Why Generation Y Might Have it Right
They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and when I call my son
into my office to help me with a computer problem, I believe it. I’ve always
considered myself a hip guy, I’m certainly nothing like my depression-era parents
who believed in two economic forces: hard-work and real estate. Pinching pennies
wasn’t even an option for them, it was just a fact, but investing in property
and working your fingers to the bone was their version of investing in the stock
market.
I guess that’s why it hit me so hard that I was as far away from Generation
Y as my parents were to me.
I invest in stocks, it has always made money given enough time, and even when
you do poorly you wind up doing well if you diversify. Compared to my parents
I’m advanced, they still think that real-estate is the only way to make money
and the stock-market is just another form of gambling (and in principle they
ARE right). However, I feel the same way about investing in websites, penny-stocks,
and Adsense revenue as my parents feel about the stock market…and the evidence
is slowly proving that I might be wrong.
I have heard no end of self-made millionaires due to investments in penny-stocks
and web based companies, and to my chagrin the statistics support it. Let’s
not forget ground breaking books like Friedman’s “The World Is Flat”,
and dozens of other who keep pointing out that the nature of the globe is changing,
and I find myself being left behind by this “Generation Y”.
A generation that not long ago I was criticizing for not being in-tune with
values and reality is quickly demonstrating that they are more in sync than
myself when it comes to how the global economy works.
So as this world turns just another revolution, I think what many of us Boomers
need to ask ourselves is, “Do I stick to the relics of my past for contentment,
or do I take the scary plunge and join the flow of humanity to survive?”
