, I first wanted to be closed off in what I communicated, keeping things on topic. That’s shifting because I notice myself drawn to figures who write with vulnerable courage and break new cultural ground. We can frame confession as giving our power away. My gut and heart tell me to exit this power-obsessed fear and step into the grounded ‘let’s have a go’ of the Metamodern. Millennials possess a drive to share because we’re working out a shift in the culture. When we answer the call to right vulnerability, we create more freedom for our individual journey and more potential for humanity to shift in a productive direction.

NOTES

¹  I prefer Sloterdijk’s The Global Immunology to refer to more or less the same thing, but I found no handy links with descriptions for that term.