Always Keep Moving
On Being 24 in 2012; Or, the Vampire Hunter Claims His Own
For those twenty-somethings who have graduated into the labor market of the 2010s, there isn’t a whole lot of positive going on in our lives. The painful compromises we make to find housing, the long hours at a job (or jobs) than may not be leading anywhere, the ill-defined relationships we blunder through, and our frightening debt— we face all this with little to show for it. We’re a new lost generation; technology and economics have changed how we must live, work and interact. No one is giving us an instruction manual.
It’s been a shock, to put it mildly. Without asking the essentially pointless question of who’s to blame, this generation grew up imagining we were actors in a Hollywood movie, a Disney adventure. Or even worse, we thought we were living the great works of art, as if it was ours to carry out the romantic triumphs of some profound epic, in which our victory was inevitable because we were young, cool and right, dammit. From kindergarten to our commencement speeches, we were told we would go forth and change the world. Instead, we come home exhausted from work and stare blankly at our W-2s, trying to figure out what we owe with two days left before taxes are due (and did we remember to pay the gas bill?). Many of my friends, people more talented or responsible than I’ll ever be, seem to be just drifting.
8,114 notes (via neil-gaiman & firstbook)
This ship will carry
Our bodies safe to shore”
