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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the younger generation of our current world. I may be 25-years old but with few exceptions the bulk of my collection of friends mostly range from 16 to 22 years in age. And I personally feel both physically and psychologically like I am still hovering around that 20-year old zone. I consider myself a part of that age group for the most part then. And it’s a hard generation to be struggling through. We’re still so young and naïve and we’re being infiltrating by fear as we watch our parents losing the jobs they’ve had for years and wondering what kind of job market they will inherit. What will our world be like a year from now? Or five or ten?
As time has wore on I have become so frustrated and disappointed with the generation that preceded ours, our parents generation. This is the generation that created the world we will be forced to inherit and someday fix, because we need severe fixing to say the least. They created this world and now selfishly expect us to thrive through it like they did when they were our age. Unfortunately so many of them fail to understand many things. The job market was thriving when they were twenty and it most certainly is not now. When I was a small child it was the way of the world that when one turned eighteen they moved away from home, went to college, graduated and found a career. I remember turning twenty-three and feeling somewhat embarrassed that I was still living at home, but unfortunately I didn’t feel a great sense of inspiration or ambition at that time. And when our parents were our age there were much more jobs available to a much smaller population. With corporations and companies either downsizing or closing shop all together we’re watching entry level and low pay jobs that were mostly open to this younger generation so as they could develop a work record and resume being infiltrated by these middle-aged former employees who are now themselves looking for work.
But beyond the economic problems this young generation faces there is also the emotional and psychological difficulties they face. And much of this falls on the deaf ears of our parents generation as well. For almost all of my friends and even my acquaintances only a relative few of them have even moderately positive relationships with their parents (and in some cases even the rest of their family). And beyond that even in the relative few cases where those I know have moderately decent relationships with their parents those families still struggle with disfunctionalities in some ways. It was easy to be naïve when I had what I felt was a functional family and had a roof over my head. I had a cool, quirky bedroom and a large backyard. I didn’t have to pay rent, pay for school, cars, insurance, etc. And yet still having everything provided for me while I worked a simple little theatre job and had no real concept of the economy or the tough job market future that was to come there was always this nervous sense I felt within myself. How am I going to support myself when the time comes form my need to do such? Everybody thinks about that, especially when they don’t know what the future holds. And as things continue to deteriorate (which the economic elite blither on about how the ‘recession is over’, likely because all their rich friends are still in work) the future of everyone looms more and more in doubt. But the difference is our parents generation has experience in the workforce. While yes the stumbling economy is something rather unfamiliar to them too they have years of experience looking for jobs and supporting themselves. Our younger generation doesn’t have that. We’re scared shitless and most of us are just fluttering in the breeze. We all have our ideas of what career we’re after and how we’re going to fly through school and into our dream career but we all know how great the fight is getting. We all know deep down inside that we hardly know a thing about the ‘real world’, which unfortunately our previous two generations did a wonderful job screwing up.
And I was seriously naïve. I had no idea how vast the pain and frustration was. In the start of the fall of 2008 I accompanied a few of my friends to an anime/manga convention in Portland. And it was nice, it was a fun escape for the weekend. But as I allowed my mind to go free there was still my more ‘realistic’ side that was saying, “Enjoy this while it lasts cause someday you’re gonna have to deal with the real world”. Little did I realize that at that time I was on the verge of watching my own family fall apart. What started as mere discussion of a separation led to so much more and by the end of the fall my mother moved out. For the next several months I lived alone with my father and began developing severe depression. For those months I either went to work or locked myself in my room. Finally one day I decided that I just couldn’t handle anymore and that I needed to start creating a life for myself or else this is all that would be left for me. I enrolled at the University of Portland and gradually I began to rebuild my life. After an altercation with my father over finances for school it was the last straw and I left home permanently and haven’t spoken to my father for over two years.
My first year at U of P was a struggle, no doubt, but it was a great experience. My confidence was on the rise and for the first time in years I felt a true drive and meaning in my life like I was on my way to something more than I ever felt before. After finishing my first year I went into the summer with a strong drive. I was learning a great deal about myself and began subjecting myself to a very liberating period of self-criticism in an effort to advance my life further. Then, in the midst of this I discovered that a lawsuit had been filed against against me for a car accident in 2006 that I will defend to my death my sole responsibility for. Not knowing a thing about lawsuits and knowing nothing more in that moment except the fact that I had lost my driver’s license and been sued for over $40,000 I almost snapped. From the DMV in Gladstone right alongside the Clackamas River I nearly walked down to the water and drowned myself. The experience was so traumatizing that for nearly the next two months I was a total wreck and eve now, almost a year later, I am still recovering from just that.
