Feast your eyes on a clash of two generations:

One of which I’m square, slap bang in the middle of and one of which I keep a beady eye on from the sidelines, observing and taking notes, sometimes scratching my head and often doffing my well-worn baseball cap.

I talk, of course, of Millennials v Gen-Zs.

And, in particular, their approach to all things tech and digital.

It’s a tale of the pioneers (the Millennials) vs the natives (Gen-Z).

My flag is firmly planted in the pioneer camp.

More “accidental pioneer” perhaps.  I certainly didn’t envisage my early years of blowing dust out of Super Nintendo games cartridges and mastering minesweeper to be such a crucial step towards the digital revolution, social media boom and birth of AI.

Nor did I realise that whenever I raced into the “computer room”, unplugged the telephone line and plugged in the modem to chat to my schoolmates on MSN & AOL, it was such a quantum leap for humanity.

But there we have it.

Trailblazing in action, even if unintentional.

Nowadays things are very different.

The native, tech-savvy Gen-Zs are all at sea if they aren’t flicking through their iPhones while also watching TV, speaking to Alexa, tracking their heart rate, syncing their selfies to the cloud, and uploading the latest data from their Oura Rings.

Forget words.  They’re long gone.

In fact, forget talking at all.

It’s all memes and emojis for the digital natives.

And consequently, for most Gen-Zs, the FOBO is real.

FOBO?

Fear of being offline. 

Tech is so baked into the lives of Gen-Zs that to remove the digital devices from their sweaty little hands would literally be pulling the plug on their reality.

This might sound like I’m having a pop at Gen-Zs.

Far from it.  I’m not saying their native digital habits are any better or worse than the pioneers’.  

It’s just a very different way of doing things to what I’m used to.

And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s tech, or whether it’s work, money, relationships or anything else:

What was normal 20 years ago is no longer normal today. 

And as sure as there’s ketchup on your chips, the same will be true 20 years from now.

So why am I rabbiting on about this?

Well, in a world which is constantly changing – and where this change is accelerating – my personal (yet still accurate) view is that it’s more important than ever to find the aspects of life which don’t change.

To find the stability and constants amidst the choppy sea of variability.

When life is a swirling morass of uncertainty and changingness, the constants are the place you can set anchor.  They’re the places you can always come back to when you drift off course or get lost at sea.

Knowing that these reliable, rock solid, unchanging and unchangeable pillars exist, knowing where they are and knowing how to find them is what allows us to step into the unknown in the first place.

And the unknown is where we find our goals & dreams.

All this might sound a bit mysterious.

But as I write right now, I don’t know how else to say it.

Still, it might’ve got one or two of your itching to explore this some more.

If so, I don’t have a QR code, VR headset or voice-activated biometric identification system for you to fiddle about with.

Just a simple, old-school, bog standard link:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

That’s all for today.

- Tom