I am an entrepreneur, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in South Africa around the end of Apartheid, now living in London. I am currently establishing a new music business model through my MySpace profile (www.myspace.com/russellmichael) that aims to deliver new product on an almost weekly basis, along with other non-musical (yet very creative) business ventures.

I started to contemplate the question, “Is Generation Y conservative or liberal?” and then the “Gen Y” in me suddenly had the urge to try to define what being conservative or liberal actually meant. For the briefest moment I thought I’d try and get a definition from a dictionary source – but that evaporated very quickly. As a good Gen-Yer I have to define everything for myself.

I think the reason for this is that we have had so many conflicting informational sources growing up, we no longer rely on other people’s definition of anything. I imagine that advertisers must find it really hard to advertise to us because we innately don’t trust any mass-produced message.

Back to the quandary of defining being conservative or liberal:

Per “Russell’s Dictionary,” conservatism or liberalism is defined as being more or less ‘stuffy’ than your parents. That said, if you are Ozzie Osborne’s kid and you only drink hard liquor but don’t do drugs, you’re a conservative; and if you are Bill Gate’s clean-living kid that cares nothing for business and only for the arts, you’re a liberal.

I hate to say it, but as Gen-Yers our parents have defined our reality.

While in the past there was a greater collective truth that people could associate themselves with (as a result of less personalized media), us Gen Yers now only have our mini family units (however dysfunctional they may be) to define ourselves against. We are now constantly trying to do better than our ‘ancestors,’ and want to make sure that we don’t have the gaping holes in our lives that they had.

Case in point: although seeing daddy Ozzie crippled by drug addiction garners your decision to ‘just say no’ – but you still enjoy a tray of shooters – makes you conservative in your eyes, according to society norms, you’re living on the wild side. The same principal applies to Bill Gates’ clean-living kid. While he shuns the family fortune to become an artist  – yet hangs on to that trust fund – makes him a liberal in his eyes, he is still pretty tame considering societal norms.

And so I come to this conclusion – the answer to the question of ‘Is Generation Y conservative or liberal?’ is another question – Who’s your daddy?