There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place. — E.B. White

“Make your life into a brand.” This was the advice of my college graduation speaker.

At the time, I wanted to vomit. She was a female millionaire. This was 2009. The economy had just crashed; inflated and then bubble burst, just like my expectations so many times that year. Mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations were not a part of my right-brained vocabulary back then, as I vowed after her speech to make my life “a work of art” and not a brand.

I have a logo now.

In college, I studied mass media communications and creative writing. I graduated at the top of my class. After a summer of pitching stories, I got my first job as a barista — an oh-so coveted work position for the liberal arts majors of America. A startup movement studio hired me to teach two martial arts classes a week. I wrote for the alt weekly I interned at in college, tried to keep the college activist group I helped start alive (which it didn’t), and eventually got a fourth job — bartending at a jazz club on the weekends, where my boss refused to pay me an hourly wage and the same 70-year-old man played the electronic piano each Saturday to a faded audience. I made roughly $7000 that year and discovered Teddy Pendergrass — which was, of course, priceless.

You could call my life industrially-complex. Complex, it absolutely was. In a culture where we define ourselves predominantly by our careers, this smattering of part-time jobs proved to be an excellent catalyst for a lower than working class identity crisis. I wouldn’t advise this go-with-the-flow, anti-establishment, say yes to every short-term creative opportunity out of loyalty to a dream and a degree and the need for quick cash attitude to many people now. My life was an experiment driven by being young and being stubborn, full of hope, and resentment.

The kids are taking longer than ever to grow up.

It’s not just me, and it’s not just you.

I spent a lot of time that first year after college faking smiles which were actually grimaces, brooding about the grossness of human consumption as people handed me wrinkled dollar bills for coffee. I was what one might call a hot mess, despite my attempts to hide my emotions from everybody.

I remember running out in the middle of an evening shift at the gourmet market where I poured espresso one night to cry in the beverage closet, when Wofford, a red-haired kitchen worker whose nickname was Joe Dirt, knocked on the door.

“Where’s the humanity?!” I screamed, as I sat sobbing on a milk crate surrounded by shelves stacked with Vitamin Water.

“I know, kid. I know,” he said, and held both of my hands as his eyes began to tear as well.

In my fleeting moments of spare time, I devised ways to ask my boss if we could make our to-go boxes and utensils compostable, despite the dent it would do to the bottom line of a new business working its way out of the red. I felt as if my hands were stained in blood. I knew my generation held the future of the planet on our shoulders, yet no matter what good I tried to do, it could not fix what was wrong with the system I was a part of. I was part of the problem.

I am a motherf*cking millennial.

Generation WTF. Generation Lost. Generation Frustrated. Generation Screwed. No cohort since those to come of age in the Great Depression has had to transition through as many societal changes as my giant generation, while enduring the aches and pains of being an amateur at absolutely everything — nauseatingly earnest, morbidly naive.

The technological revolution combined with globalization has changed the demands for goods and services at lightning speed. We’ve witnessed two seemingly needless wars, Occupy Wall Street, the emergence of concern over climate change, school shootings, corporate personhood, natural disasters, national surveillance, bank bailouts, a do-nothing Congress, and the entire economy collapse due to greed.

We have inherited a world ravaged by economic, ecological, and spiritual larceny.

Those weathered by time and experience may witness this tumult as life as usual. The stock market and unemployment rates: they go up, and they go down! But the young people who were told from birth they could do anything they wanted with their lives by parents and the media were unprepared, emotionally, to navigate this crisis. You see, there is a sense of personal worthlessness that develops when the infrastructure of your environment doesn’t seem to have a stable place for your life in it. When you’re told you’re not good enough to help others for a paycheck. When you follow the rules and are left defaulting a disciplinary deficit.

What makes our generation fascinating isn’t that we’ve had it the hardest, for people are always battling injustice, inequality, poor working conditions, and the plight to repair a perpetually problematic reality. What makes millennials worth studying is that we’ve been forced to find ourselves and our way through American culture during a time of heightened polarization — between classes, economic expansion and contraction. We are the guinea pigs of a brand new era in which the environment and the economy are waging a global war. Scientists predict if we don’t find a way to harmonize these two forces, chunks of the Earth will be uninhabitable in close to 50 years.

The nihilistic condemn the American empire too unsustainable to last much longer. The even-keeled and the optimistic believe with ceaseless determination it can be transformed as it has so many times before. The people who want to enjoy the ride while meeting their needs will try to find a way to make the system work for them and act as innocent witnesses to whatever unfolds. The weak, who can’t hack it, will survive off the compassion of others, fall away to the fringes, or go insane.

