Think about it for a second, no matter when you were born. Growing up, you’ve seen your parents become unhappy during one time or another. That sight alone is enough to make a child crumble on the inside — seeing the people you believed were at the top of the world be torn down, and nothing you could do would cheer them up. Or, maybe you could. Either way, there’s always a point of time in someone’s life when they’re just ... unhappy, and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. It might be a week long thing, or could be a constant thing for three years — that depends on the person. But, children never had the opportunities that they have now to fix that unhappiness.

When our parents and elders grew up, the work force was limited. You could be a doctor or an accountant or an attorney or a police officer, but those roles were also limited by the gender of the person pursuing them and there were other options for career paths but not nearly as many that were created while we were growing up. In the past, a lot of the population took jobs they weren’t happy with, but took them because it meant they were able to feed their family or support themselves no matter how little interest they had in that field of study. Now, it’s different. The possibilities are literally endless - who would’ve thought you could have a career as a social media advocate? In a world where now we can literally be anything we want to be, why would we settle for a job we don’t like?

It’s true that the amount of committed relationships within our generation is lower than any other generation, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. In years past, men and women got married to carry on their family even if they didn’t really love the other person. Now, we can marry whoever we want, and we won’t settle to marry someone we don’t really love. We aren’t as afraid of commitment as our elders make us out to be — we just don’t want to be stuck in a crappy marriage because we had to settle for something we didn’t deserve or frankly want.

Maybe we were the generation who went wrong, but we’re truly some of the first ones to be able to be happy without having to sacrifice that happiness for anything else.