You Were Not Born At the Wrong Time

Okay, that’s it. I can’t listen to more pontification on the topic so I must pontificate my own self! ;)

Note: This post is brought to you by my… 5th? 6th? rewatching of Mad Men.

Every few years, we hear how fucked the generation burgeoning into real adulthood is.

Gen Z is lonely and poor, Millennials (woowoo) were entitled and poor. Gen X was cynical and poor. Boomers were the “me” generation - okay, no notes there.

Before there were these tidy lil titles - the young were reckless, spoiled, soft, too sexual, too lost in the “great malady of our time” - the novel c. 1787.

This morning I was listening to Sarah Longwell’s The Focus Group, an episode about Gen Z, with a Gen Z host, and I found myself feeling that familiar fog roll in. The fruitlessness of bemoaning a time that “doesn’t feel quite right.” The sense that some generation, usually the young one, has arrived a scooch too late, or is too online, too poor, too anxious, too lonely, too whateverrr, to become an adult.

THE MYTH OF ADULTHOOD. ← The title of my next book.

The amount of true adults I see (defined as: person who contacts inner feelings to make informed decisions from their center) - are strikingly few. The # of patients I see who say “I don’t know why I don’t feel like an adult” - shockingly high.

Okay back to Gen Z for a moment: For sure there are meaningful differences between people who came of age before and after smartphones, before and after COVID 2019, before and after the collapse of certain economic promises, before and after the internet.

Sucks!

But also - this is the time we are all alive in.

Obvious, but somehow impossible to take in it seems.

I realized, listening to this conversation this morning, that death anxiety has found a new cloak/home.

Because the generational conversation smuggles in a new fantasy designed to cheat the reaper: that there was some other time when things were stable, knowable, fair, coherent, affordable, spiritually intact, and generally easier to make a life inside of.

There wasn’t. !!! The future has never been certain.

Newsflash: Generations are a marketing ploy.

They are a way to carve up the human soul into target demographics. They are a way to turn longing into consumer insight - trust me on this one, that was my job once.

Generations are a way to sell you a lifestyle, a panic attack to sooth, a supplement to “lock in”, a platform, an identity, a vibe a car, a president.

They keep the mind entrapped in an endless cycle of wanting and wishing.

Wishing you had been born earlier. Later? Wishing you had bought a house in 1998. Wishing you had gone viral in 2016. Wishing you had gotten into AI before anyone knew what it was. Bought crypto in 2017.

Wishing you had lived through the good version of history.

Newsflash, the sequel: there is no good version of history.

There is only history. And then there is your life. Your story. Or a Jung (sorry, have to!) would put it: you must write your own myth. That is the task of your life.

The machine wants you convinced that the time you were born is somehow “the wrong time.” That the future has already been foreclosed: “Whoops, you’re too late kiddo! Everyone else got the real world, and you got the broken, bedraggled one.”

That is a lie. Despair is the product being sold on podcasts and in feeds. Being fatalistic doesn’t make anyone wiser, it makes them more anxious.

Message to anyone alive, and reading this missive into the great void of the internet: DO NOT MISS THIS.

Do not miss your actual life because you are busy comparing it to an imagined decade.

The future is never certain, and it never was. Everyone who ever lived was making it up inside the conditions they inherited.

So to Gen Z, and eventually to Gen Alpha when the think pieces sharpen their knives for them too: don’t worry - but do pay attention.

To your breath, to your losses, to your wins, to your grief, to your dog - but really… to your breath.

You are, and we are, not the wounded mascot of late capitalism. We have no idea what comes next -how beautiful! How terrifying. How very much so a boring fucking podcast.

Back to death anxiety: No one leaves this life as “a Millennial consumer” or “a Gen Z voter” or “a Boomer homeowner.” We leave with memories of lives past, and lessons for future lives to over with our oversouls... or whatever ;)

We take with us the residue of how deeply we were willing to be here.

Okay, I concede - the younger generation is anxious. Mine was too. All of them were, in the language available to them at the time, man ☮️.

You were not born at the wrong time. Or you would not be here. Very simple. You were simply born into uncertainty, like everyone else who has ever lived.

Now get off my porch, order your burrito, and chill the fuck out.