My generation is an odd one. I feel that we are misunderstood, often characterized as narcissistic and feeling that we deserve a lot more than we do. I’ve read books basically talking about how horrible my generation is (which begs the question: If we are that way, then what does that say about the people who raised us, who probably wrote some of these books?).
This comes up as I read an article on MSNBC.com recently, which said that unemployment rates for our generation are at their lowest in decades. On top of it, we can’t get work in the fields that we trained for because the older generation is still continuing to work and getting the jobs that used to be filled by us. It discussed how my generation is incredibly educated, but saddled with college loans and having to move back in with their parents in order to get by. In turn, we won’t make as much as our parents and will have a difficult time achieving what came so easily to them.
The way we have dealt with the recession has varied. I have watched as many people from my generation have gone back to school either in order to ride out the recession or to maybe get a better job. Quite a few of my friends applied to law school and are attending in the fall – some of them going to incredible schools. Same goes with MBA programs. On the opposite side, I have also seen members of my generation behave foolishly, taking trips they really can’t afford and spending money they don’t have. But it doesn’t answer the question – who are we, really?
We can’t seem to be explained in song like our parents, or even have a whole bunch of movies like Generation X did with John Hughes. Heck, we don’t even have a war to define us like the World War II generation. The culture of America can’t seem to touch us or put a finger on us, and G-d knows they have tried their best. They have appealed to our demographic in television, film and whatnot, but at the same time they haven’t captured our essence. In a sense, we are elusive – which results in many books trying to explore this question.
The truth is that we are still trying to learn who we are. We were raised by parents who either were so busy working they threw money at us or had their entire lives revolve around our different lessons and sports. They were successful, but we learned that success sometimes things would fall by the wayside. We also lived in a generation where our parents’ divorces or those of our friends’ parents became a natural part of our lives, so there was a degree of heartbreak as well.
The fact that the feminist and civil rights movements came before we were born has given us advantages that our mothers and sometimes fathers never had. It was a given that girls were going to go to college, and not just to find a husband. I feel like we have had a lot, and I have always appreciated what our parents have done in order to provide the lives they gave us.
But the truth is that maybe we don’t want the lives our parents had, no matter what they gave us. Perhaps we want to put more into our relationships than we do into our working lives. We may not work 16-hour days like our parents did, but we will be able to have fulfillment beyond just making a check. This doesn’t make us less ambitious – just more aware of what we can lose if we give everything to our work or to our kids.
All I really know is that members of my generation are in for the fight of their lives. Our parents were fortunate enough that when they were growing up, most of them never knew firsthand what our grandparents went through in the Great Depression. But the fact is that we are dealing now, and we will learn through experience what it takes to survive.
After all, who knows? We could become a greater generation.
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