The Happy Prison of Millennials

I’m sure you’ve heard thousands of times this statement about mating and attraction between people: “Like is attracted by like. Birds of a feather flock together”. Your experience probably tells you it is true.

And I’m sure you’ve heard thousands of times this other statement: “Opposite attract. They complement each other.” Your experience tells you that this is also true.

How is it possible? As both statements seem to be true, there is a contradiction to resolve. In the case of mating, Keirsey attempts to explain in his book Please Understand Me:

“Suffice is to say that it is the combination of similarity in thought and speech — concrete or abstract — with complementarity in how tools are used to implement goals — cooperative or utilitarian — which seems to hold the key to explaining human attraction.” — Please Understand Me II, p.211

You can find many examples of this situation, where two commonly accepted statements seem to contradict each other. As Keirsey did by his study of human temperament and character, we need a deeper analysis to solve the apparent contradiction.

Now, take Millennials and what people commonly say about them. So many people complain about Millennials because they are “idle, lazy, spoiled, irresponsible, unrespectful, needy”; because they “don’t know to suffer”, and they “don’t want to grow up.”

But at the same time Millennials are also thought of as victims. “It’s not their fault. It’s the economy, the system, their parent’s fault.”

So are our generation guilty or victims?

I’ll explain my idea of the “Happy Prison” as the synthesis that resolves the paradox. I’m certainly not the first to come to this conclusion, but I had this idea this morning, for personal reasons, and felt the need to put it down in words.

The Happy Prison is the situation where you are happy but enslaved. And enslaved but happy. It is the situation where your life is limited by the walls, orders, and rules of the prison, but where you also do not have responsibilities.

It is the situation where you are forced to dedicate a substantial part of your time to a certain activity (studying/working) against your spontaneous will and desire, and it kills you inside, but where you are also left completely free for certain periods of time and allowed to do anything you want, within resource constraints. It is a situation where you have a constant feeling of depression for the conditions of your life, but you tragically get used to it and become dependent of that system that provides you the money to enjoy the free time you unconsciously claim to deserve in exchange for your tacit enslavement.

My generation is not used to suffer. Is not used to failure and pain. Not because we are successful but rather because we never face challenges. That’s why we seem to be lazy: we are not used to struggle. Millennials live in the Happy Prison of their parent’s house, who at the same time limit their freedom and growth opportunities, but also give them almost everything the ask, in other words taking away from them self-responsibility.

The Happy Prison is a place that helps you avoid risk-taking, and both the possibility of success and failure that risks present. It is a place that helps you avoid responsibility, too. A place that protect you from uncertainty, ambiguity. In one word, is a fake world. It helps shield you from facing real life. It is, in the words of 20th century psychologist Eric Fromm, an escape from freedom.

Living in the Happy Prison quite negatively shields you from growing. Shields you from exploring yourself. Shields you from learning from your experience, your successes and your failures.

It is the place that you keep staying at because of the fear of being homeless.

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds–that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

(For more on de-touristification, optionality, randomness and antifragility concerning Soccer Moms and education, read this essay).

So it’s true, Millennials are lazy, unable to struggle, unwilling to suffer, unwilling to work, that we do not plan for the future, do not leave our comfort zones. But the root cause of this is that we have been raised in a zoo. We have being raised in a bubble that does not expose us to life and pain, fragilizing us to the point that even the slightest disorder or challenge causes us to break. In this sense we are victims. After 25 years or more of living in Happy Prison, how do you expect us to act?

If you are a millennial and you recognize you are in a Happy Prison, my suggestion for you is to fight against it. Get out of it as soon as you can. Your parents, your friends will probably tell you that you are crazy.

Let them talk all they want, but follow your instincts. Reply by example. They may want you to think life is Disneyland, but they are wrong.

You always have away to escape this prison. Check our site to find where to start: http://exosphe.re/