an open letter to all the generations before me

by muchtomychagrin

(edited: changed some words, cleaned it up a little. Wrote this initially when I was half-asleep – the message is still the same though)

Dear Baby Boomers & Generation X-ers,

Look, I get it. We’re a bunch of lazy fucks. We’re unappreciative and we’re just all about having a good time. We want to do what we want without working hard for it. We want to make a quick buck, and all we think about is ourselves.

We’ve never claimed to be that way, and yet that is the common misconception you seem to make of us.

“Ah, you Gen-Ys…” – If  I had to hear you speak of us dismissively one more time… well, I’ve had it, and maybe it’s time you get off your proverbial high horse and see what the hell it is you’re shitting all over.

It’s this constant chip on your shoulder that you seem to have: a massive discontent that we’re not following in your footsteps and you think, if that’s something that’s worked for you to get you where you are now, then, BY GOD it should work for us too. You’ve got the amazing advantage of hindsight, while we swim in our own crap and then you go ahead and heap more of yours onto us too. What is that? Do you force us to look up to you, by putting us down? Do you feel like we haven’t got any humility that you’ve got to strip us of our self-esteem? Is the condescension in your voice meant to give us a quick swift kick in the butt to motivate us?

I think you’ve got to start realising that we are not stupid and that we just do things differently. It seems practically impossible for you to start getting with the times, so let me just spell it out for you – to why it’s so important for us to be happy and content – with our lives, what we’re doing with it, and how often we get to laugh.

As much as you’d like to remind us constantly that you had a hard time when you first started, does not mean that you need to make it hard for us too. Yeah, you had to use notepads and typewriters when writing and a mobile phone was completely unheard of but what we face now is a completely different type of adversity. Note it, swallow it and fucking accept that we are not living in the 70s and times have changed and moved forward. You either move with it, or get stuck where you are. Why the fuck should we degenerate ourselves, when we are given the speed and opportunities?

I think it’s a hard thing for you to realise that, yes, we Gen-Ys, we flit about. We hardly ever settle and the majority of us are light beings. If you treat us badly, of course we’re going to leave because there will always be another option for us. The attitudes of generations past: where employees stayed loyal to a company for their entire career (my Dad was one of them), are no longer what we subscribe to in this decade anymore. It’s no longer expected and neither is is justified to making you a better or a worse person/worker. Again, with the times, they’ve moved forward.

But my biggest and largest point to why we need to run free, be happy and understand the importance of stopping just to smell the roses once in a while: it’s because life has become so short and fragile around us that we’re noticing that it can be taken away from an instant. We are refusing to reach the point of disenchantment that we take for granted of the life that we have. Kind of where you are now, staring at us in all your jealousy, that we have all the opportunity and idealism that you once had but squandered away.

Terrorist attacks, people blowing themselves up, natural disasters, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, war, revolutions in the Middle East, car accidents, planes going missing, ships sinking, premonitions of the world ending.

What with the barrage of reminders that our days are numbered, all we want to do is just not waste time kissing the ground you walk on and looking for you to teach us the ways of the world. The future is ours to see and our world is our oyster, but we’ve got that nagging feeling at the back of our head that, shit, this oyster could be fucking destroyed tomorrow.

Lives can be taken away in an instant and the past incidences that’s got the world and Mother Nature roaring has just been the case of anyone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure they were great and amazing people. They had a lot to say, a lot to contribute and I know for a fact that in whatever they did, they had worked hard. But they never got a chance to make sure all of that happened. And that could happen to any of us.

Maybe you’ve had the glorious chance of seeing a future ahead of you. When you were our age, the cold war was ending, you were starting a career, Wall Street was booming, the world wasn’t fucked up yet. Maybe try consider that we do not have that luxury now.

Because it’s fucked up.

Now that you’re about to hand it off to us, maybe you should ask yourself why is it, that we don’t want to take it.

Accept that you fucked it up and we’ll clean it up for you; you just don’t have to make it seem like we’re destroying it any further. There shouldn’t be an entitlement either that we need to kowtow to your greats just because of how much you can see you’ve established from where you are sitting. We can fix things, without animosity, without expectations that you would equate to yourselves and definitely without the lack of respect.

Respect is a two way street, and I’m telling you right now, that your lack of respect for us, albeit us being young and new and the next generation, is unnecessary.

So you can run along and go fuck yourselves. You’ve fucked the world right up already, as it is.

Best,

M.