While the hippie movement can be explained and characterized in a number of ways; it can alternatively be simply summarized as one of history’s most famous statement against the status quo.  Of course, if we flash forward to present day we’d find that the protagonists have since grown up and ironically now make up the new status quo, which seems a lot like the old one.  Stupid wars are still being fought, much of the world is underdeveloped and our economic systems are still motivated by greed.

And yet, these idealistic and enlightened youth mobilized in ways previously unimaginable to change the world. They marched en masse, they flaunted their sexually liberation and they used peaceful means to make a point especially when rallying against war. They employed novel approaches that embodied their identity and believed that the world would be a better place because of their existence.

Does this in any way sound familiar?

Change is certainly inevitable but what is less certain in the present is who exactly is driving this change. I contend that when historians look back the answer will be quite clear: young entrepreneurs.

Today’s young entrepreneurs, an increasingly rising number relative to the past, are of different bread than their predecessors. Sure, they’re still interested in making money, but the rise of social enterprise and socially-valuable web-based platforms are dramatically changing the world.  They have realized that making a statement today is best done through business after noticing that at the end of the day, your impact is typically dictated by your financial position.

A recent article asked baby boomers, many of whom come from the aforementioned generation, if they have collectively spawned a ‘failure generation’.  I couldn’t help but wonder if their parents asked the same thing when they were out there enjoying free love, drugs and rock and roll. Today’s generation is far from a failure – they are simply doing things different whether it’s the business they create, the age they marry or the point they decide to ‘grow up’.  They are making a statement and doing it most provocatively through the systems that the former hippies now understand the best.

It was this week a year ago that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the largest bankruptcy in the US history becoming the first of many crashes of the Great Recession. Although I was troubled by the event, I remember being more disturbed by my nonchalance to the fact that Lehman was $613 billion in debt. It was such an astonishing amount of money that it was barely believable. My comprehension was further confused by having grown up in the Age of Hyper-Capitalism – a period when having a million dollars became “not that much”.

This assertion would likely confirm the beliefs of those individuals who claim that the recession was a good wake up call for Generation Y. To those same people I would acknowledge that the recession has certainly re-adjusted our expectations and our perceived sense of entitlement but the real wake-up call is just how messed up a world our generation is inheriting. For this very reason, many of us have said that the recession was needed – a valid albeit insensitive belief to those that are suffering.

Many have suffered and many still will so despite economic growth here in Canada, the recession’s impact is not over. The recovery could potentially be equally as painful. Part of me feels premature, therefore, to speak to the death of the recession and assert whether or not Creativity Killed the Recession.

Given this community’s identity, it would be nice to say yes and provide a packaged response why. But this would be dangerously dishonest. The reason for this is that the recession was merely the exclamation point to realizing that capitalism is not a self-sufficient system and has largely been without a conscious for some time. Our way of life, in short, needs immense change and creativity will do lots to enact this but neither quickly nor on its own.

Creativity is a scary word for many people, victim of the innate reluctance towards change, let alone a form of it which is not incremental but defined by being dramatically different. The recession has been, however, perfect by producing the proper climate for ideas to come from the margins to the mainstream.  The fact that economic growth does not automatically translate into social or human growth, for example, was not understood so clearly until relative recently. Dismantling a society driven by the pursuit of money rather than the pursuit of happiness, however, will take time.

We are really only at the beginning for creativity. In retrospect, its not as important whether it killed the recession but rather by what it can do to re-build our planet.