My Generation

You can save all your indignation about how my generation is worse than yours, how things were so much simpler and how there was so much more quality to relationships when you were young. Maybe you are right about some of those things you hate us for, the parts about us loitering around the 711s, breaking glass bottles...wait, are you sure that was just my generation?

What I do agree with is the lack of quality that is in everything. You can blame it on the iPods, the laptops, the android phones and generic action movies. In fact, blame it on anything you will, because this problem didn't just happen over night and appear to strike people in the age group of 15-25. This started ages ago with you, with how you taught and nurtured your kids, and how they taught us.

Money. Money is the root of all evil; proverbial is it not? Yet, it is at the heart of what drives us, our modern capitalist world fixated on consumerism. I look around in my university classes everyday, trying to see through the masks on people's faces, to see whether they even enjoy being in the class or if they're doing it just because they have to. I listen to other people talk about their program of study, and I differentiate between those who are truly passionate about what they are doing, who are doing it just because of the monetary returns, or who are doing it because it's easy, because they can. I'm sorry, I go to university and study what I do because I want to use it to get a career in a field that I'm interested in and am passionate about. I take my classes hoping I would learn something from them, understand the key concepts, be able to use them to solve problems that hitherto may have had no conceivable answers. I did not go to class to listen to people around me talk about how wasted they got over the weekend, and whether or not they should do it again the next. I also did not go to class to listen to fellow students talk about how when they become a doctor/pharmacist, they will have lots of money and be able to live in mansions and drive fancy cars. Please, I don't think the world needs more doctors who can't heal, or pharmacists who can't count. Don't get me wrong, I usually love people who want to be doctors or pharmacists, and it's totally their prerogative why they want to be what they want to be. If they are studying to become a lawyer just so they can say "screw you bitch, I don't want to help you unless you pay me loads of money", then that's their choice, and nothing I can say will change it.

Quality. Ever since I've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I've been thinking about quality. I believe that my generation does have it, I believe that deep inside each one of us, there are things that we love doing, things that we are passionate about. I also believe that among those things, most of them would seemingly get us nowhere in life, and that our parents drill it into us to believe so, your generation. Society is changing, and my generation is changing with it. In your generation, black and white television was a novelty, in mine, half the population in America (if not all) have a coloured TV. We have become increasingly materialistic, but it didn't start with us. It would've started with you. If you want us to be less superficial, maybe you should've taught us the merits of hard work, the feeling of satisfaction when we do a job well, not how quickly we can do it. Maybe we should have more family nights around the dining room table playing old school board games instead of watching shows on our plasma televisions. Maybe if we were not always rushing from place to place, feeling like we're out of time when we don't use the time meaningfully anyway. Maybe...

Sometimes I feel like I'm completely delusional. Why am I the only one jaded about what is happening around us? Why does it seem like I'm the only one who cares that no one else cares? I'm just so sick of it all, my generation.