The Inbetweeners

With so many conversations about Millennials, Gen Z, and the unrivaled nostalgia of being a “90’s kid,” I thought I might give my own cranky old man rant about how kids these days don’t know the half of it.

With every generation, there is more than just a sense of unity, there is an inherent pride that comes with the things you did and saw when you were around 11 to 13. Even The Who’s song My Generation shows that this kind of showboating happened in the past. It’s gotten to the point where I question my own tastes, like whether or not the original Disney Renaissance movies I grew up with were the masterpieces I know them to be, or if my bias is talking for me. 

For context, I was born in 1995, and in some ways, I don’t feel like I belong to any generation. I think the time I was a child represented a massive cultural shift in America, and that both Millennials and Gen Z represent the before and after. The bombastic culture of the 90’s held on into the 00’s as America underwent the consequences of 9/11 and the beginning of technology moving faster than we could handle. When I started school, I was familiar with the sound of dial-up internet — by the time I graduated high school our computer labs were replaces with carts of MacBooks to supplement the computer in our pocket.

I am glad I grew up with technology and can adapt easily as things grow. But I am much happier that I was able to experience the how life was before. This kind of thinking tends to be brought up when discussing privacy and social media. We all did embarrassing things as children, but never once was it permanently stored and relivable online. With the internet, kids are catching on to things much faster and much earlier in life.

When I think of our generation, I see a blurred image. There is no way to break down and objectively look at the clash of cultures and messages that plagued us when we were children. Did we take those ideas in with no concern or is our generation a reaction to those ideas?  We were given lies — The Food Pyramid, watching TV melts your brain, your country is looking out for you, video games make you violent, the guilty always receives justice. We pledged our allegiance daily to a flag. A flag which represents freedom and liberty in a country made up of immigrants who abused the natives and used slaves just so people in the 21^st century could say, “go back to your own country!” Every generation before us told us what a good job they were doing, to treat others how we want to be treated and that every individual is special. The news said our generation has poor interpersonal skills due to our reliance on social media. This sentiment only stopped once businesses found social media to be useful.

If our generation seems apathetic, it is because everything which we used to build our world view was found to be distorted. Following money and power to its source leads to bottomless rabbit holes, but there was a simple truth in front of me the whole time. 

Generations are inherited.  It was never the change in technology or entertainment, but rather the problems which were unaffected and never told to us.  Through the lens of poverty, hunger, freedom, happiness, generational lines do not mean a thing.  We overlook these issues not because they are too big to handle, but because it is a failure which makes us all the same.  We let technological and social change act as proof that modern people are more refined than the past. But quality of life does not equal quality of person. I hope my generation can break the cycle by first blaming ourselves. If there are those who think our generation is far detached from the atrocities of slavery, we all carry an aluminum rectangle with the answer. To consider each generation as its own, is equivalent to humanity having short-term memory loss.