This post can stop a war…
Prof. Sybill Trelawney, head of astronomy at Hogwarts University once predicted that Muggle Third World War would be fought on Medium between Baby-X (Alliance of Baby-Boomers and Generation X) and Millennial.
Compartmentally, I’m a millennial and I’m tired of listening to cliches that we are a generation raised on consolation awards and participating certificates.
I’m also tired of Baby-Xers telling me that instead of doing 'kiki challenge' they were fighting White Walkers when they were of my age.
So I’m writing this post about why we millennials are the way we are! I’m putting a honest perspective and hoping that this post can stop this ideological war and save innocent hypothetical lives of metaphorical White Walkers. Or whatever.
Let’s start with something which is an aphrodisiac to Baby-X ears…Nostalgia.
Remember the sepia-tinted good old days when we had limited choices or sometimes none at all. We listened everything Radio sang and watched anything TV showed.
To counter boredom we had only one app…imagination.
Watching your favorite show all day used to be a impossible dream back then.
A wise man once said that if you want to destroy a man give him everything he wants. And we got just that. Everything that we ever dreamt about.
All our favorite shows, music and more just a click away, any time, in our pocket, dirt-cheap or sometimes free! And not just shows, dating, shopping, friendship, photo-albums, porn. Just everything and some more, way more then we ever dreamt about. So much so that it is making us sick.
Abundance is modern epidemic.
We took control of everything. Now our TV can’t throw content at us. We decide our entertainment and there are so much good stuffs to choose from that we are confused, we are hopping from one app to another, delirious by avalanche of effortless information.
We are overwhelmed by uninterrupted supply of attention hungry stimulus that are tailor-made on industrial scale to be unavoidable and delivered oven-hot to us through pocketable conveyor belts of internet and omni-accessible supply chain of social media.
The greed-fueled eco-system has convinced us that we are born to be a consumer and purpose of our life is going viral, so there is this mind-numbing rat race to consume more and more and some more because all it takes is a click of a button.
Our entertainment has become a work. We are over entertained still super empty.
We have become zombies, our distractions now control us.
Entertainment is our Frankenstein monster.
We taking responsibility of every petty and mundane thing in our hands…and delegating important stuffs like driving car and doing surgery to machines.
And we are overwhelmed by this 'responsibility’ of managing small things and ‘freedom’ of escaping bigger ones.
The petty choices are tiring us slowly, one decision at a time. Every simple thing that we took for granted back in 90s has become a decision now.
It’s causing us a lot of decision-fatigue. A mental fog that we are not caught up enough, that we are running behind and that we are missing the latest viral trend and most important that we are not enough.
We know, it may not bother that much to Baby-Xers mostly because you can afford to pretend to not understand all this tech mumbo jumbo but please understand we can’t. Because it will make us you and there is too much peer pressure on us to be us.
Maybe the next generation will handle it with relative breeze than we are doing it because they are born with this digital spoon of abundance but not us. We millennials were born in scarcity. We used to save good stuff so that we can savor them later at a better time and we subconsciously still think good stuff are scarce and should be preserved and savored later not consumed mindlessly and immediately.
Now suddenly there are so many good stuffs and we are like the proverbial unsupervised kid in a candy shop, unsupervised because we are no longer a kid but not-adults because we are still a entertainment-starved kids who haven’t grown numb to miracles.
So Baby Xers Do you expect us to be sorry that we don’t have to cross the river to go to our school or you are just angry that you had to cross it?
Please understand your struggles are not our fault nor our privilege is your joke.
Our comfort doesn’t mean we are lazy and your hardwork doesn’t mean you were not.
And because our White Walkers doesn’t look scary as yours, doesn’t mean our fight is any less than yours.
So stop looking down at us like we are soft toys!
Peace.
Gratitude. P.
