I Am the World’s Oldest Millennial

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/sunday/worlds-oldest-millennial.html

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Sometimes, it feels as though I am older than everyone else my age. Or at least the world conspires to make me feel that way.

I remember going to my oldest sister’s college graduation in 1996. The valedictorian stood up to say, “They call us Generation X, but I hope we become Generation Why.” I was 14 years old, and this sounded deeply profound to me.

I had been jealous of my sister, that she belonged to this group that had magazine covers devoted to them and was old enough to wear baby-doll dresses and chokers. Even their problems seemed glamorous — ennui!, unchecked irony!, the existential dilemma of living outside of history, as philosophers proclaimed we all somehow were doing, after the Berlin Wall fell. I did not understand then that time would pass for us all, that we would not be living in this moment forever.

Maybe it was being a little sister. But I don’t think that was it. Looking at their generation from where I sat, not yet old enough to earn any glamorous existential despair, it seemed as if our generation could expect to inherit this same quiet desperation. Little did I know we were definitely going to be Generation Why: Why are you eating so much avocado toast? Why are you always so broke? Why did you kill fine casual dining and department stores and nuclear families? Why are you always so anxious?

I had spent a childhood convinced that the world would end by the time I reached maturity. My anxiety about this got so bad that I took a year off from school after my freshman year of college and moved from New England to Alaska. I returned, eventually. My first day back at classes was Sept. 11, 2001. I was in the campus therapist’s office to try to treat what I was sure was unfounded anxiety, to try to get college right this time. I remember having the questionnaire on my lap, getting to the question “I often have negative or anxious thoughts” and pausing before circling where I was on the scale. I heard the receptionist whispering into the phone, her mouth covering her hand. “All those people. Do you think they’re O.K.? It’s awful.”

That semester, I stood in the nearly empty campus center to watch, on the TV there, Congress vote on the Patriot Act, believing in my bones it did not make any sense. I tried to escape the United States, the creeping sense of not right, but I wasn’t brave enough and didn’t speak the languages of the places that would have been truly far away, so I went to London in the spring of 2003.

I was too shy to make friends with any of the people I met at the protests I went to when the invasion of Iraq started, but I went — even as our host university sent emails telling American students not to, even as the other Americans in my group spread rumors that the United States consulate could somehow take pictures of your face at a protest and confiscate your passport. I remember this was said approvingly by some of my fellow American students, not with dread or fear.

I can’t imagine anyone feeling nostalgia for this time, but they do. Recently I was talking to a woman who is younger than I am. “I love 2000s fashion” she said. I think she meant the version of 2000 fashion that exists online now — angular, tiny sunglasses worn beside infinity pools, not in their original habitat, a dimly lit mall food court. I understood what was happening, but I still reacted the way my mother did when I asked for a pair of saddle shoes in first grade because I thought the pattern looked cool. “It’s so ugly,” I said. I tried to convince her that real life wasn’t what it looked like in the pictures. “Everything was so beige. Even the hippie black people went through a really bad burnt-sienna period. It was bad,” I told her. She didn’t seem to be getting it, so I kept explaining. “It was so bad I thought I wasn’t attracted to guys for like six years until fashions changed and they all stopped wearing dockers or baggy jeans.” But she only looked at me and smiled politely. I was too old to get it, the smile said.

People seem to name generations so that they can blame them for things that we have all inherited, that have slowly been accumulating over time. All generational divides operate on the binary of youth versus age, but the particular version of youth attributed to millennials is one that exists outside of time and history. We are a generation that came of age during the collapse of some of the dominant ideologies of the previous century, who are bearing the brunt of the collapse of neoliberal capitalism now, while also contending with the internet, a mode of relation that had never existed before. But our experiences are set aside to settle on an easier conclusion that we somehow must not know enough about the world, about how things really work, about history or time or politics or finances, despite the fact that one of us is now old enough to run for president.

I don’t think I will ever feel a passionate allegiance to a generation. But I find this passionate feeling of an in-group, of belonging, sort of lovely, and I sometimes wish that I had it.

Maybe I feel this disconnect because I am uncertain what will come next. The world has already ended many times in the past 20 years, for many different people, but because they aren’t rich and white and American and residents of the coastal United States, many people believe, and many more people are told, that the end is not real.

The problems are not that glamorous, it turns out. But what sorts of allegiances could we form, what sorts of worlds could we build, if we recognized that every generation was going to have to fix it together?

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the novel “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” and a contributing opinion writer.

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