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“We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact.”–Tyler Durden, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
Fight Club is the literary classic of my generation. And this quote hits it right on the head–even more than I thought when I first read it.
In school, if you had some talent, we were praised as being “very smart”, as a “leader”, as someone that will be successful. Our parents were educated, worked a job, took care of their parents, and took care of us. They found a way to make sure we got to every extracurricular and had everything we needed to excel. We then brought to light the “stressful” competition to get into the best colleges. We had instant access to the world’s information through the internet and instant access to people through mobile phones. Those of us who didn’t take to academics had ADD.
We had everything we needed, and now we want to change the world and have an impact……
How exactly do we do that?
These are strokes so broad that they’re annoying, but I think this does describe the dilemma of my generation. We’re a group of people built on stability, technology, and great expectations–which is incredible. But, the culture got something wrong. And I think this has helped create a group of people that are talented, but even more lost.
This sounds a bit pessimistic (I prefer to be realistic.) I’ll end with this: we will undoubtedly change the world.
-Kevin
7.27.2010
