(i'm a child of the 90s! prada f/w 1997)
i had a conversation with one of my girlfriends (who's 30 years old) about "people of my generation." it sounds a little silly that a woman who is just 8 years older than me to speak of "my generation," but she says there's a marked difference.
she said people of my generation are in this big fat rush to accomplish. what you do is not important, it's the idea of winning and success. (the outcome -- financial security, wealth, and access -- guide it more than the act itself). remember in high school, you or your friends would volunteer for stuff, keep officer positions you'd never do if you didn't have that college application to fill out. (how much lying there is and how little safeguard there is against it, because this kind of competition promotes lying to protect your position!) the goal was to get into a great uni and become the leaders of the world, or genius innovators, poet warriors, or just rich, degreed professionals, like it's our destiny.
she says, people of my generation in America are so busy doing these things for something else that there's no more time spent thinking about why we are doing it, for what. (this discussion has been carried on so many times, but it's nice to talk about it again because it hits at the heart of things).
how often have we reached a point right after we graduate -- brilliant, young minds, making a good wage, doing 80-hour work weeks to make other people rich -- and noticed it's not where we're going, what we thought we would be doing. it's not the same anymore.
when do we do it for ourselves? make it for ourselves and by our new ethos. there's a shift in our generation, and the next, towards a different kind of living -- all these things (information access, wars, our lying leaders, poverty, and an morally empty core) changed us, not like a riot, but quietly. it's not the same, i think.
2 comments:
thanks for the comments siqi. i feel like i have traffic!!!
hello hello-
just reading these entries while i'm trying to sort out my post-college aspirations. it's funny to recall how much ranting i have done in the past months.. half of me aware of that i still have a long way to go in life, half of me very verbose and cocky.. overlapping halves.
now that i'm out of the cave, it's nice to trip upon things like this with a calmer and quieter mind. i remember when you crossed the bay to hang out in berkeley and hearing you express disappointment with your job at apple. i thought i really understood what you meant then, but i'm really only beginning to get it now!
oh well. thank god for time passage.
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