It's Saturday night and I'm waiting for the second Democratic debate to kick off. My roommates are in the other room setting their fantasy football lineups.
It's been a huge year for fantasy sports, if you haven't noticed. It's hard to go a day without seeing a FanDuel or DraftKings commercial, usually featuring an average guy telling you how much money he won and how much you're missing out.
It's also a huge year for politics. After seven long years, the Obama-era has reached its final chapter. In 2016, the United States of America will elect its 45th President and the next chapter of American history will begin.
However, you wouldn't know that we're a nation on the brink of political transformation if you observed my roommates on debate night. It's business as usual here. One roommate is watching SportsCenter, another is arguing DeMarco Murray's upside, and a third is simulating an entire season of Madden 2016.
But before you call my roommates a bunch of ignorant jocks, I should tell you: they're all smart, college graduates who have good jobs and watch sports to relax. Fantasy football is by no means a distraction for them. It's an extension of their love for sports. Plus it has the added value of paying out cash.
Besides, it's not that they don't care about politics. They do. But they also do have a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to presidential elections. After all, they saw what happened to Al Gore in Florida in 2000, and that really left a stain.
Like many young people, my roommates don't feel connected to the political process. They view American politics as a corrupt system controlled by big money, which serves the interests of big money, and functions this way with or without their participation. My roommates aren't the only ones who feel this way.
In general, Millennials report feeling disconnected from American politics. No wonder political science is a dying major. No wonder 18-through-24-year-old voting rates declined from over 50 percent in 1964 to just 38 percent in 2012.
Millennials are also unique in that they're getting married and buying homes later than the generations before them. Take my roommates, for example. As 24-year-olds, they don't have much skin in the political game. In other words, none of them have children and none of them own real estate. In their minds, they don't have all that much to lose or gain from a new POTUS.
This brings me to the most important point. My roommates don't have the patience to follow a presidential election season that lasts a grueling 596 days. They live in a world where instant gratification is the expectation, where tweets are often too long to read. They'd much prefer to follow an NFL season that lasts 17 weeks than a campaign season that drags out for two years.
The fact is, short attention spans are characteristic of both Generation Y and Generation Z. Millennials and Post-Millennials are addicted to ephemeral media and consume it whenever they get the chance.
They post Snapchats and Vines and it's all about now. It's all about being concise. They're living in an increasingly on-demand society where they can't even wait for cabs anymore. They've created, and were created by, the age of impatience.
It seems abundantly clear that if we want more young people to get involved in politics, we first need to transform the way that we inform them about our elections. That's why I decided to invent a brand new format through which to serve people political content. Last month, I released the world's first animated rap video about the 2016 election. It's a short, beautifully crafted and factually accurate music video that garnered almost 75,000 views in the first month.
Now, I'm ready to produce AN ENTIRE SERIES of animated rap videos all about the election, but I can't do it on my own. Last week, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the next phase of animation. We currently have 23 days left to hit our goal. Any help you can provide, from backing my project on Kickstarter to just telling a friend about it, would be very much appreciated!