- “We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.
I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset.”
“When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.”
““We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”
Oof. This resonated more than I’d expected.
Gah. Should’ve looked better. I found it a useful read, if only because she connects a bunch of phenomena that I see so many of my peers struggle with. Of course we’re mostly the subject of our particular circumstances, but isn’t that what makes each generation feel and act different in the first place?
Someone on Twitter the other day said something like "There are two kinds of tech bloggers: (A) this is a gadget that does gadget things (B) what does reality even mean". I don't have problem with some navel-staring 30-something going Ich hab angst. My problem arises when they follow up with and I'm in the first generation to feel this way. This screed, if it were better written, would be Douglas Coupland's Generation X; if it were more shooty and bomber-ey it would be Joseph Heller's Catch-22. "I was told there would be cake" is the litany of everyone whose college experience didn't work out the way they were told it would and yeah - college is hella more expensive than it should be, than it used to be, than it can sustainably be but I've seen this movie, it has Winona Ryder in it. It has Robb Lowe in it. It has Bud Cort in it. It has Dustin Hoffman in it. If that's how Millennials became the "burnout generation" then they're the fourth or fifth generation in a row to get there. My issue? Some millennials, such as this author, want to internalize the bad press.
We try too much. That is the problem. We want to create a perfect world, we push to hard and get burned at the end.