Generation Misery

A friend of mine recently wrote that the Millennials — my generation — seemed burnt-out and, even though some of us were meeting some of the traditional check-points of a successful life — marriage or stable relationship, kids, stable career, etc. they were the rarity. And those of us capable of those achievements seemed a little hesitant to go after them.

I could only point out that our generation has seen the sort of severe trauma and impoverishment that we associate with feudal peasants, and no one’s wondering why those lazy French peasants were underachievers (Marie Antoinette did, but I believe she lived to regret her judgments). If you went to a physician because you felt fatigued and had joint pain all the time (non-specific symptoms), there’s a specific script most physicians use to figure out what to do next (most-likely, a scan, possibly a prescription, maybe a referral). However, if you casually mentioned to your GP that you’d recently survived a sexual assault, came from a hyper-abusive family, and had divorced your spouse; that initial script is going to be jettisoned rapidly — there’s no point discussing a sedative if you need a series of sedatives, antidepressants, and years of psychiatric therapy. I’ll admit that my metaphor is tinged by my experiences as a cancer patient (we all have a ton of stories about going in with a severe flu and staying three months because it was leukemia)(that actually happened to a friend of mine), but, let’s go through a sort of greatest-hits version of all the once-in-a-lifetime events that have happened in my generations’ lifetime.

Let’s start with some basic ones we all remember. First, in 1980, there was a global economic recession. That was when the oldest of us were born. Then, in 1987, we hit Black Monday (this is on top of the ongoing savings-and-loan crises and scandals that occurred from the 1980s throughout the 90's). In 1990, we got the first Gulf War, which, apparently, never really ended. In the 80’s and 90’s, American industry went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. I realize I’m simplifying it, but getting a decent hourly job on an assembly line was absolutely not a financial reality for me or any of my peers. I’m not going to bash those jobs, but it’s easy to take bold career or family risks if you know that the worst-case economic outcome is that you’ll go back to the factory for a year or two to keep your benefits and shore-up your savings. My generation gets to look forward to flipping burgers and starving to death if our burgeoning music career doesn’t work out. Of course we’re less-inclined to take risks than previous generations; we starve to death if we screw up, we don’t get set back a few years in our ambitions.

Yes, we saw the Internet Boom, but none of us were in a position to benefit from that (unless our parents owned stock in Apple or Microsoft), and that ended in 2001. Which coincided with one of the single greatest attacks in US history (right on the heels of a multi-year involvement in Serbia), and we’re still in Afghanistan. For every single year of my somewhat brief life, the US has been involved in a shooting war. I‘ll admit that being in America is a much better option than being in on of the numerous countries we bomb; but, whenever a Real Grown-Up talks about American prowess or foreign policy, we’ve all learned that codes to, “We’re going to bomb the hell out of some Kurdish villages, scare away a dictator, and then install an even-worse dictator of our own… who will sell us out within a few years, requiring us to bomb even more kurds, and find a new ruler for Mesopotamia, which is better than universal healthcare or college.” Unlike every other generation, we’ve been brutally educated that America has no discernible foreign policy, and that’s why none of my textbooks in school actually had accurate maps of any of the countries we bombed (my seventh grade history text still listed the USSR as a country, despite that ceasing to be a country over five years before I arrived). When Baby Boomers hear about war or military intervention, even though they all assiduously avoided service in Vietnam, they think of the Marshall Plan, or checking Soviet expansion. When my generation hears about war or military intervention, we know we’re talking to heroin addicts discussing how this rehab program is different. We’ve been in Afghanistan for 20 years, on top of a stint in the Horn of Africa, five-year involvement in Serbia, on top of Gulf War 1, on top of our endless bush wars in central Africa and central and South America. Of course we’re disaffected with US foreign policy, for my generation, that just means exporting working class jobs to other countries, followed by bombing more countries… all without any tangible benefit to anyone but the Cheneys. Meanwhile, we’ve had the 2008 economic recession, a housing crisis, an Opioid crisis, a once-in

And that’s the fundamental problem at the heart of Millennial Ennui; we are locked into an abusive country without any real power to do anything. We are the largest demographic in America, right now, but we control only 4% of the wealth. We don’t try and we’re not interested in ambition, because every single time we reach for anything, we’re greeted with domestic terrorism (I completely forgot about the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Unabomber, the Waco Siege), foreign terrorism, or another excuse to funnel money from infrastructure projects to killing Palestinians. Of course we’re not going to take risks or try — we’ve been taught, carefully, over the course of 40 years; that death, poverty, isolation, and alienation are inevitable. Struggling against them just leaves us tired. If you’re paying close attention; I estimated that my generation might have seen 10 years — tops — of uninterrupted economic stability and growth. Of course we’re never going to retire, we had less than a single dog’s lifetime to develop a career. Then we were all careening to the next civilization-ending disaster.

