Looking around campus, it is hard to find many people that look “motivated” to do anything but text message, Facebook and drink coffee.

We do not look like our fathers, or our grandfathers, or even like our older brothers and sisters who had to “walk up hill, both ways” to get their degree.

We would rather Facebook than listen during class, we want to watch all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls back-to-back for a week straight rather than do our homework, and we would rather celebrate with a $5 Cold Stone Love It creation than think about how we cleaned toilets for an hour to earn it.

To the outside world, it looks like we just do not care: Do you not care about the value of a dollar? Do you not care that you will not learn anything in college? Do you not care that you will have to face the “real world” when you graduate? say the generations preceding us.

Yeah, we care. But we care with a nonchalant, “Yeah” and another dip into our Cold Stone creation. To the outside world, it might look like we are lazy, and sometimes, we really are. But to those who take a second look to try to more deeply understand how Generation Y works, they see something new.

In a recent New York Times article titled, “What Gen Y really wants,” Penelope Trunk said that the concrete line between work and play has softened with the generation born after 1980. What matters to us more is that what we are doing is meaningful.

Volunteerism related to a work field, for example, is important. More than half of those in their 20s surveyed by Deloitte, a consulting firm, said that they prefer when their companies provide a chance to “give back.” “It’s a way to take the skills I learned in the corporate arena and give back to the community without leaving the company,” said Elliot Moore, 26, who works at Deloitte.

But more than that, the young 20s of today want to have meaning and purpose to what they do. On All Things Considered on NPR in March, they stated how Americans are four times wealthier than in the 1950s, but they do not report any changes in levels of happiness.

What was once so important for our parents and grandparents—to make a name for ourselves by making money—is now a lesser thought. Money is not the highest priority. Give us a cause, and we will fight for it. Give us a name of some injustice, and we will do our best to see that justice is enacted.

We are not lazy; we just do not care about putting our name on a building.

We want to have a greater purpose.

And we might cause a disturbance while doing so. “They’re like Generation X on steroids,” said Bruce Tulgan, a founder of New Haven, Connecticut-based Rainmaker Thinking, in USA Today’s article on Generation Y. “They walk in with high expectations for themselves, their employer, and their boss. If you thought you saw a clash when Generation X came into the workplace, that was the fake punch. The haymaker is coming now.”

It is not that we want to cause trouble; it is that we want to make a difference, and we want to do it in flip-flops.

So give us a break, and a chance—and while you are at it, give us a latte.