Talkin Bout My Generation

There seems to be rising interest in this, my Generation Next. The online-only, network-quality, eight minutes-per-episode drama Quarterlife has made something of a splash despite being only mildy addictive and even occasionally silly. (It will be aired on NBC this spring, which sort of negates its whole appeal, but business is business and business must grow.) And now, as part of its ongoing series of stories on Generation Next, NPR has announced studies revealing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 are still not quite adults according to themselves, their parents, and the rites of passage generally associated with growing up. These not only include marriage, kids and a mortgage, but moving out and financial independence as well. Why? Are we just dragging our feet, or is there a method here?

My generation terrifies and fascinates me. When I think about all 42 million of us collectively, I despair. Forty two million young men and women just as tongue-tied, embattled, beset and directless as I? How will this fadge? I think all of we Gen Nexters, particularly the liberals, would agree that the big picture looks appallingly bleak. I don't know anyone in her twenties who thinks we will have Social Security to rely on in retirement, or who believes that our country will still be "Number ONE!!!" in forty years or even ten, always assuming we haven't all drowned an an apocalyptic maelstrom by then. But who's going to solve all that? Certainly not us. We are so paralyzed by fear that we can barely muster the strength to move out and pay off our college loans, let alone effect change. And yet these are our problems. Climate change will not be our parents' problem. The oil shortage is not our parents' deal. Globalization is not our parents' concern. The same parents who are coddling us now, who hold us so firmly to their ample bosoms now, do so with full knowledge that some day they will be gone and we will be stuck with a smoldering shit pile of a country and a world and it will be ALLTHEIRFAULT NOTOURSTHOSEASSHOLES. So what does Gen Next do in the meantime? The only thing we can do. We close our eyes, turn away and party like it's 1999. Old fogies of earlier generations think us shallow, spoiled and entitled. They aren't wrong. Gen Nexters from the upper middle class and up have had to go looking for need in order to find it. We were born in the midst of a long slow economic expansion that to our wondering child eyes seemed boundless as the sea. Our parents told us everything would be all right and we looked around and everything was all right, so we believed them. Can they really begrudge us our softness and frailty now?

That being said, I don't think most of are all that spoiled or lazy, at least not after we've lived alone for a bit and seen some of the world. What we are is running scared. Of course we're in the slow lane to adulthood, NPR! The weight of the world is quite literally on our well nourished shoulders. Our parents and grandparents rushed right into adulthood and look what it got them. THIS. If we're going to solve this shit, we're going to need all the extra time we can get. Don't begrudge us that, after all the crap you've pulled.