Generation: Why?

It's 2014. The age of the bright future boys and girls collapsed with the twin towers. I remember being a sophomore in high school on 9/11 and everything up to that point had seemed so positive for my generation. It seemed that we had life by the balls and we were able to do whatever we wanted. But 2001 changed the way we saw the world and the way the world saw us. Nothing ever was the same for us and that feeling of hopelessness, insecurity, and vulnerability sowed the seeds for the new generation of melancholy to grow.

Today if you look around at my generation we are jaded, hopeless, cynics. Jobs are nowhere to be found and 99% of us are working in retail or filing mail in an office with the hope that we can get health insurance (or at least that we don't get sick). Our social lives are dwindling because we are beyond the age where it's acceptable to always ask our parents for money but we aren't self-sufficient enough to enjoy life's adult luxuries. So we buy cheap alcohol, get addicted to anti-depressants, and sit at home wondering why our lives aren't more like the people on "reality" television.

The only glimmer of hope we have is to make a mockery of our situation. If we can't change our lives and we can't handle the seriousness of how fucked we all are then we have to joke. So we do. We joke about how our lives are meaningless, how our jobs are worthless, how we will most definitely be single forever, and we laugh. We laugh because we don't want to cry about the fuckery that is our life.

We get labeled as "whiny brats" by older generations who blame social media or some other irrelevant factor on why we aren't succeeding. In reality we were between 10 and 15 when our lives and opportunities got fucked over and that wasn't our fault. What we've been doing is trying to cope with a gradually declining socio-political landscape without any prior knowledge of how to. We are blamed, told to work harder, or get ourselves out there more. Overextension is the new black and we wear it daily, but we are fucking tired. We are totally fucking tired of the feeling that we get when we put every ounce of ourselves into an opportunity only to be told we aren't good enough. We are the generation that knows rejection better than most others and that's why we have to laugh. We have to mock our situations because if we take it too seriously we won't recover.

So to everyone out there who thinks we aren't taking life seriously, or that we are just whining about things because we don't want to work harder, I'd love for you to imagine what our lives are life from day-to-day when you can't make a five year plan because you don't have the luxury of even making a five day plan. We are Generation "Why" and we still have no answers.