Generation F

Dear Narwals,

Today, I will post something very different from the rest of my work, but it just spills out of me at this moment, I must share.

So I was sitting in my friend´s car, in mids of the vibrations of electro-house music. I do not normally listen to it, but this time, it actually relaxed me. It was too loud, too fast, too repetitive. It was exactly what I needed to let go of my thoughts.

And then it hit me hard : it was anastaesia. Sure, a very noisy one, and it didn´t exactly put anyone to sleep, but it numbed my conscious just so well...

This image didn´t let me go for a while, and it started to occur to me that I must not have been the first person to feel that way. Now please look at the facts : we, the so called Y generation (people born from 1983 to 2000) obviously crave something of this sort.
Why else would ASMR channels on YouTube gather astronimic numbers of subscribers, why else do we crave a drink even as teenagers, why do we go to loud clubs, damage out eardrums on cheap-sounding music and enhance this experience by drugs (of whose damaging impacts we have been informed over and over and over again)?

People apparently need something to shut down the inside, or to get excited beyond the ability to listen to those inner voices. So what do the calls inside us say that needs to be unheard? I am no expert in that field, but my answer is : they remind us of reasons to be afraid.

Just look around you. Kids, young, healthy, living in aboundance, must pop pills to fall asleep, drink in order to party. Young adults seem to suffer from identity - and existence crises as soon as the school system sets them free. Just try and ask the next college student you meet about his or her plans after graduation. You will have to hold the stare of terrified eyes before hearing an improvised response.

Sometimes the world just seems full of dementors...

We have been falsely labeled Generation Y, when we really know wery well why. Why we cannot trust our money to keep its value, why we must not expect our government to tell us the truth, why whe do not hope for worldpeace, why we have no means to know if our grandchildren will see snow in winter and panda bears in the wild. We have been very well informed about the reasons to be afraid.

But certainly, the most startling fact is that the ones in charge, our teachers and parents, seemed to have felt the foreshadow. They secretly knew what world they have been passing on to us, who have barely left their arms. How could they abandon their descendence to that collapsing house of cards, they who love and hope for us the most?

Now, dear Narwals, I too feel like a hobbit who has been the ring of Sauron... And where is our Gandalf, do I ask. Where are the eagles that will carry us to the top of the mountain? The thing is, we have never known a peaceful land of green grass and little housings in the hills. Only tales of past promises remind us that it has existed, at least in the minds of our elders. We de not have that sense of peace and idle to come back to.

But we should not underestimate our wise ancestros, for they knew whom they set into the world, and they forged a secret weapon for their children : a quest.

Do you now remember the mysterious phrase "love yourself" and the quiet battle hymn "follow your passion"? That is the magic that keeps us alive, deas Narwals. This is the drive for our Generation Fear.

If the boom of a social network in the midst of an increasingly antisocial world has not yet convinced you of it, then just remember this terrified undergraduate. Not knowing why, not really daring to hope, our generation follows a mysterious path, leading us away from the harbour of tradition and into the loneliness individuality. That drive, I would argue, is responsible for the first Afro-Amerivcan president of the U.S, for a secret organisation of hackers avenging victims of internet violence, for a man ready to go into exile to reveal the truth to a country that will seak to punish him in response.

Sure, we are to some extend selfish when we do it, and understand that passion is a luxury, but that is the only way to go. The present situation, worldwide, stares at us with a bleak expression of disappointment. The collective human search for comfort and improvement has failed us. You know exactly that children have made your shirt, that the chicken meat in your refrigerator has never seen sunlight. The lifestyle that past generation´s struggles have paid the price for, together with the people right now, doing it in silence, far away from your safe home, has not made you a better person, us a better humankind.

And maybe it is that numbed sense of empathy towards the world that freed the path towards the recklessness that keeps it going. But it does work.

So the next time your thoughts make honour to the true name of your generation, close your eyes to hopelessness. Use fear as the organic fuel that will propulse you in high speed in the direction you can chose. Do what keeps you innerly alive and you will feel the weight of the wold you pull behind you, set into motion.

If everything fails and you lose the belief that you can make a change, then do it for others. This alone will let you see that your impact on one person will turn an entire universe upside down. And if everything fails, just remember : you have been born at exactly the right place in exactly the right time, and maybe that is the only why you can not yet answer...

With love ,
Your Old Narwal

P. S. : Some ASMR goodness for the short rest you might need...