The one and only good thing we learned in 2020 is that we can, collectively, have a tiny little impact through individual choices. When President Murder was still in charge, the country went into a 1984 mindset on overdrive. We witnessed more American deaths in a year than pretty much any single incident in our war-torn 40 years. Hell, we learned that every single institution the Boomers trusted and built — from law enforcement to Congress to the Executive Branch — serve, exclusively, the billionaire class. That’s it. They get the comforts and benefits of a carefully-constructed, maintained society, everyone else gets endless war, financial collapse, poverty, disenfranchisement, and a sprinkling of police murders. I’m not dumb enough to think our country was designed to be a functioning democracy (it wasn’t; it was built for minority rule after a ton of genocide), but the last year was the difference between, “This Prince Philip fellow is a little untoward” and “Guardian obtains financial statements revealing that the British monarchy eats live kittens,” (only the folks who watched Eurovision this weekend will understand that reference). Half a million Americans died. The American economy collapsed. The last fortresses of true believers in “rugged individuality” and “personal responsibility” — like Texas — got wiped out by the sorts of natural disasters that most Midwesterners would term “November.” Is there anyone who still believes the American Dream — that it’s better to be free than alive?

It’s telling that it was only after the events of a devastating, once-in-a-lifetime plague (the Millennial Drinking Game — take a shot every time you see something horrifying and then get told that it’s a completely unforeseen freak incident that will never occur, again — we’d get liver failure in a few months), a once-in-a-lifetime attempted fascist coup, a once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse (actually, the sixth or seventh once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse that’s occurred within my life), and a ton of other once-in-a-lifetime events that the leadership of this country realized that the methods of subduing the peasantry they’d relied upon for the past 40 years weren’t working, and maybe it is time to rebuild our infrastructure, look at yacht tax loopholes (that’s a thing), and maybe join the industrialized world and not bankrupt people who decide to get sick.

The message to my generation is that we may or may not get the long-overdue domestic safety net that’s been denied our country (but exists in every single other industrialized nation), but, we’re only going to get it if we continue those cost-saving measures we figured out in Quarantine that hurt the administrative class that stands between labor and the investors. We may not be able to get Elon Musk to return Bitcoin value, but we can make life so hard and miserable for all of his trusted associates that no one will ever do business with him, again. Oddly enough, we did that, very effectively, with The Donald — no bank will touch him, his web page is on-par with larger cooking blogs (in terms of traffic), and every member of his odious klan is under some form of investigation. I’m not dumb enough to think Donald can’t make a comeback, but that won’t happen if his supporters want it more than Jowly Jabba wants it.

For everyone out there eager to send me death threats, all I can say is, “Do you really think you’re capable of something the literal deadliest disease known to modern medicine isn’t?” Which brings up an important point — the traditional threats used by society, such as violence, impoverishment, death, inconvenience, etc. — are the defining aspects of Millennial existence. You’re really, really going to have to put more imagination into your threats to distinguish them from a normal Wednesday for us. And we’ll hold the service industry hostage until we get affordable housing and healthcare.

And, I’ll let everyone in on a little secret that only my generation seems to have discovered: all of those big “life moments” are largely artificial and conceived of as a way to sell crap that absolutely no one needs. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get married, buy a house, or have kids, if that’s what you really, really want. But, my generation seems to be in the process of realizing that if you are perpetually single, childless, and rent; it’s not like you get dragged away by orcs or devoured by a dragon. All that happens is, you just stay single, don’t change diapers (or worry about paying for schools), and have to deal with landlords on a regular basis (okay, that last one’s a bummer, but it’s not like repairing a cracked pipe on your own is a joy). Millennials aren’t killing industries; we just don’t have the time, interest, or money to participate in them when there are many, many other things that are of more immediate concern. Don’t want us to kill the education industry? Give us money to go to college. Don’t want us to kill medicine? Make it affordable, and actually train and equip physicians to do their job so that the British Medical Journal doesn’t list “medical misadventure” as a leading cause of death. Don’t want us to defund the police? Give us cops who don’t kill people on-camera with witnesses.

Every discussion of my generation treats us as if we’re some sort of invading horde of Mongols on the edge of the Eurasian plains. We aren’t. We’re just the invisible hand of the free market correcting itself. I hate to introduce economics to a civil discussion, so, let me just paraphrase Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance — Popper claimed that societies can be tolerant, but there is a natural limit to that tolerance, because endless tolerance will result in intolerant people rising to power, destroying tolerant people, and, thus, tolerant society. In a truly free, unrestricted market, it would absolutely be fine to sell cocaine in soda, heroin in vitamins, or anything that made a profit, regardless of safety. The only problem is, of course, that, eventually, the consumers of those products will die, and the market for original-recipe Coca-Cola with them. Unlimited free markets destroy themselves, eventually. My generation has been so thoroughly and repeatedly bankrupted that we don’t have the money or power to participate in various industries, and now those industries are dying. And, good news; the folks who championed the horrific policies that lead to endless war, endless oil drilling, and endless waste, are dying. The Silent Generation is mostly-gone; the Baby Boomers are dying off (as it turns out, you can have all the money and power in the world, and you can’t buy immortality), and my generation isn’t buying into the traditional divide-and-conquer strategies that diverted questions like, “How is this foreign trade agreement going to impact a median-income household in Michigan, really?” So, yeah, that weird free-for-all century of unregulated, uncontested brutality-masquerading-as-economic-policy is going to end. My generation certainly won’t mourn it.