Today my life is a wreck, a gradually redeveloping wreck. I practically live on one, maybe two meals a day if I am lucky. I just spent half my money on a car that now I must spend handreds of extra dollars to fix. The current roof over my head is weighing completely on whether the church I attend stays open, and our church just happens to be struggling financially. And as with so many others my relationships with many people are struggling. And I am not ashamed to admit that every now and then I completely lose my mind and snap over things because I wonder how much more I can handle. But when I am finally able to calm myself I take recognition of how much turmoil I have managed to make it through.
As a result of this, more than anything right now I want to embrace a stronger understanding of the struggles those around me are suffering. I am trying to watch closely, looking at the expressions on their faces and the pain that everyone has. I am doing this because one of the hardest things in the universe is to take recognition of the pains others feel when you are so wrapped up in your own. And I don’t want to be all wrapped up in my own pain. I want to handle it and use it to change my life or to forget it all together. Pain and suffering is often an alienating experience, something that makes us want to run and hide. But as I’m slowly learning, and after years of putting myself through isolation, one of the best ways to handle pain is to connect with other people, other people who too are suffering. The problems we all feel may differ but the simple truth is we all feel.
One thing these past couple years have taught me is how heart breaking it can be to suffer and to feel like you’re all alone. That’s why through it all I choose to keep smiling and keep trying to bring happiness to those around me even if it’s only for the most fleeting of moments. As much as I know I cannot control it and don’t have the right to control it, I don’t ever want anyone to have to feel the way that I did. That coupled with the experience of watching my family break up, something so many around me had suffered through but never something I thought would ever happen to be (again with the naivety), and I’ve been transformed in a way. It’s strange, for I’ve noticed a change in my personality. I watch video of me from some three or four years ago and I notice I am not as wild and outlandishly entertaining as I once was (something I always relished). I feel that’s a change I don’t want to embrace but in accordance with that I have found a change in my emotional state/ Very influenced by my father I had a somewhat pessimistic perspective of people who weren’t productive. I was very much judgmental and while I am glad for that time and for the knowledge it gave me I am grateful for the struggles I have I guess for the most part because they’ve made me feel more human. I’ve been forced to experience things I’ve never faced before and everything is coming to me in a new light.
I think back on that weekend in 2008 at the anime convention and I think about all those people there, just exploding at the seams with happiness. While the preppy kids next door at Lloyd Center glared at us with their snobby expressions and I think about what all the parents of these people must have been thinking, the absurdity of it all, I just think of the happiness. God knows things like that are hard to find. It makes me think. I wonder what would possess people to become so immersed in a fantasy world of fantasy characters. Again, just me battling with my common sense. And it’s here I return to thinking about this young generation and the world we live and my goodness it hits me like a ton of bricks. Who wouldn’t want to escape into a fantasy world like that? I wonder what some of these kids much be facing in their real lives, what broken-heartedness they must have felt or still be feeling.
And this is another thing our parent’s generation just doesn’t understand. They always say they do and in some case yes certainly they do but often times this defense of understanding is just an easy out. And that’s how so many parents are. All they want is an easy out. They complain and feel stressed about having to be parents as though each individual one is the only one who knows what it feels like to have to raise kids. And then these same parents find their stress only deepened when they find their kids becoming standoffish and resentful towards them. Maturing at a much younger age than most guys I took to heart the understanding that adults, especially those our parents age, really did understand us and understood the world much better than us. But now I see several examples of the proof looming right in front of me and it’s obvious there is a great break between these two generations. But the older generation is the one I am most disappointed with because they have the greater experience to where they should know how to deal with such things better. And yet when all is said and done I am stunned to see that such is very seldom the case. And it stuns me. And too, it saddens me.
We have this plethora of parents and many of them are just mired in all sorts of dysfunctions. They’re either bogged down and controlled by some lost addiction to alcohol or some hidden drug addiction. I look at many of these parents and the fact of their misery just oozes from them to such an overbearing degree that it is beyond their reasoning to be a positive influence on their children’s lives. And how can they be such if they can’t even pursue a positive outlook on their own lives. Many of them know their miserable but either don’t care or don’t have the clout that God gave the common beaver to change their direction. They fail either to see or, if they do see it, they then fail to acknowledge all the good their children do and can do but every mistake these kids make, no matter how pointless, has to be noted. And not only must it be noted but it’s often times accompanied by some ten minute rant blithering on about irresponsibility when really the whole time their parental subconscious is telling them that they’re the one’s who cannot grasp responsibility.
