What Is Wrong With Millennials?
As a kid, I remember looking up to my older brother. He was the definition of cool, with a chain dangling from the side of his baggy jeans. His dirty converses would scream of involvement in some real adventures and parties. That adventurous lifestyle led him to come home with a broken nose one night. Luckily it wasn’t a big deal and he has a pretty cute nose right now. Nevertheless, I wanted to be like him. I wanted to do all kinds of cool and fun things with my friends, come home wasted in the middle of the night, and try to make as little noise as possible not to wake my mom up.
I eventually grew up and had similar experiences as a teenager but never had my nose broken like my brother did, which, I believe, is a good thing.
There is still that part of me who is craving to run after adventures and live a care-free life forever. Even though I thought this feeling should and would fade away as time passes by, it didn’t. Therefore I have to admit, I still couldn’t become a proper adult. However, I don’t feel alone in this situation because I know many ‘beginner level’ adults who are going through the same things as I am.
I am 25 and I think I have only just started to grasp one or two things about life and myself. I have a job, but still, when I go out with my parents, I don’t take my wallet with me. My dad, however, was already married and successfully running a household at my age. Even today I feel like at any moment I might do something to ruin my reputation as an adult.
We, as a generation, were raised by parents who had strict rules and schedules to follow, for both themselves and their kids. They always knew how to solve daily problems, like how to prepare dinner with limited ingredients, or how to fix a broken machine without calling the repair service.
We are the products of those decisive parents who wanted to garnish their kids with all possible skill sets, to give them a meaning to hold onto. This is a generation of kids that spent their summers in sports camps, were sent to ballet courses during weekends and performed their latest guitar solos in front of family guests. Being raised by these kinds of parents meant fully scheduled summer breaks, and knowing how to behave properly at the dinner table.
Most of us were brought up having to do a lot of things, mainly decided for us by our parents. As a result of that, when eventually expected to make our own decisions in a sea of limitless options, we tend to experience decision paralysis. The unhealthy love story my generation has with the obsession of making the best choice is the biggest reason why many of us might end up not making a decision at all.
I consider this as the problem of my generation, although our parents prefer to define it as ungratefulness or being spoiled, hard to pinpoint.
I see no harm in explicitly saying that my generation is a confused one. Even with the perfect plans, our parents had for us, we turned out to be different. We are confused about what we really want, how good our choices have been, or even what to have for dinner.
We might either be trying too hard or not at all, and seemingly insignificant issues might take more time for us to handle. Yes, we are confused and a little bit exhausted trying to figure out how necessary it is to strive for impeccability in life. But exactly because of questioning everything, we are the generation that has a wider view on the spectrum of life.
The confusion of my generation might seem like an attribute to be gotten rid of but I think the opposite.
What we call confusion is our strength in disguise.
By virtue of being confused, we are able to create new paths through life. That same confusion is our driving force to question existing patterns and come up with something way different, way more creative, and perhaps even something unthinkable.
The wider your view is the more options are revealed to you.
No wonder why we cannot identify ourselves with one single thing for the rest of our lives in this globalized world.
The same reason goes for why we neither have strict definitions of many things nor meticulously prepared plans for 20 years from now.
Who cares if you don’t want to get married, and instead of going to a college you want to build a community to sell organic key chains. Who cares if you don’t want to buy a house, and instead get a tent to live outdoors until your internet addiction starts to kick in.
This generation doesn’t carry their parents’ worries about how one should portray their best version to the outside world.
We are curious to truly know ourselves instead of creating fake personas in order to cope with life. We spend more time on understanding the world around us and are prone to contributing to global issues more than previous generations.
‘It is not my problem’ doesn’t sound right to us because this generation can see more clearly how deeply connected we are to everything around us. This generation is much more open to the changes that life can bring, since we have witnessed how fast things can, and have, changed in just one lifetime.
No matter how the responsibilities of existence might freak us out every now and then, we’re also capable of acknowledging the ebb and flow of life with more indulgence.
This generation is not the ideal candidate for filling the position of adulthood we have inherited from our parents.
This is the generation that is writing new definitions for things, and with more flexibility than ever before.
Maybe we were never meant to be ‘proper adults’ and maybe it is completely fine. There are no proper adults among us to decide that anyway.
