To my generation,

I sit in a two-position chair at a desk covered in screenplays, paint markers, inkwells, and textbooks every Thursday or Friday, and carefully write a sometimes-lengthy article, one that I believe evokes my soul, one that I can look back upon and say proudly, "Hey, I wrote that.” It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to broadcast my thoughts and ideas to -- literally -- an entire generation. A generation, might I add honestly, that isn’t even worth my time.

If it’s not an article about why the ’90s were so d*mn great, you don’t care about it. How can you say, though, that you do? The ’90s didn’t have iPhones, so what’s the purpose? You’d be lost without your phone. If it’s not on a small screen, who cares? This article’ll probably show up on your small screen, but what does it really matter when I’m not telling you how to take the perfect selfie or why whatever the h*ll gives me life? Speaking of which, this whole censorship thing is ridiculous because it produces second-rate, cookie-cutter articles. And although they share well, they are devoid of passion and individuality because most millennials -- yeah, you -- need everything to be generalized and have several pictures throughout to make it "easier to read."

We're all easily two decades old, or a few years shy, so why the h*ll does anything have to be easier to read or more readable? Poets don't include a f*cking cat meme every time they think their poems are a bit long. I'm not sorry I don't tailor myself to you. I'm not going to undercut something I've spent literally hours writing and rewriting with some irrelevant picture. And as for more readable, like what I've written isn't finished unless it's got some hyperlinked photo of sh*t separating it into easy-to-swallow portions. If you dig the photos ruining people's hard work, real life is going to make you choke because reality does not go down easily. With this generation, it’s not about creativity; it’s about being relatable. It’s about conforming to the goings-on of the 21st century. Who cares what I think as long as everyone else thinks the same thing? This is not a generation of individuals. It's people, just people, generic and defined by pop culture.

All you care about is page views, likes on your Instagram and Facebook updates, and retweets, not what you post, just as long as someone else thinks you’re relatable. It’s quantitative over qualitative. There’s no articulation. As long as you say something, you believe you’re in the clear. God, I don’t know how half of you are going to get jobs. Yeah, the Internet’s a gold mine, but only if your mind’s the pickaxe, and not your fingers.

Speaking of which, I saw this interesting Tumblr post that said, essentially, millennials shouldn’t allow themselves to be deterred from taking selfies, watching Vines around a phone, or doing anything else that is a commodity of this generation, simply because past generations did the same exact thing. Here’s the thing, though: Those generations’ commodities brought progression. Drive-ins, malt shops, vinyl records, rock ’n’ roll -- these are all things that either increased life’s social potential or brought people pleasure and excitement. Yeah, phones will one day have all these things built in, but we all look so anti-social and, quite frankly, dead using them. We are no longer excitable because we’re accustomed to our next gift being a little thinner and a little bigger.

Some people go to coffee shops just to sit and text next to each other. If these are the commodities that define my culture, define my generation, I don’t want to be a part of it. I’m not the brain-dead conformist wasting my life on a phone in a photo in a high school textbook years from now. My worth is not defined by a four-digit passcode. I am not the number of photos filling a Camera Roll, but filling a photo album -- something tangible that will live longer than I will. And if my house burns down and I lose that photo album one day, I’ll at least be able to say I made something, something real, something that cannot be summarized in a series of ones and zeros.