MEANING ANALYSIS ON HUMAN EXISTENCE IN MILLENNIAL ERA

Millennial generally refers to the generation of people born between the early 1980s and 1990s. Millennial have been characterized in a number of different ways. On the negative side, they've been described as lazy, narcissistic and prone to jump from job to job (Ron Alsop, 2008). Then, millennial is about narcissistic, they’re lazy, they’re coddled and even a bit delusional. The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that's now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982 (Joel Stein, 2013). As a group, Millennial are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. Strauss and Howe (1991) have defined a generation as “the aggregate of all people born over a span of roughly twenty years or about the length of one phase of life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and old age.” So, a generation is a group sharing an “age location in history”, such that they face key historical events and social trends during the same period of life. Each generation that experiences the same events within the same time span having similar values and world views, sharing cultural, political and economic experience.

Nowadays, the culture of consumerism that we constantly receive will surely gradually grow and become a culture owned by millennial generation. In addition, Indonesia has one of the fastest growing consumer markets in the world (McKinsey & Company, 2014). The high consumerism culture among Indonesian youth is primarily a result of internet availability and social media. Social media networks are growing so fast and popular, millennial generation not far from the word internet and gadgets. Then, as we can see Indonesian kids can access the internet easily using their gadgets. They can open youtube app with easily, usually they imitate adult people around them.

Internet and gadget in modern era is a set that cannot be separated. Social media has an important role for millennial. Today, social media is a term that everyone knows. They can do anything by simply connecting the internet access. The internet moved into the era of blogging and instant messaging. By the year 2000, around 100 million people had access to the internet, and it became quite common for people to be engaged socially online. Then, back in the early 2000’s the website MySpace was the popular place to set up a profile and make friends. Another innovation is facebook app. They can write it down, upload some photos, and to connect with each other to network, find jobs and socialize. According to Benjamin Hale (2006), the popularity of text messaging or SMS inspired Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams to create Twitter, a service that had the unique distinction of allowing users to send “tweets” of 140 characters or less. One of the things that started happening right in this time period is that social media not only became widely used, it also became widespread in business. One of the things that started happening right in this time period is that social media not only became widely used, it also became widespread in business. Nowadays, instagram is the one of favorite application. Instagram to the kind of person that communicates through photographs best.

            Nowadays, people judge and measure a person's life based on something they post in social media. An example, someone celebrates their friend's birthday, and they just concern and focus in their insta story on instagram app. They are not focused on that surprise, but all of his friends stayed in their phone especially in their insta story. Another example, their existence and their feelings or emotion can be easily detected through their social media. Then, almost all of their activities took place in social media. Advertisement above tells about post something in social media is important and post something can show their existences.

            One of social issues is the content of social media is more important than the real world. Example of this issue is surprise birthday party. That day, we are celebrating surprise birthday party with secretly, but not this time, they give a fabulous surprise to be post in their social media and so people know that it's a fancy surprise. Actually based on advertisement above, when we see the concert, we all raise our hands so we can record the concert and post it to social media. That issue mostly done by the millennial rather than the older generation, they enjoy the moment. Millennial generations do that to be recognized by the people around. So that, their society was judge that he/she is capable and is at the upper class if it has seen expensive concerts. Then, this indicates that post something to recognize their existence and also their social stratum.