A generational conflict | 4 September 2020

I think the defining characteristic of the millennial generation is duty inspired by hopelessness and perseverance inspired by spite. The world has created a generation who no longer has dreams, so what inspires us to be better and not give up? It’s the spite we feel for the previous generations.

We resent their entitlement and wasteful lifestyles. Their selfishness and hate appauls us. That’s why the environment and social justice is so important to us. That’s why you’ll almost never see a young person yell at a service worker. Even though it feels like life doesn’t matter, our spite inspires is to be better than the ones we hate, even when everything is stacked against us.

As children, we were told stories of how great the world is. How if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded with success and a good life. And that was true, until the selfishness of people took it away. We are now recognizing that, and we hate it. But we are also realists. Just because we know the problem, doesn’t mean we can fix it then go back to following our dreams. I think we can fix it, but it will only be fixed in time for future generations. So in a sense, we’ve given up on our own happiness, but continue fighting because we know happiness is possible, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes. Even though we don’t believe in our own happiness, the thought of others’ happiness is enough to inspire life.

I want to make it clear that we don’t hate everyone from that generation, just those who embody the characteristics above. I don’t like to hate. All it does is make me feel worse about life, and it’s exhausting to constantly feel it without any healthy way to express it. So I try to focus on the positives. I try to think of the good people. We always talk about people like Mr Rogers, Bob Ross, Steve Irwin, etc. But they’re just the famous ones. They weren’t the only good people in the world, just the most visible. There are countless others who are just as kind.

But sometimes it’s hard not to feel hate and anger. Like now – we’ve experienced four years of corruption and division, and somehow I still see Trump-Pence signs on people’s lawns. Trump is the incarnation of everything we hate. He is so cartoonishly evil, that it would almost be funny if hundreds of thousands of people weren’t dying because of him. But somehow he has a cult of followers who believe he’s the second coming of Christ.