Interesting Study.
Stanford University in California did a study to determine the difference between the response a person 65+ years old has to winning/losing money and the response a member of Generation Y has to winning/losing money.
The participants were shown cues that they could either win money or lose money. Their brain activity was monitored throughout the experiment to show what their anxiety level rose to. The participants also had to rate their excitement and anxiety based on how they were feeling.
The researchers found that both the self-reports of how they felt and the brain monitoring showed that the Gen Y’ers got much more anxious about the prospect of losing money than the 65+ participants. When it came to the excitement of the prospect of winning money, the responses were the same regardless of age.
It’s interesting to think about the economic fear that Generation Y is experiencing for the first time. We grew up during the internet boom years, our parents worked really hard to provide for us and the economy has been strong for pretty much as far back as we can remember. The disastrous economy right now hasn’t been easy for us to stomach, while our grandparents can sit back and say, “yeah, yeah, we’ve been through this before.”
We could probably take some notes from our grandparents in this department – maybe being a little more frugal, living closer to our means, and for goodness sake stop consuming so much stuff. I don’t want it to come to the point of food rations, bans on nylon, and cutting out everything except the absolute necessities of life like our grandparents did during the depression, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it? We could probably stand to be more conscious of what we’re buying, use less electricity and water, recycle bags and containers, the list of ways to save money and help out a little goes on and on … and maybe we’d all be a little less stressed out!
