The students of my high school, like any high school, were given the same message as nearly every other high school kid is given; reach for the stars, because even if you fail, you’ll land amongst the clouds. The grand irony of this teaching is how far from the truth it is. Reaching for the stars for our generation is achieving impossibly attainable plans and somehow beating all the statistics for transfers, dropouts, unemployed students, defaulting on student loans, or death throughout college. Somehow, we’re supposed to be prepared to deal with life on our own at a place that we’ve visited at most twice or thrice, while still being able to study and maintain enough of a GPA to keep our scholarships. All this, while also following the lesson to “always keep yourself busy!” so we join a bullshit club or group just to have something to say to our parents when they call, so that we don’t look like we’re just sitting around waiting for an opportunity to smoke pot or drink, which is much closer than the reality I paint over the telephone lines.
I’ve always looked at my peers with a bit of envy. They seem to be able to make things happen easier, make less mistakes, perhaps they have things figured out more. Envy, however, is something different than respect. I’m not trying to say that I disrespect my peers. I do see myself on a bit of a higher plane than many of them. Call it arrogance, I suppose. The fact that I ended that sentence with ".., I suppose" probably indicates that it is pure arrogance. One thing I’ll give myself is that I’m self aware.
The worst part of it is, I have terrible self esteem normally. I'm not sure why I have an air about me, especially when I feel that I am inferior on many different levels to them. I'm in worse shape, I have less of a social life, I have worse teeth, but for some reason I still think that I'm better than them. But what am I to think when my friends constantly use absurd terminology and phrases like “bitches” for girls and “raging” for going out, etc.? My generation really doesn’t set the bar very high.
The words that my generation chooses for their actions and the people they interact with are pretty horrible. That’s probably the number one reason why other generations look down on us so poorly. I try to stay away from the pitfalls, using “mega” to signify something more important than usual (mega-test, mega-practice, mega-paper), calling girls “bitches”, “hoes”, “bitties”, “dime pieces”, and the list (sadly) goes on and on.
I’m a member of Generation Y, by literally the last year that was possible. In this way, I don’t really identify with other Generation Y members. They’ve already had their drinking problems and started AA meetings, whereas I’m still looking to the sketchy guy on my floor with a fake ID, who I have to tip $10 just to get his sorry ass out of his room. Nothing like that premium tax imposed on the customer, to borrow an economics term.
Whenever I see posts on reddit of Facebook about a random person who has done a random act of kindness for a veteran, I always think to myself: “Why do I give a shit?” Back in the “olden days,” i.e. the early 2000’s and before, people did nice things to veterans without expecting any sort of reward or like count or karma reward. They just did it. During World War 2, when veterans who came back home were missing limbs or had scarred faces, the people of the country had no forum for them to post (boast) their kindness to soldiers, but it was still expected of society to perform random acts of kindness to strangers in uniform.
It’s incredible how sometimes just the smallest visual clue can suck you back into a memory. Seeing a familiar face or a familiar location brings you right back, and the memory can hit you like a ton of bricks when you aren’t ready for it. Old, forgotten people who you maybe miss like hell. A lot of times for me, it’s people who I wish I could forget. People who taught you things about yourself that maybe you’d rather not know.
Through our experiences with other people, we can learn more about ourselves. Everyone knows this, it’s a fairly fundamental truth. But the most interesting experiences or lessons that we learn from other people often are the ones that we least expected. Someone who we had settled in our brain and you thought that their role was accepted in your life, until one day everything changes and they become something totally different to you.
It’s the simplicity of a single moment. One glance. One touch. One kind word or one unintended consequence can totally change a person’s role in our lives. You become comfortable with them, you are able to identify your role in their lives, until this one moment comes crashing into your life and completely turns everything upside down. For better or for worse, it’s these climatic moments that end up defining us as human beings, and individuals. Without these moments, these slight shifts in our path, we would be completely different people. All of our values, likes, dislikes, our appearance, our mannerisms, are totally defined throughout this spectrum that we exist upon.
These are the moments that your mind refuses to forget. They keep being dug up from the depths of your conscious and you can’t ever really be granted reprieve from them. Some bad, terrible moments in our lives end up defining us. For some, their defining moments come at their finest hour. They step up to a challenge or face an obstacle that changed them forever. We can look up to a person like that. Us whose lives are defined by our worst hour try to live up to that, and blindly hope for it. But we take great comfort in our delusions.
One of the fundamentals of economics is the idea of scarcity. As a human race, we will always desire more than we can have. No matter what we currently have, it will never really be enough for us.
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