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I have talked about this before but I need to emphasize that graduating from college in 2008 was... quite a thing.
9/11 was one world-ending event, and 2008 was the other one. Our life experience is defined by them and it’s impossible to adequately explain how traumatic it was. https://twitter.com/amydentata/status/1272648631867170816
9/11 was one world-ending event, and 2008 was the other one. Our life experience is defined by them and it’s impossible to adequately explain how traumatic it was. https://twitter.com/amydentata/status/1272648631867170816
I’m not like WE HAD IT SO MUCH HARDER THAN ANYONE ELSE, I’m talking about this as someone who’s simply fascinated by how our experience differs from others in some very notable ways.
I was 17 when the Towers came down.
I was 17 when the Towers came down.
One year before graduating from high school, and in a single morning the world fell apart. Like everything I had been led to expect about how things worked was erased.
On the cusp of one of the more important transitions to adulthood and whoops, there goes fucking everything, and in the early days of images being ubiquitous and inescapable.
It was traumatizing for all of us, but again, we were teenagers when it happened.
It was traumatizing for all of us, but again, we were teenagers when it happened.
It’s wild to distinctly remember a world prior to 9/11 and the Patriot Act and to have been hurled into the transition from one to the other in such a profoundly formative period, in the midst of the transformation of our relationship with what the web became.
I remember coming home on the afternoon of 9/11 and getting online and looking at all the news and the tidal wave of images and processing and numbly thinking “my world is now fictional”.
I didn’t even really know what that meant, I just knew that how I engaged with reality had changed forever and a huge part of the basic assumptions I had about the world was gone.
Nine months later I graduated.
Nine months later I graduated.
I won’t say the world became terrifying, although for some of us in a lot of ways it did. It just... changed. It all changed. We had to rethink everything. It is impossible to fully understand unless you lived through it in that specific way.
Then we all went off to college (or a lot of us did, this is a broad age range). And it was like “okay so that happened but we can move on and get jobs and have a relatively normal life anyway, right?”
And then 2008 was like lmao
And then 2008 was like lmao
And we grew up with recycling and Captain Planet and Earth Day, and were always vaguely told that if we were Good People and did the right things and saved the rainforest and shit everything would be okay.
Well.
Well.
We were not raised with the knowledge that we were on a planet which, in our lifetimes, might become literally uninhabitable, and even if it didn’t would become extremely difficult to live on.
We internalized that right around the time some of us started considering having kids.
We internalized that right around the time some of us started considering having kids.
(Again, I’m speaking very generally, this is a broad age range and there’s a broad range of experiences. I’m also ignoring a racial component to this which I shouldn’t but don’t feel equipped to talk about intelligently at the moment)
The people who are teenagers right now will also be marked by the experience of spectacular upheaval. It’ll be different. It’s always different.
But we’re unique in that we were told things would not be what they became at the most important moments in our lives.
But we’re unique in that we were told things would not be what they became at the most important moments in our lives.
And we’re also uniquely—at least in the last 70 or 80 years—a generation wherein many of us had been raised to expect a particular trajectory of wealth accumulation only to see it decimated before our eyes.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of us retreat into escapism in our late 20s and 30s, and it also shouldn’t be something to scorn. We are terrified and bewildered. We have been terrified and bewildered for most of our lives. We want things to make sense.
It’s not that we refuse to engage with reality. We’ve been engaging with reality as best we can this entire time. It’s just that we’ve also been radically adjusting what reality *is* for us and we get very tired and want to go back to something comforting.
It’s not immaturity, it’s self-care. It’s how a lot of us remain functional and find meaning where meaning has been constantly rearranged in ways we don’t control.
wrt “adulting”: this is something else I’ve talked about before.
wrt “adulting”: this is something else I’ve talked about before.
Most particularly in this thread, but briefly: many of the benchmarks by which we were raised to identify and measure adulthood are no longer available to us, again for reasons we don’t control. https://twitter.com/dynamicsymmetry/status/1046873895494664192?s=21 https://twitter.com/dynamicsymmetry/status/1046873895494664192
“Get married!” A lot of us can’t do that, or have chosen not to because it’s impractical. “Get a real job!” Real Job? What is this Real Job you speak of? “Buy a house!” lmao oh my god
“Have a retirement plan!” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“Have a retirement plan!” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“Grow up!” WE. CAN’T.
ALSO GROWING UP DOES NOT MEAN WHAT IT DID
WE DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. WE ARE REDEFINING IT AS WE GO
CUT US A FUCKING BREAK HERE
ALSO GROWING UP DOES NOT MEAN WHAT IT DID
WE DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. WE ARE REDEFINING IT AS WE GO
CUT US A FUCKING BREAK HERE
Which is why it can sting for some of us to have the generator after us telling us to “grow up”. Our parents have been telling us the same thing, even as our parents destroy our ability to meet their expectations of what growing up is.
Thin-skinned? Sure, maybe, but I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable for that to be a raw patch sometimes, given how many of us are struggling with a constant low-level crisis where that’s concerned.
“lmao grow up millennial” I would love to, please tell me what that means
“lmao grow up millennial” I would love to, please tell me what that means
Every generation goes through upheaval and trauma, and every generation goes through a period of being a bunch of fucking brats.
But we are distinct in some important ways and I don’t think a lot of people adequately appreciate that.
But we are distinct in some important ways and I don’t think a lot of people adequately appreciate that.
We’ve been trying to grow up all this time. Turns out “growing up” was a completely arbitrary social construction, and like most social constructions, it’s extremely vulnerable to collapse.
And again, we did not control 90% of this. It just happened to us.
And again, we did not control 90% of this. It just happened to us.
We have agency, we can make choices, we’re responsible for ourselves, we have faults and foibles, a lot of the stuff we get dunked on for is at least sort of true.
But please do not tell us to grow up. Unless you intend to hand us all very large checks.
But please do not tell us to grow up. Unless you intend to hand us all very large checks.
READ THIS THREAD, it addresses some of the racial component in an extremely good and personal way https://twitter.com/sqiouyilu/status/1273003105383141377?s=21 https://twitter.com/sqiouyilu/status/1273003105383141377
Oh also do not ever fucking give us shit for drinking wine you fucking pipsqueaks, you will be doing the *exact same thing* because literally it’s the only rational response to things in general
