They bet that time would make us complacent.
“With age, you will naturally become conservative,” the elders used to say.
It was a promise that the rebellion of youth would transform into the maintenance of the status quo. But reality is coming, and what we are witnessing is not a lean toward the right, but the same critical views holding steady.
Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, are staying liberal, though in the same time, their belief in democracy is shattering.
How to explain that phenomenon?
Perhaps it’s just research bias, limited to the US or Europe. Yet other countries show the same pattern. Some research included countries from the Global South – Chile, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea. The same pattern exists.
The collapse of the meritocratic promise.
Salaries have stagnated. At the same time, the cost of education, housing, and health care keeps climbing.
We are the generation that studied the most, mastered multiple languages, and stacked postgraduate degrees—only to collide with a post-Reagan and Thatcher market that prioritizes capital above human dignity.
The fracture began in 1971.
Since 1971, the world has seen a dramatic divergence: productivity continued to climb while real wages for the average worker remained stagnant.
That’s the structural failure that has trapped our generation.
Other graphics, like work pay, productivity, real GDP, income concentration, the rise of fascist governments, all point back to those decisions made in the past. Even the price of tomato soup didn’t escape it.
Making neoliberalism the radical platform for us to move forward carries the deepest consequences for the new generations.
We are not “always complaining”, we are the engine of a system that rewards us with debt and the uncertainty of a social safety net that may never exist.
In a fast-changing world with multiple crises and wars, being positive is a real fight.
The tendency of today’s system is to isolate us and our response must be rooted in collective action. Our struggle for social causes is not a whisper from the past, but an urgent necessity.
We carry the hope of transformation. We know that hope cannot be just a feeling, it must be a tool for measurable change. We continue to challenge the system, not out of stubbornness, but because we understand that “success” within an exploitative model is an ethical failure.
Our role now is to co-create paths so that new generations are not just survivors, but architects of a world where work does not mean dehumanization.
At Chameleonic, we use Human-Centered Design to put people – their voices, context, and culture – at the core of every strategy. We continue to co-create paths so that new generations are not just survivors, but architects of a world where work does not mean dehumanization.