Generation Lost

We are not the Boomers, marching confidently into a world of boundless possibility. We are not the Xers, sullenly resigned to the reality of a Boomer-filled world. Some call us the MTV generation because we have short attention spans and a bland tolerance for unspeakable violence and self-degradation, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. If I am to put a dramatic label on us, I would call us the Lost Generation.

This is my theory. This is not particularly about my living in Mexico, thus extraneous to the point of this blog, but at least I'm writing it *in* Mexico, right?

The Lost Generation.

We are the children of the Boomers, flooding the delivery wards starting in the mid-1970s and lasting into the late 1980s, depending on which demographic sociologist you ask. We were raised by the confident boomers but inherited the cynicism of the Xers, creating a generation of children who, when faced with a increasingly contracted, loyalty-less, perk-less, unstable workforce, still can't shake the feeling that there must be more.

Our slogan is, "I just don't know if I *want* to do that..."

And I think now, as we encroach upon and enter our 30s, we're on the verge of an identity crisis pandemic.

If you had asked any of us when we were ten what we expected to be by age thirty, most of us would probably have rattled off the old expectations: married, maybe a child or maybe not, but definitely ensconced in a career path. In short, we thought we wanted the lives of our parents. Maybe we did. Perhaps we still do.

I hold myself up for examination. I am thirty years old, single with absolutely zero prospects and an oppressive inability to tolerate men who would be prospects, and last year I walked away from the career path that inspired two degrees. I am currently living in a foreign country where daily life is a reminder of how intensely I don't belong here, no matter how much I am learning, yet I am unable to make a change because I haven't any clear idea what exactly it is I want to change to. My personal mantra is, "I just don't know if I *want* to do that..." Deep down, but not invisible or avoidable, I feel I am a failure, a traitor to my life path, and all I can do to keep going is mentally run away from perpetual images of being directionless at 40, 50, 60, game over.

I am fear mixed with numbness, painted over with a shiny coat of living a wild life experience in the absence of having any clue about reality.

This fear creeps upwards sometimes, and it's only when I look around that I realize I am hardly alone. Everywhere you look, the thus-named Lost Generation is peeling away from the life paths we had decided upon at the start of university, often with little idea of where we are turning to. The few that actually did try their hand at marriage are, with only one exception in my personal circle, changing their minds and walking away. And in the absence of direction, there is a mini-exodus of people from their home cities, usually to foreign countries where they spend a year or two or more "thinking and making decisions." Not many of us have actually made any, either: a few have resigned themselves to manual labour or contracted workforces or true callings that lack inspiration (my Ex had no choice but to become a Professor, for example), and the rest of us keep wandering and hoping that someday soon we will be struck by perfect clarity and become flooded with purpose.

I just finished watching Zach Braff's poignant Garden State (hence this musing), a movie which many hailed when it came out as the first true voice of the 20-somethings. And it is, absolutely, without a doubt, as much in its depiction of a posse of young people who have never quite fulfilled their own images of the future as in its stubbornly optimistic ending wherein one lost soul actually does manage to find truth and honesty and clarity and purpose in the form of love, true love, with the only person who has not succumbed to the fear. His friends might continue to dig graves and drive golfcarts around empty mansions of unfulfilling success, but that one, him, that one, he's done it, he's out and he's free and ain't it beautiful? Oh maybe, just maybe, that could be me next.

And so our generation continues on its way, getting older, still looking for that dream job, still looking for that love of our lives that makes the Empire State Building light up when they kiss us, still waiting for our realities and our dreams to come together to form our demented idea of what we really *want* to do with our lives.

Is it possible? Love will never cause Manhattan to flare with light, admittedly, but can our generation find peace? Is it a question of having to knuckle down, pick something already and just be happy with it - much like our grandparents married for life, often spending decades waiting for the other to just die already? - or is our faint but stubborn hope remotely understandable? Will we know what we want when we find it, if we find it, or will we be forever wandering around looking for something just a little bit better, a little bit easier, a little bit better paid, a little bit more exciting, a little bit more stable, a little bit more flexible, a little bit more fulfilling?

I want nothing more than clarity and purpose.