Hide your funk! Here comes the Mi3Ls.

It happened in a flash last night that I finally realized how “plugged-in” I was — or wasn’t — in today’s technopalooza world. (Note: I don’t know what, if anything, “technopalooza” means but I thought it was a good word to insert since nothing else came to mind at the time. Needless to say, the word infers a technologically all-encompassing society. Feel free to use any other word that you want!)

My friend Paul, who lives in Tokyo, and I communicate with one another by e-mail, Facebook posts and Facebook sort-of real-time chats. We were friends in college and lost touch with one another. We recently discovered the other was still alive through Facebook or Classmates.com. I don’t remember which one. We have not actually talked to each other for somewhere around 26 years.

Those modes of communication also go for my contacting other, though certainly not all, friends. Also, some of the friends with whom I keep in contact, be it through chat, e-mail and post — oh and I forgot ye ole EFD — I have actually seen live and in person and perhaps talked with by cell more recently than in Paul’s case.

Paul posted on Facebook a quiz by which a number can be attained to put one’s self up against the so-called “Millennials.”

Millennials are the generation of those teens and 20-somethings who are coming of age as adults at the start of a new millennium. A recent study by the Pew Research Center looks at the characteristics of this new crop of young adults and found some interesting although sometimes, not-so-surprising, traits. The quiz on Facebook was likewise revealing though I was not greatly astounded by the results. You can take the quiz here and you don’t have to be on Facebook to do so.

One who has paid the slightest bit of attention to what has gone on around them  during their lives — and can still remember things reasonably well — should not really be surprised that the Millennials are in general:

” … more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.”

As well one has to have been in a coma for the last few years to not know that the Millennials (Mi3Ls–hey I made that up just now!) have suffered setbacks in their first jobs courtesy of what Pew now pegs as, the “Great Recession.” That this generation is unfailingly plugged in to different modes of communication and self-expression such as Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc. — 83 percent of the Mi3Ls surveyed sleep next to their cell phones compared to my Boomers at 50 percent — should also raise a great “duh” from someone who has a fraction of awareness of our current society. And that includes those who have a penchant for using “duh” as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc. I kind of like “etc.,” don’t you?

What I believe the Pew study does exhibit very well is in their conclusion that the Millennial generation are, for the most part, kinder and gentler than previous generations. One can only hope that is more literal than the rhetorical term President George Bush the First used.

The study and quiz, as well, allows some reflection and some introspection (I feel some 70s soul slippin’ in, now) into how in touch one is in the larger sense of the word. I scored 22 on the quiz, which puts me about smack dab in the middle of the profile between Baby Boomer and Generation X, which would seem fairly logical because I was born in the middle of the Boomer years.

I am sure there are all sorts of variables these researchers kept in mind during the study. This sort of thing is where sociology and statistics and economics all merge, the latter two makes me dizzy even though I work somewhat in the last field. But from this research it does somewhat startle me when I think of just how much I have grasped technology — or it has grasped me — in really just the last 15 years or so.

This research and self-reflection somehow has made me feel relevant. I think were I to explain how I would question my relevancy my head would explode. But that is the good I see from such knowledge in my own personal way. What more can an old aging Baby Boomer ask for, relevancy and hope for the future, and perhaps, the entire Beatles collection?