But they’re creatures of habit as we all are. Everyone says our world today has become a more lazy one, which I disagree with to some extent. Laziness plays its part but it’s more so to me a world in which we are more easily allowed to slip into comfort zones and thus grow accustom to our lives. How else do these marriages in which there is clearly no love and/or connection last for years. Nobody through true personal examination and a recognition of what changes it will take to make them happy would stay in such a frustrating situation but it’s a matter of inconvenience. I’ve known people that have lived in dysfunctional and bickering families their whole lives and yet they’re still standing. It’s amazing how much of the same garbage we are capable of taking on day after day once we simply get used to it as a daily thing.
This is something so many of us hardly even notice because why should we? It’s what we’re used to. But what our parents generation doesn’t understand is that this constant and endless rhetoric, the same miserable and immature manner in which they choose to lead their lives day after day, rubs off on their children. It leaves them feeling unappreciated, feeling like nothing they ever do is good enough. They’re left isolated and confused and their parents are too lost in their own problems, most of which they create or allow to come along themselves. They play this circular game where they tell you to be your own person, on the surface, but then there’s this constant insecurity where they try and get you to be like them. And even in many cases I have sensed the resentment from parents whose kids don’t follow along their footsteps, and so their frustration increases over their selfish desires for their children to be slaves to what they want. And that anger and resentment then only becomes amplified because deep down most of these parents known their shitty lives are their responsibility. They allowed it to become that way and to remain that way and so often times there’s this additional struggle they have with themselves where they hate themselves but still expect to be respected as the authority figure they should be.
And this just goes on and on and at the end of they day all they can do is prattle on about the corruption of America’s youth and how they‘re all lost spending 12 hours a day on you tube and the other 12 hours texting their friends any random shit they can come up with just to kill the time. They bicker and become paranoid about how their child’s generation is becoming more and more isolated. Adolescent depression is on the rise. Adolescent ADHD is on the rise. And all most parents do it either cop an attitude with their kids who only want a little positive attention (most young people are critical enough about themselves, they don’t need anyone elses assistance on that) as though that’s supposed to turn things around. Or there’s the common solution of medication. My kid’s depressed but I’m so pissed about my life and I am so busy in my life I don’t have time to deal with it. There are honestly parents who think this way! I’ve seen it and it disgusts me to place of complete incomprehension. So then parents get their kids hooked on pain meds of which if you ask the majority of young people, these meds hardly do a thing for them. But as with everything else, it’s something one gets used to so they keep taking them. Every acts like a change is happening but deep down everyone knows, if they’d stop and actually use that damn ball of mush inside their head called a brain that nothing is changing. It’s just the same garbage day after day and this young generation that’s already scared shitless is being forced to take the brunt of it by an older, supposedly more mature generation that can’t get anything about it together.
That’s possibly the most pathetic thing of all. As time goes on I see more and more young people’s parents reverting back to the immaturities of childhood while their children are forced to step up and being the mature ones as best as they can understand. And even though they often have little to no experience on what it’s like to be thrust into such a place often times perform at a place of maturity their parents have never reached in their entire lives! But still our parents go on and on about how lost we are. They have no problem acknowledging our flaws. They try and buy our hearts with money because simply giving somebody a present or cash is a lot easier than just sitting down for a few seconds and asking, “Hey how are you doing?” and actually caring about what the answer might be. The disrespect many contemporary parents show to their kids leaves me in complete awe, and not in the good way. And they can just go on and on asking their questions, which of course they don’t want to take five seconds to answer. They can go on with their frustrations about how their flawed kids won’t change when their selfish and dismissive attitudes only serve to block any change or advancement their kids might make.
