We were told work would be "fulfilling," that it would be yet another endless source of amusement for us. Turns out that work sucks. Nobody can really explain why Grandpa was willing to drive from town to town sell vacuum cleaners, because delivering the same pitch for the thousandth time isn't fulfilling at all (none of us ever thought to ask grandma whether she envied grandpa's long days on the road when she was at home with the kids). Millennials are bored and angry in the workplace. We were told fulfillment would be here. Instead, it's...work. And since we don't have families, it has no purpose.
It's sad to watch my generation collapse into nihilism and fear as our bodies begin the process of dying. The men become bugmen, living to consume, filling shelf after shelf with toys their adult brains can't find amusement in, because they know of nothing else to do. The women are in a panic, desperately trying to hold onto their evaporating youth, trying to prove to themselves that a woman can be just as sexy and alluring at 35 as she could at 23. There's a lot of rage at the Boomers, but it's aimless and uninformed. Mostly, people are mad that they "crashed the economy" or "destroyed the climate," as though the double-digit inflation and choking smog of 1978 were so much better.
No, what the Boomers did to us was what their parents did to them. They ruined us by trying to give us the life they never had. Our grandparents grew up in the Depression, and overindulged their children with toys and attention to the point the boomers failed to develop any real sense of self-awareness. And what, you may ask, did the Boomers lack? The Boomers had their idyllic teenage years cut short. WW2 & Silents still ran the world, and made our parents put on a tie, go to work, and serve The Man before they were ready to stop playing. Your average Boomer male looks back at the summer of '69 wistfully, wishing it could have gone on forever, slightly resentful that just a few years later, he was driving a s**tty Toyota, getting nagged by his wife, and listening to a baby scream. The Boomer female thinks that if it wasn't for that marriage and those babies she had by the time she was 26, she would have been an editor of a fashion magazine. She never would have gotten that baby belly. She would have been young and sexy forever.
Boomers have a perpetual teenage mentality that their parents never understood, and they raised us to be the eternal teenagers they didn't get to be. When you're 17, the idea of just buying cool stuff, having consequence-free sex, and binge-consuming media for the rest of your life sounds fantastic. You do not understand that when you are 40, you will not want that any more. There are tons of guys my age and younger, who wear Star Wars T-shirts, collect Marvel Funko Pops, and have gotten vasectomies, and they have no idea why they're so miserable. There are women my age who just broke up with another live-in boyfriend of three years and have no children. So here we are, and we're falling apart. Our parents instilled in us a totalizing selfishness that they never got to indulge, assuring us that marriage and family "would just come" when "the time is right." As far as they were concerned, that's just what happens. Except it "just happened" to them because of all the social capital of previous generations that was still there for them, which they razed to the ground. Now my generation is absolutely miserable, because we're reaching that age where your brain shifts modes from "consume and copulate" to "prepare your offspring for adulthood," and we don't understand that's what is actually happening. Women of my generation have been told their entire lives that loneliness is a psychological disorder, that children are parasites, and that exhausting yourself for 40 hours a week at work is the meaning of life. It turns out that continuing to live as though you were a teenager does not in fact bequeath eternal youth. "Age is just a number" is the most insidious of all Boomer proverbs.
It's sad to watch my generation collapse into nihilism and fear as our bodies begin the process of dying. The men become bugmen, living to consume, filling shelf after shelf with toys their adult brains can't find amusement in, because they know of nothing else to do. The women are in a panic, desperately trying to hold onto their evaporating youth, trying to prove to themselves that a woman can be just as sexy and alluring at 35 as she could at 23. There's a lot of rage at the Boomers, but it's aimless and uninformed. Mostly, people are mad that they "crashed the economy" or "destroyed the climate," as though the double-digit inflation and choking smog of 1978 were so much better.
No, what the Boomers did to us was what their parents did to them. They ruined us by trying to give us the life they never had. Our grandparents grew up in the Depression, and overindulged their children with toys and attention to the point the boomers failed to develop any real sense of self-awareness. And what, you may ask, did the Boomers lack? The Boomers had their idyllic teenage years cut short. WW2 & Silents still ran the world, and made our parents put on a tie, go to work, and serve The Man before they were ready to stop playing. Your average Boomer male looks back at the summer of '69 wistfully, wishing it could have gone on forever, slightly resentful that just a few years later, he was driving a s**tty Toyota, getting nagged by his wife, and listening to a baby scream. The Boomer female thinks that if it wasn't for that marriage and those babies she had by the time she was 26, she would have been an editor of a fashion magazine. She never would have gotten that baby belly. She would have been young and sexy forever.
Boomers have a perpetual teenage mentality that their parents never understood, and they raised us to be the eternal teenagers they didn't get to be. When you're 17, the idea of just buying cool stuff, having consequence-free sex, and binge-consuming media for the rest of your life sounds fantastic. You do not understand that when you are 40, you will not want that any more. There are tons of guys my age and younger, who wear Star Wars T-shirts, collect Marvel Funko Pops, and have gotten vasectomies, and they have no idea why they're so miserable. There are women my age who just broke up with another live-in boyfriend of three years and have no children. So here we are, and we're falling apart. Our parents instilled in us a totalizing selfishness that they never got to indulge, assuring us that marriage and family "would just come" when "the time is right." As far as they were concerned, that's just what happens. Except it "just happened" to them because of all the social capital of previous generations that was still there for them, which they razed to the ground. Now my generation is absolutely miserable, because we're reaching that age where your brain shifts modes from "consume and copulate" to "prepare your offspring for adulthood," and we don't understand that's what is actually happening. Women of my generation have been told their entire lives that loneliness is a psychological disorder, that children are parasites, and that exhausting yourself for 40 hours a week at work is the meaning of life. It turns out that continuing to live as though you were a teenager does not in fact bequeath eternal youth. "Age is just a number" is the most insidious of all Boomer proverbs.