Idiosyncratic Filipino Post Millennial “The Advance

Mag-isip Generation”

Filipinos are known because of their unique characteristics.

As stated by Escalona, 2017, “They’re a lot of fun”. Aside from
their “laughter is the best medicine” outlook on life, Filipinos
are simply a lot of fun to be around with. Meet a Filipino for
the first time and they will seem like the shyest wallflower. But
throw them into their group of friends and family and they
transform into a completely different person. Though it may take
some time to get Filipinos to be comfortable with you, but once
they are, they shift into their talkative, silly, karaoke-loving
selves. When they bring out the pansit, lumpia, and Magic Sing,
you know a Filipino party is about to go down and you’re going to
enjoy every minute of it.” Filipinos are friendly and they love
to sing and drink, they enjoy celebrating and hanging out with
family, friends, and other group of companions. They share their
happiness to each other every single minute of time they are
being together. That is one of the characteristics of Filipinos
that is known to be different from other countries, and even
centuries had passed through different generation, still the
cheerfulness and fun-loving approach to life of Filipinos
remains.

Today Post millennials took over from the old generation.

Generation Z has their own set of idiosyncrasies that will
identify them from their preceding generation (Mondon, 2017).
Base on Merriam Webster dictionary, “Idiosyncrasies” means “an
unusual way in which a particular person behaves or thinks”.
Generation Z is popular among the past generations because of
their different and unique characteristic (positively and
negatively). Based from the article published by Clark(2019), the
Generation Z are characterized as financially focused,
entrepreneurial, all about technology, enjoys other people,
competitive, changed is welcomed, prefers independence, wants to
be heard, can be a lot like their parents, and has a focus group
of one.

Here in Philippines, post millennials are in different

level, they declare themselves as “advance mag-isip” which means
“advance thinking”. As stated by Olsim (2018), the “advance akong
mag-isip” meme is probably the funniest Filipino meme I’ve
encountered since I made my Facebook account 8 or 9 years ago.
For those who live under a rock, or those who have not visited
their social media pages for some time, the meme came from the
interview of a young call center agent who was recently arrested
for dealing of illegal drugs. He justified his actions by saying
that he had envisioned himself using the drug money to improve
the local economy, or to do good for the country by running for
public office – according to him, that is how advance his mind
works. The social media then exploded with the funniest
expressions and quotes using “advance akong mag-isip” as the
final punchline – “di na ako gagawa nang homework, babagsak din
naman ako...advance akong mag-isip!” Because of social media’s
powerful influences, generation Z started to adopt it and made it
one of their language and expression.

They (the post millennials) came up to make a lot of terms

or phrases that is popular in and only to be understood in the
Philippines like the words, “werpa” that is scrambled and spelled
different which means power, another one is “lodi” which is
spelled backwards for idol, and other words like “erpat”
(father), “ermat” (mother), etc. Post millennials are
idiosyncratic (Mondon, 2017). There is this phrase “san ka? Or
saan ka?” which means, “where are you?” and because “advance sila
mag-isip” generation Z came up to a new meaning not literally but
in a philosophical way. Instead of the meaning “where are you?”
the phrase “san ka?” turned out to be a term which meant to be
understood by generation z as to influence someone or invite
someone to hang out with friends in a way of having a drink and a
momentous night. In social media, teenagers screen shot their
conversations with their friend saying, subject A (the friend):
“pre san ka?”, “pre” is a term for bro or brother. Subject B:
“wag mo akong dinedemonyo”, it means “do not influence (negative
influence) me” and posting it on their Facebook accounts making
fun of it with sarcastic caption.

The “advance mag-isip” is one of the memes that became

popular to Filipinos.

In Addition, because of the Generation Z having an

idiosyncratic attitude, varieties of different Filipino words had
been created. Recently, the most used word by the post millennial
is the word “Awit” which was observed on the Social Media. The
term “Awit” was derived from the word “nga-nga” which implicated
a person encountering a scenario in which he or she could do
nothing about but left himself just staring at the current scene.

