The Pleasure and Ache of Being a Millenial
This year, the last of the millennials are finally crossing the bridge into their 30s. And it makes me realize how time passes without notifying anybody. The world changes among us and within us without making loud noises. We, as a generation, witnessed multiple changes and shifts in the world. The modernization happened in front of us. From simple to complicated, no internet to social media, mobile phones to smartphones, dial-up connection to Wi-Fi; the world kept changing and left us no option but to adapt and upgrade.
The world we grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. So we bite the bullet!
Friendship meant making or getting cards and friendship belts, knocking on doors, landline calls with roaming charges. Saturday brought special TV shows, family outings, late-night movies and playing for longer hours in gardens with friends. We didn’t own wristwatches, we were told to come home when the sun goes down. Happiness simply meant potlucks in the garden, making lists of songs for mix tapes, renting movie tapes, and enjoying the first rain and making paper boats. None of it was aesthetic back then. It was just a regular Tuesday. Then the world started changing faster, louder and harder to ignore.
We are the bridge generation. The last generation to know life without technology and the first to grow up adapting to it, gracefully or not. We carry two worlds inside of us. That’s why we carry a certain ache, a nostalgia for simpler times, and that’s where we are stuck. Our childhood was without advanced technology and our young age came with technology advancement.
We were taught to save money, opt for a safe job, buy a house, and keep our mouths shut and heads down in front of elders. But that world ended when we became adults, and a new world came into order. Saving money has become difficult with inflation, jobs aren’t safe, houses have become costlier than ever, and respecting elders who are still living in an old life is chaotic. Old dreams in a new reality. Many of us earn well on paper, yet feel more insecure than our parents did, because the world keeps changing and if we don’t learn the new methods, we are left behind. To sum up, we had choices, but no certainty. Our roadmap became outdated in the middle of the journey and we had to figure things out in real time.
If I play devil’s advocate, our previous generation, our parents, are disappointed in us because we didn’t live up to their expectations. And the next generation thinks we didn’t do enough to lead them, give them a better path, and compromised unnecessarily. Our parents knew patience, Gen Z has confidence, and the revolting world gave us, millennials, the attitude of adjustment and compromise. As a light joke I often say, millennials are the testing generation. The beta version, still being updated.
We hold values of both the previous and the next generation. We have learned about our morals and culture. And we have also learned arrogance and impoliteness. We are the ending point of the previous generation and the starting point of the next. We started asking questions, breaking rules, and stopped following traditional lineage and old-fashioned work culture. We chose new job profiles and made space for new things we like.
We are resilient and optimistic, not because we are special, but because we didn’t give up at every corner of our life when the world changed its methods for different aspects of life. We stayed at it while crying and cribbing about it with our fellow mates. We are not perfect at it, but our self-awareness comes from sitting with a broken reality instead of denying it, and from owning our behavior instead of labeling it away.
Even though we partied like there was no tomorrow, millennials aren the smartest generation to date. People can’t use our past against us because number one, there is less record of it, and number two, we confidently sat right across the table, told our story and owned our mistakes, failures, and scars. Yet lived to tell the tale like a testimony.
So what does this mean if you are dating a millennial? It means you are not meeting one person. You are meeting a kid who waited for the landline to ring, a teenager who watched the internet arrive, and an adult who was handed a rulebook and then watched it get rewritten. We are slow to say “I need you” because we grew up learning to manage on our own, and quick to say “I’m fine” because compromise became our first language.
And honestly, we don’t hand over the manual either. We learned to read people the way we learned to use every new gadget: by pressing buttons until something made sense. Be patient with that.
So if anybody is getting involved with a millennial, I will leave you with only one thing. Fall in love with their roots before the flowers, otherwise you will not know what to do in autumn. We are beyond what we show, express and project. You have to understand us layer by layer, as we were created like that over the years due to different lifestyles, communication patterns, upbringing, relationship teachings, cultural values, professional practices, and lastly, ever-changing innovation.
Until next time, know that the compass was invented before the clock. Clearly, direction mattered more than knowing how long it would take to reach a destination. So don’t stress yourself about the things you desire but don’t have yet. Just remember to follow the right direction, and everything will work out for you just as you deserve.
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