I look at how this younger generation is and I remember when I was in high school and the level of depression amongst young people never even touched where it’s at today (and it’s only been seven years). And for a long time I had that aged attitude when I looked at people who were in high school right after I started college and I just thought, “Grow up you whining little brats! What could you possibly have to complain about?” And that was just me slipping into the hole that so many others have. That was me not using my mind. That was me following that transparent line so many parents follows which is essentially, “I support you, kid. I feed you and keep a roof over your head, so quick bitching!” Of course, there is a very fine line between they things that allow us to survive properly (such as food and a home) and the emotional pains that we suffer. So many parents think because they’re “in power” and because it is to their credit that their children have a place to live that somehow this translates to them having the right to treat their kids however they damn well please. This perspective, beyond being utterly self-serving and pathetic, is just another creation of the ignorant part of our mind known as the ego.
Now I’m not attacking all parents, obviously that’s not the case. Many children have grown up happy and in decent homes where their relationship with their parents and family is stable. And they should be happy and grateful for such an atmosphere. This is not a broad, flat out criticism of all people of our parents generation. But that disclaimer being laid down, the number of parents who serve as a more detrimental element in their kids’ lives as oppose to a positive one is staggering. And that’s why my perspective on these products of messed up, depressing and dysfunctional homes has changed. It’s easy to look at all these depressed and sad young people and fear what the future may hold. So many worry about whether or not these people will be assets at all in our society. But then I look at our society as it stands and I look at who’s in control. When we look at it what are the things that so many of us deem to be what matters in the world. There’s money, of course. Appearance; so many are obsessed with how they look and how others look. Status is also important, we all long to be known and revered (reputation). It’s all very material and shallow, which has played such a big part in what is so wrong with our pleasant world in the larger context. Why is our economy struggling so much? Because everyone’s thinking about profit, which often leads to cutting man power to save money. The have mores are gaining more which those who aren’t are finding themselves with even less. Why is marriage failing so much? It’s because we’re marrying for looks, status and money now more than ever before. You use such materialistic things as a platform for a relationship and a marriage and it will almost always fail or lead to a loveless marriage. And many of these marriages produce children who are forced to grow up underneath this lack of love.
One doesn’t have to think too hard to realize this is a selfish world going about its selfish means and everyday we are seeing love and compassion flying out the window. We watch the job market fizzling and we start to think ‘well, I’ve just got to worry about myself.’ If our world comes to a point where in every case it’s all about looking out for number one I fully believe our society will crumble because there will be nothing to hold us together. Nobody would genuinely care about anybody else anymore. While I don’t want to make any grand claims or pose any ill-informed prophesies I fear we are slowly edging our way in this direction, and the more and more people that turn their life perspective in that way the more resentful we’ll become towards each other (because despite our ‘looking out for number one’ perspective we will still hypocritically expect others to take compassion on us) and the more and more we will slip away.
That’s where my change in perspective comes into play. As much as I see kindness and compassion flying out the window for the sake of looking out for one’s own interests and the desire to have a life of security I think back again on that convention. I think back on looking around at those smiles of happiness and I look at the way these young people come together, they way they bond. When they watch their friend being treated poorly by their parents they are there for that friend because they can most likely understand where they’re coming from. This is a generation that is starving for love and attention because they’re not getting it from their parents. And as heart breaking as that is there is something to be gained in our present day world by this. And it’s the potential that this, what I believe to be a majority, of young people who are struggling and having to practically scream out to feel noticed or loved will begin to whittle away at this present day materialistically direction society.
I pray the hunger and the desire that these young feel for love and compassion stays strong and that they never forget what it feels like to be alone and/or unappreciated. Because these may be our greatest asset at bringing love and compassion back into this world. I think everyone agrees that there’s something wrong in our world and that changes need to be made and I am truly beginning to believe that those who are struggling now may very well be that force that sparks that change. One of the strongest statements The Bible makes is that life is suffering and the more we suffer the stronger we will be. And I believe that, especially with the trials I have faced recently. I am nowhere near perfect or squared away right now but there are things I can do now that three years ago I never would have considered. Suffering does make us stronger because it’s a constant reminder against the odds of what we as people are capable of surviving through. And not one of us, if one is coherent, would deny that knowing we are loved by others during these trials makes us feel that much stronger. This honestly makes me worry less about the future, even with our addiction to material nonsense. I spoke with one of my aunt’s recently and we discussed the fact that one of the things our parents do perfectly for us is they show us all the mistakes and ways in which we should not live so we learn from those mistakes. As so many of us young people founder under the sadness and anger of the strain of our relationships with our parents the best thing we can take away is a deep and reflective understanding of that pain and frustration. This understanding can serve as a constant reminder of how one should and should not be towards others and hopefully that understanding can catapult us into a greater future where love once again becomes the ruler of all.
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