Generation Z- Scott Kulicke

I've never put up a piece by anybody other than myself, but Scott's definitely worthy of being the first. I loveeeeee you Scottimus Prime.

Generation Z
Scott Kulicke

I’m scared of the world I’m going to have to live in, because I know it won’t know me. Go to any airport, and take a minute to think about how long your life has been. The world inside your head, the endless road of memories and emotions that have comprised every minute you’ve been awake, is too much. Perniciously it starts to eat away at your senses, until you’re forced by the complexity of your own experience to turn your thoughts elsewhere (weirdly enough, away from your own thoughts). Then look around you. There are people everywhere. Blank eyed, quiet people. You never noticed any of them until now, because they were just the people walking past you. But the minute you stop walking and you start looking, it becomes clear that they are also people. Most of them older than you, they’ve all had lives too. Every little memory of everything you’ve done, they’ve done too. They’ve all had feelings, and they’ve all had experiences. They are all as complicated as you are.
And none of them look happy.

It may just be the natural expression of their faces, faces that look tired in the corners of their eyes, faces attached to bodies that lean in on themselves like they’re lonely. At what point did everyone become so unhappy?
I then ask myself what constitutes happy. Maybe everyone just hates travel. You get up earlier than you’d like to take off more clothing than you’d like to get through security (and you really don’t look like you have a bomb anyway). But it seems like more. You walk through the city, and everyone has that look. You sit on the train, and you look out at the gray world outside, at the boarded up houses that are flaking away into abandoned lots. Every adult I see looks unfulfilled, and dying.
What am I supposed to think of the world I’m going into? No one anywhere looks happy. How hard can I try to break out of this? I’m going to run away from the place I’ve grown up in, and the people that have watched me grow. I’m going to shun everything I’ve done so far, and try it all over again. But if I haven’t already, when am I going to?
My parent’s parents were, having emerged from the great depression and World War II, hard working, strong people. Their children, my parents, grew up listening to their parents talk about how hard they had worked so my parents would never have to face such hardships again. But they didn’t recognize that my parents would then turn around and look at the racism and sexism that pervaded their lives, and decide that my grandparents were hypocrites and liars. They shunned the lessons they had been taught; they had been raised under the cold rules of liars, and needed to break out of them. The hippies emerged. They preached freedom, and understanding. But they didn’t preach responsibility, or hard work. My parent’s generation became a generation of excesses, both physical and emotional. This left them fundamentally unequipped to be adults, and run the world that was handed to them.
We are the first generation to be left with a world worse off than it was for our parents. We’ve been raised by people who have had so much trouble raising themselves, and we’ve thus been left with the responsibility of teaching ourselves moderation, responsibility, and the ability to change the world into what it needs to be. No matter how hard I concentrate on piecing together the world around me, and figuring out why every person does everything they do, I can’t put it all together for myself. I, like everyone else that I’m growing up with, faces tremendously low odds of making ourselves happy. We’ve defined happy as the ability to be satisfied and free doing what we’re doing, but we never accounted for the work that had to go into it, and were never taught how to work that hard without killing the beauty of the process.
The most I’ve been able to do is look at all those people walking through the airport and growing increasingly paranoid of ending up that way. I won’t let myself walk from one unhappy place to another. I won’t be my parents, unable to raise their children into adults because they’re still learning how to do it themselves. By the time I enter the world, by the time I leave the nest my parents have put me in, I will be able to move freely, making myself into what I need to be. I won’t be that man who had his chance.