A teenage girl lays in bed cozily wrapped up in her mom's sweater from the 80s listening to Free Fallin' by Tom Petty. She types "ugh :/ I was born in the wrong era" into her phone and sends the tweet. She is the most quirky girl in the world. So insightful. So brave.
Except, she really isn't. I don't buy into that whole daydream, not one bit. And I am not speaking from any self-righteous perspective on my generation, it's just that I've thoroughly mulled it over, and I've come to my conclusion.
I grew up hearing my mom constantly shower the 80s with praise. The music. The fashion. The hair. The simplicity of running around as a kid in the neighborhood unattended by the fearful eye of her parents and then sneaking out late as a teenager without the omniscient gaze of the Find My Friends app following her every move. Yes, sometimes I envy that lifestyle, and I oftentimes fantasize about a childhood without a screen. When compared to the hardships I live through today, my parents' era seems like a flawless neon dreamscape. Except, it really wasn't. Nothing is perfect, and the nostalgic wanderlusts of my generation need to get a grip on reality—past and present.
So many things have changed for the better leading up to today, and I am not just talking about since the 80s. Some people dream of the 50s, but do they consider that women had virtually no options for a lifestyle other than to be a housemaid disguised as a wife? Do they consider that Jim Crow laws and segregation plagued our nation like an enormous elephant in the room? Some people dream of the 60s, but would they actually be willing to embrace the consistent looming fear of a nuclear attack? Would they be willing to give up their right to an abortion? To those, that dream of the environmentalist virtues of the 70s, look how far we've come with our understanding and awareness. And to those that dream of the freedom of the 80s, look how free formerly taboo subgroups like the LGBTQ community have become. And just look at the worldwide connectedness that spawned from the internet—and the iPhone X…you've got to admit that's pretty cool.
Yet, of course, the world we live in today is not perfect either. The sociopolitical climate is divisive and disturbing. Although women and minority groups in the United States have gained more and more freedoms, there is still evident discrimination that comes in similar and vastly updated forms. We are harming our world at alarming rates from extreme pollution and our massive carbon footprints. All that new technology I mentioned, the iPhone X, has hypnotized us into forming addictions to screens, the resulting side effects being an increasingly antisocial social world and health defects that I'm sure will crop up in our later life.
But, even with everything that is wrong, we have managed to get a lot of things right. Day by day, we are becoming increasingly more aware of our downfalls and working to correct them. Setbacks are bound to happen, but I have faith in our generational and global ability to keep moving forward.
Maybe you believe that you were born in this era for a reason; maybe you believe it was pure chance. Either way, you were born in this era, and the only way to make it one in which our children will look back on with a jealous desire is to embrace it. Be mindful of the past, be engaged in the present, and keep your eyes to the skies; it's only up from here.