Millennials, the Dying Children
I am one of the oldest millennials. Something terrifying is happening to us. We are dying while we are still children. We men are going bald, and the ladies are starting to sag. We have graying hair. Our eyes crinkle when we smile. We have unsightly fat deposits that are going nowhere. Our joints pop in the morning. We get injured by turning around too fast. Our vision is fading. Our reflexes are slowing. Many of us know someone our age who has died of cancer, a heart attack, or some other old-age disease that occasionally strikes the middle-aged.
And we're still children.
The oldest of us are rapidly closing in on 40. We are the least married, least fecund generation in history. Really, only 30% of people under 40 are married! Big-brained thinkers blame economic conditions, largely because big-brained thinkers go through years of training to ensure they don't see what is right in front of their faces. We started coming of age in 2003, and economic conditions were nowhere close to as bad as the 1930s, 40s, or 70s, when people had little trouble marrying and procreating. Yet here we are, aging out of our ability to enjoy childhood, feeling death creep up on us. The video games have grown boring. The TV marathons are suffocating. The candy tastes like ashes in our mouths. We're committing suicide and consuming antidepressants at record rates. We try to accumulate even more, and it fails to make us happy. We don't know why, and we don't know how we got here.
Well, I'll tell you.
My entire life, the only message I got from school, or church, college, and the media was that every decision I made, from what degree to pursue, to where I lived, to whether to marry, was with the goal of having a maximally pleasurable life. True, as someone raised in a conservative church, I was warned against fornication and substance abuse, but these were framed in terms of interfering with the good life. In the 1990s, there was no difference between Christians and non-Christians in that general outlook. Both Christian and non-Christians were equally horrified at the notion that a bright young woman might not end up "maximizing her potential," which meant putting 40 hours a week into a cubicle. Both warned her against getting married too young, because marriage could cut short a promising career. Evangelicals, for their part, indulged in a pious fiction that the unmarried 25-year-olds in the church were all virgins, but still, everyone agreed that the proper way to treat the world is as your playground.
Any kind of social responsibility or context to our choice-making was completely absent from what our boomer elders told us. What is the social purpose of marriage? Conservative boomers couldn't say. They appealed to "tradition" without understanding why it existed, to a Biblical literalism that was as mindless as it was quaint, in a world where their own self-indulgent concept of marriage had led to record-smashing divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s, and my generation growing up with every weekend alternating between parents. The boomer had already set up the foundation of marriage as an exercise in self-indulgence; gay marriage came as the consequence. If marriage has a social purpose, to channel and direct human sexuality in a way that promotes social cohesion and provides for a man's progeny, then gay marriage is nonsense. It's an absurdity. But if it's just to "be happy with the person you love?" Then why not?
Similarly, we weren't told that the purpose of a job is to provide for your family. If that's the point of working, then any kind of moral imperative to put women in the workplace evaporates. Why would they want to be there? Find me a woman who dreams of providing a new car for her husband, or who feels any satisfaction at knowing that her money will be well-spent by her husband for the children, or who feels that the ability to take the husband and the kids to the beach for a weekend is worth that drudgery in the office.
I am one of the oldest millennials. Something terrifying is happening to us. We are dying while we are still children. We men are going bald, and the ladies are starting to sag. We have graying hair. Our eyes crinkle when we smile. We have unsightly fat deposits that are going nowhere. Our joints pop in the morning. We get injured by turning around too fast. Our vision is fading. Our reflexes are slowing. Many of us know someone our age who has died of cancer, a heart attack, or some other old-age disease that occasionally strikes the middle-aged.
And we're still children.
The oldest of us are rapidly closing in on 40. We are the least married, least fecund generation in history. Really, only 30% of people under 40 are married! Big-brained thinkers blame economic conditions, largely because big-brained thinkers go through years of training to ensure they don't see what is right in front of their faces. We started coming of age in 2003, and economic conditions were nowhere close to as bad as the 1930s, 40s, or 70s, when people had little trouble marrying and procreating. Yet here we are, aging out of our ability to enjoy childhood, feeling death creep up on us. The video games have grown boring. The TV marathons are suffocating. The candy tastes like ashes in our mouths. We're committing suicide and consuming antidepressants at record rates. We try to accumulate even more, and it fails to make us happy. We don't know why, and we don't know how we got here.
Well, I'll tell you.
My entire life, the only message I got from school, or church, college, and the media was that every decision I made, from what degree to pursue, to where I lived, to whether to marry, was with the goal of having a maximally pleasurable life. True, as someone raised in a conservative church, I was warned against fornication and substance abuse, but these were framed in terms of interfering with the good life. In the 1990s, there was no difference between Christians and non-Christians in that general outlook. Both Christian and non-Christians were equally horrified at the notion that a bright young woman might not end up "maximizing her potential," which meant putting 40 hours a week into a cubicle. Both warned her against getting married too young, because marriage could cut short a promising career. Evangelicals, for their part, indulged in a pious fiction that the unmarried 25-year-olds in the church were all virgins, but still, everyone agreed that the proper way to treat the world is as your playground.
Any kind of social responsibility or context to our choice-making was completely absent from what our boomer elders told us. What is the social purpose of marriage? Conservative boomers couldn't say. They appealed to "tradition" without understanding why it existed, to a Biblical literalism that was as mindless as it was quaint, in a world where their own self-indulgent concept of marriage had led to record-smashing divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s, and my generation growing up with every weekend alternating between parents. The boomer had already set up the foundation of marriage as an exercise in self-indulgence; gay marriage came as the consequence. If marriage has a social purpose, to channel and direct human sexuality in a way that promotes social cohesion and provides for a man's progeny, then gay marriage is nonsense. It's an absurdity. But if it's just to "be happy with the person you love?" Then why not?
Similarly, we weren't told that the purpose of a job is to provide for your family. If that's the point of working, then any kind of moral imperative to put women in the workplace evaporates. Why would they want to be there? Find me a woman who dreams of providing a new car for her husband, or who feels any satisfaction at knowing that her money will be well-spent by her husband for the children, or who feels that the ability to take the husband and the kids to the beach for a weekend is worth that drudgery in the office.