Plants and gardening are hobbies that suit all ages, ranging from the young to the elderly. Yet, many news outlets have reportedly called millennials the plant crazy generation. While such a headline is likely exaggerated, there is something interesting about the typical millennial’s lifestyle habits – and how plants come into the picture. Arguably, plants leave more of an impact on the lifestyle and wellbeing of an everyday millennial, compared to older generations.
Why does this matter? When it comes to lifestyle design, your physical space matters. Not everyone should own plants, because not everyone wants to grow or maintain their plants regularly. But others do not mind greenifying their workspace with some low maintenance plants.
When used tactically, plants can become a lifestyle hack that complement many areas of your life as a millennial.
Why plants suit the millennial lifestyle
Millennials and Gen Z make up around 30% of gardening households, based on a 2019 Gardening Survey. The New Yorker released a video about millennials’ houseplant jungles. It shows how some millennials have developed their collections of indoor foliage. What are the reasons for the popularity of plants amongst millennials?
Firstly, having an indoor hobby is convenient, as many more millennials are working from home and embracing work life balance.
Secondly, millennials can embrace gardening as an indoor hobby even without having backyards as places of their own. Growing and maintaining plants can be low cost and affordable. You have the choice to select the plants you want, the size of your garden, and the level of investment to put into the endeavour.
Thirdly, growing plants well is not just a skill, but an Instagrammable skill. After all, plants are aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and they are well received on social media. Younger generations connect with like minded peers through their plants.
Ultimately, there are multiple benefits of having plants around in your living and working space, especially when you spend tons of time working from home. To mention a few, plants contribute to stress relief, enhanced productivity, reduced sick days, and clean indoor air.
The benefits: Plants as a lifestyle ‘hack’
Plants reduce stress levels and enhance peace
Growing plants can take you away from your own world and work as you are caring for something else. It helps you to destress and unwind.
This helps because millennials are a stressed out bunch. Based on the results of Deloitte’s 2021 Millennial and Gen Z Survey, 41 percent of millennials said that they felt stressed all or most of the time. This is a worrying statistic, but it is unsurprising given the financial situation that millennials find themselves in.
Many millennials entered the workforce following the Great Recession, which meant that they started off with lower salaries than they would otherwise have gotten. Also, many millennials have recently graduated in the 2020 recession.
With large initial losses in income, they would end up taking ten years after graduation to recover and resume their normal income.
Thus, millennials are earning less money than previous generations. They struggled with a tough job market. They struggled with building income over the first ten years, whereby people typically experience 70 percent of their overall wage growth.
Plants are proven to manage high stress levels. Plants are a natural draw to millennials, a generation that values health, wellness, and work life balance. As a study of 444 employees has found, having plants alleviates mood and anxiety issues while enhancing job satisfaction.
Further, plants are great for the work from home crowd where work/home boundaries are blurred. Having plants around helps to transform our space, greenify it, and help us relax. If you have a bedroom office, keeping some low maintenance plants around can support cleaner air while improving productivity.
Plants are low maintenance, but fulfill a desire to nurture
If you like, you can use more plants and space to develop an indoor garden. Otherwise, owning and caring for a few desk plants is low maintenance. There are low light plants that survive indoors without requiring tons of care and watering. You have control over the number of plants you own, and how much time you spend on your plants.
On the flip side, the death of your plant is not nearly as big of a deal as when your pet dies. Most people spend less energy and time on their plants compared to their pets, and they are less emotionally attached to their plants.
Although indoor plants require low commitment, they can fulfil a need that many millennials have: the desire to care for and nurture something. Growing plants is an exercise of agency. It is rewarding to nurture living things in a small way that benefits your emotions.
Plants boost productivity
Once we get distracted, it takes us 23 minutes and 15 seconds for us to get back to the task at hand. Yes, that is how long we take to recover from a distraction and refocus, according to researchers.
On a typical workday, we can get distracted by notifications, sounds, interruptions from others, and visible clutter in our physical space.
Compared to most visual clutter in our workspace, plants are not the same. In fact, when presented with actual plants to look at, students experienced better attention and concentration levels. Interestingly, plants can “replenish” our attention capacity and draw attention back to the things we are working on.
Use plants tactically
It is about how you use your plants that impacts how effective you are.
Believe it or not, colors impact our productivity and the way we perform. The color green, brought in by plants, adds a calming atmosphere. This is why many offices nowadays use plants to add a sense of balance and harmony to their workspaces.
Tactically placing houseplants to add pops of green into your workspace and living space matters. You can experiment with the placement of your plants in order to optimise for both focus and stress relief. For instance, the next time you work on a task requiring high attention to detail, have a plant sitting on your desk. As human beings, we perform badly with visual clutter and our workspaces should be as minimalist as possible, but plants are an exception.
Of course, maintenance would be an issue if you have an entire indoor jungle of houseplants. You would have to spend time doing thorough watering, fertilising, repotting, trimming, and more to take care of the entire “ecosystem”. Go for it if it brings you joy.
If you are using just plants tactically, opt for low light houseplants that are hard to kill.
Time management is key, especially if you are a struggling millennial trying to make ends meet while working from home. Low light houseplants are a low maintenance hack. Like standing desks and smart switches, plants are a tool you have within your control in your workspace.
There are no quick fixes to becoming more effective as a millennial, as good habits need to be learned and trained.
But maintaining plants would involve setting up simple systems, just like doing cardio every afternoon to lose weight or meditating in the morning.
If these habits are your kind of thing, you will make imminent progress.