Mediocre musings from Generation ME

Then, even if growing up were real, the question is really about what you’re going to BE. Oh god. So now we have to plan to BE something? What exactly?

Judging by the most common responses to the sin of a question in question, we’re talking professions. “I wanna be a fireman!” cries the five year old. Or something to that effect.

We’ve taken what we busy our hands with to put food on our tables into states of being. Because if you buy and sell equity for strangers, you’d have to BE a broker, right? Duh. You really have to admire our ability to perversely confuse the details of our lives in a desperate attempt to simplify. It seems so much easier.

In a nation where we’re told if you just buckle down, work hard, and with a sprinkle of love from the big-man upstairs can take you into the White House or better yet onto the red-carpet. Implicit in this fantasy is that you work your ass off to BECOME something. This isn’t just a task you occupy your time with subsequent pay for services rendered. It’s who you are. How you identify yourself.

In the free-market, who you are has become what you sell. You clean up a high school corridor for minimum wage, you’re selling your cleaning abilities. You must be a janitor. You dress up in some cookie-cutter outfit and carry steaming plates of eats to strangers, you’re selling your food-busing talents. You must be a waiter.

And what, you may ask, is my point? I am after the slime oozing out from behind this mechanism. Because after calling each other what we do, we break out the scale. Judgment day has come early and the Messiah’s looking to roll with the super-stars and the bank-breakers.

If Steve is a lawyer and Henry is a porn-star, all else held constant, who do we invite to our dinner party? Without looking, who’s the smart one? Who’s sleazier? Because in the land of the free and the home of the brave who you are is what you do.

We move on to Junior year and start wondering what’s going to be so different between now and 30 that will have us be grown up. Some of us change Majors. Some of us drop out. Some of us go to Spain. But most of us just tighten the blinders another notch until we’re seniors.

Come senior year, we realize exactly what The Graduate was all about: You’re almost 30… do you have your shit together? Our heart rate picks up as the year goes on. We have our way with all those freshman we couldn’t when it was our year. Second semester rushes towards us. We all hold our breath. Like the train goers hurtling towards the dead-end tracks. We shut our eyes and make even sillier faces.

But graduation passes without any fan-fare, more or less. Our families fawn over us for one-reason-or-another. But what’s changed? What’s different? It’s like after getting laid for the first time. The anti-climax of the thing.

In freshman year we’re wise enough to understand: We’ll grow up when we’re 30. Because, that makes sense, right? We have more than 10 years to figure out our shit and nail down ONCE AND FOR ALL what on earth we want to do. It’ll get clearer when we pick that Major we want. Vocations training. We’ll be ready for the real world after a Major. Until then, I’ll take another drink. Skip another class. Kill another blunt.

Then you hit sophomore year.

Your lackluster report card from the year before has shamed you into making a slew of resolutions that you either keep or break. And regardless of what you do, you are yanked into second semester. Under the hot lights, the loud voice booms. It’s time to declare!

Well shit. They catch us with silly looks on our faces with hands full of our genitals and expect us to decide our futures. So we quickly riffle through the offering list, just like we did when we were looking for college all but a handful of years ago.

Skimming pages, skipping chapters, fervently hunting down what subject on earth we’d be happy with for the rest of our life. Well of course we’re all at a loss, and if you weren’t, fuck you for making me jealous.

Film? Well, the industry is such a piece of shit. Government? Would I really want to be a politician? Music? I could never make it, so why take it? French? Not as a Major. I’d just as soon save myself $200K and go live there.

We all feel like royal assholes, because we had all last year to read this forsaken list. With the Jeopardy-jingle looping in the background and only seconds left on the clock, we pick that one that looks good enough for now. English looks fine. Open ended, easy reqs. We’ll take a Grande liberal arts clusterfuckuccino.

We make that delightful simplification and assume there’s some kind of “right” answer. Forgetting the simple truth: there are many. Always. Always and forever. It is a question of what works now.

But instead of taking a breath, cracking a smile and enjoying the time we’ve got here, we get worried. Anxious. Because god if we can’t find IT, our calling, what on earth is wrong with us? In our desperation we start thinking. We could always be lawyers. At least the pay is sick. And is that “Army” thing still recruiting?

Whatever the thought process is, you fill out the paper work. The bulk of us choose to Major in “I’ll get back to you…” while the rest of us take another couple months of “Undeclared”.

Right after we hand that paper in we begin to become aware of this sound. It’s quiet at first. But as we notice it, starts getting louder. It’s this faint… ticking? And then we wonder if we just signed away our lives. Because we still have those silly looks on our faces with our hands furiously fidgeting about our genitals, hoping that we can distract ourselves just one more moment from the question: What are you going to be when you grow up?

“What are you going to be when you grow up?”

I find this to be the greatest crime that has been committed against our generation. It is why we reek of this apathy everyone is so concerned about. It is why we are known – so empoweringly – as the “Me Me Me Generation".

So thank you. You fuck.

Anyone who asks this question should be slapped. What on earth are we doing to our youth? First of all when does “grown up” happen? I can see double and triple guessing myself into my grave. I can’t see this complete uncertainty giving up anytime soon.

I’m figuring the closest thing to “growing up” I’ll ever get around to doing is getting comfy in the discomfort of my absolute uncertainty. Start enjoying that stomach-tumbling free-falling-careen into unknowing. Enjoy that mystery of being blind in a maze that doesn’t go anywhere anyhow.

One of the most ironic parts of this, for myself, is the time relation to “growing up”. When exactly is this supposed to happen? First, we think those teen-agers have it together, because… well… they were TEENAGERS. Man they looked so cool. Then we get there and you realize its just a couple years of social confusion and series of strange secretions.

After learning the finer art of antiperspirant and tampons, we start counting the days until that 21st birthday. Because God. That’s when we’re grown up. We’ll be in COLLEGE. And that matters because fuck me, does high school suck. But college? We’ll get to pick all our classes, so even the work part won’t suck. But best of all: no parents, no rules, all party. And we won’t have to lie to get our hands on the shit we’ve been drinking illegally since we were 14 anyway.

Then we get to college and we realize we’re just a large concentration of children in increasingly adult bodies getting away with shit we’ll never have a legitimate opportunity to do again. And ‘school’. Well it still sucks. Worse than that, no one is forcing us to do it. So now, we have to watch our own ass because god forbid we get booted from this fabulous playground. Short of avoiding abject failure, we all know that being grown up, that’s for after college.