The first lost generation were the young men and women who were consumed by World War I. These young adults were the generation who lost their years of youth while witnessing a war raging in their midst. Millenials are not all volunteers or military enthusiasts. Most of us were in elementary school during 9/11, but each of us have a different experience to other historical events in our lifespans.
We grew up witnessing the evolution of technology with the rise of the computers. We saw all eight "Harry Potter" movies and fell in love with the books while we anxiously anticipated each new arrival until the "Deathly Hallows" came and went, always leaving its readers in tears as they reached the close. We are the millennial generation: witnesses to the rise and collapse of the economy and a revolutionized way of communication via text. We love to believe that we're a part of something great. Why else would we be the generation who had the most college educated individuals? We want to be our best selves, and I truly believe we each have something big to be a part of. The tragedy is that we are lost because we miss out on so much. We'll never know a life with financial stability. We have our cell phones as social crutches; when we misplace them or the wifi is off, it's as though we've lost a limb.
Relationships are tough. Nobody promised us it would be easy, but we don't know what to expect half the time when there are so many broken families. I know so many with divorced parents. I was blessed to have parents still together but my family is in no way perfect. I'm no stranger to hard times. As a kid, I struggled with making friends and I felt really isolated in my own head. While I felt misunderstood and alone, I saw other girls so happy with their friends as they posted pictures together at sleepovers and mall trips to get manicures. I felt like something wrong with me, but I learned very quickly that no one really cared how I felt. There was a whole world that continued to turn and the fact that I spent my time in high school avoiding the girls who knocked me down and called me vicious names is completely irrelevant. I realize that so many people have emotional trauma as we are the generation with higher exposure to domestic violence, abuse, and neglect. We are more at risk of mental illness.
We are isolated from the world, immersed in video games or books because we can identify with fictional characters better than my family or peers. I'm not saying these are all bad—I'm an advocate for "Gilmore Girls" marathons at 3 a.m. and binge reading Jane Austen novels. It becomes dangerous when we are strangers to the term moderation. We lose ourselves by overindulging in anything we can get our hands on that will guarantee a good time.As a result of this we flee from commitment, we have such a hard time relating to other people when we spend so much of our time in withdrawal from hangovers and broken hearts. So few of us have learned to process strong emotions. As a result we are stunted from establishing genuine relationships that go past a one night stand after three months of "hanging out." We tell ourselves lies that we just need to feel pleasure and pretend everything's okay. These risky behaviors and lifestyle choices have earned us the stigma and reputation from the generations before us.
I do not have infinite wisdom. I don't know the answers to everything, nor do I feel smart half the time. I know we are capable as a generation to do much more than we think. I am not naive enough to believe we are perfect, but I am smart enough to know we are capable of good. The idea that elderly people hate all of us is a myth as fat as the one which says we are all tied and defined by the generation we're in. The reason why I say we're lost is because I believe there's a part of each of us that cares strongly about the world we live in. We are lost because we feel alone in the lives we lead. If we don't set goals or start thinking bigger, we won't go anywhere. What kind of life is one where you conform to the stigma your given and don't think outside the box? We're scared to live our lives as adults. Most of us have an education that gave us so little to prepare for the outside world (because you can't pay bills with pythagorean theorem.) We don't know how to find ourselves—most of us don't even know how to change the tires on our cars. We're scared of growing and we panic when life throws us a curveball. We don't know how to find ourselves, which is fine—we choose to create ourselves instead.