The idiosyncrasies of the Filipino teens today, specifically

the Generation Z had been strongly hit by the impact of the
world-wide social media where in you can invent something easily
just by the click of your fingers. According to Fotis, 2015,
Social Media is guiding people on expressing and sharing ideas,
thoughts, and opinions to others. This being said, we can say
that generation Z had their minds evolved in order to fit the
upgrading media. “Social Media has created an online culture that
encourages users to show off whatever they can.”(The Blog, 2014).
This explains why some users are famous on social media. By
showing off what they have that other users might not have or by
having something that is common with other users, either way it
would have a click in the minds of the users that “I like him
because we are the same,” stating the he wants an specific person
because they might have mutual outlooks to life or “I like her
because she’s better than me,” meaning he wants the person for
having better characteristics than himself and he might end up
using that person to make himself as a better one.

Generation Z had been involved more in the virtual world of

the social media than the real world. Have you wondered how the
technology around them shaped them as an individual? It is a
common observation that people from all age groups who are
engaged to the technological world shapes their society
standards. Generation Z had the ability to absorb tons of new
information everyday (Steve Robertson, 2018). Thus, the famous
taglines, “sana all” (someone hoping to be have something he
doesn’t have) for example, a person who has single status saw a
couple being sweet together, hi might end up saying the phrase
sana all wishing to have also a woman he can create happy moments
with, and “Bakit ka umuwi ng bahay?” (a conversation of a mother
and her daughter or son by asking why did he went home, and the
son responses with different explanations that is related to the
current situations teens are currently experiencing within this
generation. And the words, “sahled” which was actually solid,
“erp” which was actually “pre” are created by the advance
mentality of the Filipino youth as of the generation today, the
generation Z.

According to Bruce (2018), an expatriate had adopted some

idiosyncrasies of the Filipinos by living in the Philippines for
too long. These includes “language is not a barrier,” for
example, the term “jowa” is a gay language which means boyfriend
or girlfriend in English. Another one, “ice in your beer,” which
is an act of Filipinos placing an ice in their beer for a cold
drink due to the hot weather in the country. Also, “shoes off,
please” which is a customary for any visitor to remove any
footwear he is wearing as a courtesy to the owner of the house
before entering.

The Sciences Engineering Medicine of 2003, said that the

extended period of youth or post adolescence, in other words
teens, is filled with experimentation. This is related to the
attitude of Filipino youths or any other youths of different
nationalities of being empirically having the urge to try new
things in almost any day. This is because they want to gain
popularity in the society. In this generation, once you
introduced something new on social media, you became to be one of
the talk of social media. By observing how the generation Z can
create famous lines in a year, we can keep count of how many
famous taglines and peculiar words had been made trending and
used nationwide in the Philippines. For example, the video of a
girl who sneezed and sung at the same time saying that it’s the
normal way she sneezes, which became trending online, especially
on Facebook, had created many memes and funny imitations that had
made social media wild and crazy for over a night. The girl on
the certain video had the inner strength to post in online and
she did not expect it to become trending, earning thousands of
shares and millions of reactions.

The youths of today also had become too dependent on social

media that it dictates what they feel about themselves. It is
impossible for something accidentally posted to be deleted again
to not have been noticed by someone. Knowing that billions of
users are there in the world, what you post can be seen by
thousands of people in just a minute. You may have removed it but
others may have copies obtained only by screenshots on the phone
screens. “The search for Truth”, according to Francis and Hoefel
of McKinsey and Company is the main spur for the Generation Z.
Humans are born curious but the generation Z is way more curious
than what we can imagine. Because of the constant curiosity of
these generation idiosyncrasies are born and can continue to grow
as years pass by. The endless curiosity of these generations
turns them to explore things unexplored and might create better
things than other things in their minds. Because of this, the
research and innovation exists.

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were.

But without it we go nowhere”, Carl Sagan said. Even a young mind
can create something extraordinary with the utilization of the
minds creativity and applying what we have learned to reality.
Due to the never-ending inquisitiveness of our mind, we always
lean towards forming new derived words that will result into the
popularity of our own uniqueness.

This concludes that as the modern times grow, things will

always change the way it was used to be from generation to
generation.