Regardless, however, of your position, there are less tried and true routes guaranteeing traditional notions of success. And even though these practical paths still exist, the most idealistic young people won’t take them. They will sacrifice their security and the safety of the herd to try to do the saving.

Alexa and I started this project two years ago because we had no idea what was going on in the world around us. We didn’t understand how our economy worked, the pecking order and stratification behind the way we all somehow chaotically fit together — why some people had so much and others had so little. And it felt like I was living in a haze in a house built on sand.

Yet, despite my inherent white, upper-middle class privilege — my view of society was that it was depraved. I wanted to change it and escape it at the same time, even as my actions affected my health, my pocketbook, my intimate relationships, and my self-esteem.

As I got older, I knew I might completely screw up my future if I kept living in a semi-blind rebellion. I thought if I took this time to self-educate myself about the hows and the whys, while recording the experiences of my peers, we could figure it out together. So there you have it.

This is my bias.

Economists say the millennials who graduated into the recession are permanently damaged; that for the first time in history, our generation will amass less wealth than our parents. Chasing money, a conventional motivator for it ensures an element of safety for the people in this unpredictable world who have it, hasn’t been an option for those of us who still face unemployment or are making a minimum wage that won’t rise alongside inflation. We’ve had to find a different source of inspiration to maintain the momentum of our existence.

I have dedicated this book to the gap we all know too well. The schism between the person who stands before you, and the person you want to be; the space between how the world works, and the all the ways you feel it could be better run. This book is to honor the quest that young and unfettered adults wholeheartedly take on to shorten the distance between these two spaces — just as much as I hope it serves as a reminder to relish the moments when that gap disappears completely for no reason. Those moments of acceptance are the closest to real we will ever feel. Treasure them, for they come and go like the breeze, and they are brief.

It is a cultural imperative that young people are allowed to search for their identity, and that we use this information to choose a stance in the world, because the answers found are almost always altruistic.

This book is to help our readers pursue this self-realization, and stay fueled by these insights, rather than watch them dissolve as time and stress and harsh realities transpire — because they don’t have to. We’ve interviewed many of these adults, the kind who’ve retained their individuality and a humanitarian spirit. Their words of wisdom can also be found in here.

I’ve learned through this process of interviewing hundreds of my peers that contrary to the way the mind likes to lump people into categories of us and them, there are as many ways to navigate your twenties as there are 20-somethings. There is no normal, no picture perfect emerging adult life. There are only medians.

Beyond the hyper-sensationalized bleak state of the economy and politics, it is diversity and progressive values which define this generation in this country. This book is about the culture of my generation, and what the rest of the world can learn from our decisions. We all come from different backgrounds. We are all driven by our life experiences. Our choices eventually separate ourselves from each other, and that is scary, and that is natural. And although religious commitment to the linear track toward success is fading out of fashion, we must all eventually pick a direction, or it will pick us, and life seems to be more enjoyable when it’s a product of your volition.

An iconoclastic history chair at The New School once told me,

“If you want to understand something, try to change it.”

And that’s what I can honestly say I’ve gained from my searching, and my fucking up, and all the imaginary money I’ve lost because I rejected stability to fight with what is out of allegiance to the visions in my imagination and the world that doesn’t exist yet. All of the curiosity and the blessed unrest has led me here to have enough understanding of the country we are entering into, and empathy for all the types of perspectives in it, that I may now, as a writer, actually have something of use to say. I may have also found a sense of balance.

There was no book when I needed it encouraging me to go on this journey to know myself and the world; to take my time “growing up” to investigate the boundaries of my individual agency and our cooperative power instead; to take the risks and to work for the kind of world I’d want to raise children in. There was no book offering me the motivation to stop from surrendering my values so quickly as I learn to adapt to that which cannot be changed.

I am young and I am shortsighted because of this. But in this time period of life when you think you know everything and will continually learn you know nothing at all, try to alter this world for the better — because that is what sets civilization in motion. An ideal is all that us evolved monkeys on planet Earth ever chase. Whether you win or lose as you test your convictions, what you will gain is understanding, and humanity will be better because you chose to engage with this spirit.

I have learned the roles we can take on here are endless. There are people who want to run society and others who will shun it. There are bankers and there are vagabonds, businessmen and housewives, pop stars and mechanics. It almost doesn’t matter which hat you choose in this world of variance. What matters is how and why you do it. This is the challenge of a lifetime — to offer the world a sense of wholeness regardless of the form you grow to take on and its fluctuating external circumstances. Start young and try to make sure your pursuits in this life are conscious.

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