As I sit here today I begin thinking I am almost 25 years old and yet I have not accomplished many of the things I had wanted to do; I have not written a great genre defying tome, created a symphonic masterpiece that millions of people can identify with, in fact at the moment I do not even have a steady job. Worthless would be an overstatement, because I am not worthless, yet I feel as though it’s the best word to describe my current predicament. Like most people my age I was born into an era that began after a generation of hardworking men and women who worked job where they always made it home in time to dinner. To call my generation lazy would be a misstep, for you see we have done more in our infancy than most generations had done in their adolescence. I grew up, at least for the first decade or so of my life, believing that everyone in the world worked 9 to 5 jobs, but then the mid 90’s happened; gone were the days of the 9to5ers slowly replaced by get rich quick schemes of that plagued the nation at the time. Who was the main culprit in this shift from normalcy?
From the time I was 10, I was told that I could do whatever I wanted, that I didn’t need to be stuck behind a desk, in a cubicle without a outside view, doing some job that would not pay me what I was worth. We, as in this generation between X and Y, were told to rebel from the normal and create our own paths, ones that didn’t include college or any type of secondary education aside from high school. Gone where the days in which we wished to do what mommy and daddy did, not we wanted to be famous, rich, desired, and able to retire by the time we were 30. We had the reverse of coddling, we were just tiny explorers and the world was our plaything, we were basically told to go out into the world and make it ours. And yet none of us have so far succeeded in making it ours, we were in actuality just pawns in our parent’s pseudo-educated self-help game of intellectual superiority.
- The Rich, the Famous and the Dead.
The generation before mine had one saving grace, they were told it was “not cool” to be famous, the spokesman for this anti-fame movement was no doubt Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana. But my generation had no outspoken spokesman, in fact for all of Mr. Cobain’s anti-fame tirades and antics all he did was prove to the world that being famous meant that you could practically do and say what one wanted without any real consequences. No my spokesperson deficient generations were left to fend for ourselves, we looked everywhere for our own shining light and then we got too old and grew up way too fast to comprehend what was really going on in the world and what we needed to do for ourselves.
Whereby the generation before mine had learned lessons about excess and morality from their celebrities, the generation that followed mine learned nothing, they learned that excess was the way to live, what was their common mantra: live fast, die young, replacing the lessons in which they were told to have goals and make a living. No the generation that followed mine was told that if you don’t make your first million by the time that you’re 21 you’re going to be a failure. So what did this generation do? They lived fast and they tried to make millions fast, while I was spending the early part of my life trying to figure out what and who I am, they were spending time trying to make tons of money and living a retirement by 25 lifestyle.
Our parents hadn’t groomed us for this type of life; Woodstock, free love and the 1960’s had worn our parents out, they were born into that crazy era watching their parents plummet into excess so they decided they wanted to be the opposite of what their parents were, They wanted jobs and careers and children they could love. I wanted to be the opposite of what the parental figures in my life were but they weren’t doing anything that led me to wanting to oppose them, what they did was nurture us too long, feeding into our psyches and letting us do what we wanted while they watched from the sideline, to them we were just miniature adults and they were only there to make sure we didn’t get hurt and if we did to encourage us to try again. It was essentially parental abandon but in a non-abandoning way, there but not there.
- Missing Childhood and Growing Up Too Fast
Where most people got to experience a comprehensive childhood we were forced to grow up fast, the heroes of our parents were dying and they needed to look for new ones, thereby not letting us look for our own heroes. We were left to our own devices and with nothing left to do we taught ourselves, we became computer literate, we read and comprehended books that were far much too advanced for our tiny intellects, we questioned our existence, the existence of God, the consequences of being inherently good or malevolently evil, and we wrote and expanded our vocabulary. From such a young age we were already moving onto adulthood and yet we were too young to understand anything, our parents questioned our grandparents about where baby’s came from and we questioned the very existence of God.
Here I am 10 years old and questioning what and exactly who was God and how he mattered in my life, I don’t know what brought along this form of questioning but I couldn’t let it go. I went to church and I listened to the sermons and in the beginning I listened astutely and I found such hypocrisy in what God was like that I stopped questioning his existence but laid out that I would no longer believe in such a close minded entity, how could a being that created so much in the world be so judgmental and condemning, the world was our veritable arena and yet we were expected to abide by rules that prohibited us from doing anything fun. Now in a statement that is sure to incite scowls because of the blatantly contradictory tone in which it will be uttered; I can understand why the rules in the bible are so closely followed, what the bible offers is a rulebook on life. In a sense it is an instructions manual on life, people flock to it because they need an understanding on how to live in this world but others don’t need that, they prefer to live their life by trial and error.
- Learning So Fast Our Parent’s Can’t Seem to Keep Up
Our Parent’s wished upon us an education and yet they themselves were not as educated as us. Sure they had their high school and college educations but they lacked the knowledge that we had, we were their intellectual superiors from very young ages. How did we get this way? Simply because we spent our time reading, gone were Grimm’s fairytales replaced by Nietzsche and Darwin, from a young age we could argue in defense of Darwin’s evolutionary theorem and do so convincingly, while mommy and daddy were baffled and confused by where we were getting such knowledge. The sad part is that our vocabulary had become far superior to their own that we began to dumb down our conversations with them. Four and Five syllable words had become too much for them, after all the doldrums of working a 9 to 5 had merely made them remiss in the brilliance that was around them.
This point in life that we are in now, is because of this, the more we pulled ourselves down in order to communicate with our parents the more we neglected to better ourselves…
The Long Road 