During the greed-is-good era of American history known as the 1980s, flamboyant businessman and head cheerleader of unfettered capitalism Malcolm Forbes supposedly declared, "He who dies with the most toys wins." Whether or not this precept of consumerism-run-amok rightly can be attributed to Forbes may still be subject to debate, but a generation later, the sentiment behind the quote seems to be ringing false these days, especially among Millennials.

Long before I finished graduate school with an advanced degree in psychology, I believed, as many mental health professionals do, that labeling a person or a group based on a set of traits or symptoms could do more harm than good.

Ask any Millennial what he or she can't live without and you're going to get a consistent response: "my smartphone." Millennials rely on these devices to text their friends, peruse their social networks, manage their emails, pay their monthly bills, listen to music, track their steps, hail a cab and more - "virtually" anything and everything they need to do throughout their day. They even use their unsuspecting smartphones to research, purchase and ship their smarter, faster, better replacements. (Poor smartphones. Never saw it coming.)

Do Millennials care about luxury? It's a question we hear a lot. We've done a deep-dive on the topic, and we know that the definition of luxury has blurred for the generation.

With terror threats to our nation at peak levels and risks of the deadly Ebola disease spreading throughout the globe, the world is truly a scary place at this point in time. As wonderful as it would be to assume that everyone was your friend and that we all had each others' best interests in mind, this is certainly not the case.