Kids These Days by Erin

Kids These Days by Erin - February 2015 Scholarship Essay

We are the last of a dying breed. The Beats have been beaten, the Silents, silenced, the Gen X-ers, exiting. We are the last children of the old millennium, and our sons and daughters would never recognize the world we were born into. Technologically speaking, the years between 1980 and today have represented the most dramatic change in our society since the advent of the steam engine. We were born and raised as the world expanded at a furious rate, and this has only compounded our disillusionment. Our parents and grandparents built the country we live in today, but what will we build? We are young, but already battered and beaten and scarred. We are graduating high school, graduating college and coming of age, and like the Americans born a century before us, we are a generation lost.

I read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at the age of seventeen, hovering precipitously between the golden days of my youth and the unknown horizons of my future. The past few months I had spent in a drowsy sort of malaise, not a depression, but the type of melancholy disillusionment that seems to pervade the lives of seventeen year olds, when the magic of childhood fades away, and the future becomes all too real. I found a copy of The Sun Also Rises at a library book sale, a 1954 printing adorned with a Snoopy bookplate inscribed with the name Pat Fahrey. I couldn't think of anyone my age who read Peanuts, anyone named Pat, or anyone who even bought printed books anymore. Everything about that battered novel seemed so old and strange and nostalgic. I had to buy it, and that afternoon, I began to read. It was around the third chapter when everything seemed to make sense, when the anguish of Hemingway’s expatriates began to reflect my own discontent.

“Brett was leaning back in the corner, her eyes closed. I got in, and sat beside her.

The cab started with a jerk. ‘Oh darling, I’ve been so miserable,’ Brett said.”

The misery, I concluded, facing myself and my peers, is not teen angst, or PMS, or being a moody high schooler. It is the feeling of being lost. The famous phrase used in the epigraph of Hemingway's’ book is said to have been coined by a french mechanic in the 20s, expressing disapproval of his young worker. You are all a “génération perdue!” he exclaimed- a lost generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and their contemporaries epitomize a generation lost- their lives of hard drinking and hopeless wandering echo that of their literature’s characters. The last children of the 20th century identify with this sentiment. We are scorned by the generations older than us for our laziness and narcissism, and yet, our plight today mirrors that of the youth coming of age in the early 1900s. We just want to feel something stir within us. We just want to feel alive. My generation should read The Sun Also Rises not because it's the story of Brett, Jake and Robert, but because it's the story of each and every one of us today.

In childhood and adolescence, my peers and I watched hurricanes and school shootings ravage communities from behind our television screens. We watched flash floods and famines and genocide, saw the aftermath of bombings and earthquakes and battles. Myself and my peers, we are so young. But the spread of digital media and communication means that we have witnessed, in real time, countless horrors. Perhaps this is why so few of my voting age peers choose to participate in government. We are lost, disillusioned by a broken world that no leadership could ever fix. Maybe the myths about us are true- we do not have as much faith in religion, we bury ourselves in our electronics, we lack social and intrapersonal skills. But can you blame us? This is the world we grew up in.

Ernest Hemingway was born 98 years before me, and I suppose after nearly a century, things have come full circle. We are confused and broken and scared, searching for something to fill the void. We change life plans just as we change clothes, and our wayward nature is mocked by the generations above us. We are the products of our era. But are we doomed? The second epigraph of The Sun Also Rises is from Ecclesiastes.

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… all rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

Although the fate of my generation seems to be darker, as the earth keeps spinning and the universe keeps unfolding, the lost millennials of the digital age are beginning to find our way. For the aimless youth of the 1920s, and for the aimless youth of today, just as the sun seems to have set, it will also rise again.