A response to this eye-opening, Pulitzer-winning piece that cuts to the very bone
We are the 23-year-olds. We are the ones privileged enough to have jobs to feel awkward in because we don’t quite fit in with the other privileged people we work with. We strut through city streets with eyes cast toward our screens that our privilege and money or perhaps our rich parents allows us to afford, desperately seeking our privileged access to a global network of information that will somehow validate our lives or decisions, even if it’s just a stranger or a shallow internet post. We work hard – just a few hours of procrastination on social media here and there, scout’s honour – in jobs we’re lucky enough to have and be qualified for that we’re somehow still ungrateful for because we want to make our privileged access to a top-quality education feel worth it, and we’re privileged enough to occupy a social position that makes us attractive to others or that makes us being in a relationship with another person not universally hated or spat on by other people.
We spend privileged hours of free time drinking wine in our privileged apartments that are probably equipped with all kinds of modern fittings, promising one another that those who broke our hearts will not own us forever, because we, the privileged children, haven’t matured to the stage where we can forgive and forget past mistakes. We zone out in expensive grad school classrooms or teach English in Rwanda, all the while wondering if we are supposed to be somewhere else instead of making the most of our lives and situations.
We are 23, and maybe hangovers hurt. Maybe they don’t. I dunno. I hate to generalise. Most of our conversations these days centre on assuring one another that we’re going to be okay, because we’re the kind of unprepared, insecure children who need to have our hands held for the rest of our lives. When a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than the dirt and scraps many hundreds of people have to survive on on a daily basis, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup, because duh, success is just supposed to be inevitable and immediate without any real struggle, am I right?
We dance all night to Taylor Swift on our iPods and radios blaring through expensive speakers or car stereos because she, as an equally privileged member of our age demographic, understands what it’s like to pretend that a breakup at 23 can be lifechanging. We hate labels, except those smeared on us by sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, those 4chans of journalism. We are not in college anymore, and we long for the days of running back and forth between houses at 1am, because change is frightening, and we are scared, so scared, won’t somebody hold my hand? We have few obligations (because we’re so lucky) yet we are always stressed (because having a simple job to do is more pressing than a 2000-word essay due in four weeks), wondering if life will ever be more certain.
Our breakups never end because when we see pictures of our exes on social media we don’t have the balls to grow up and move on. Even when we block them or unfriend them, we still get all teary-eyed and red-faced at the sight of a combination of letters that forms a name. We hate online dating, but we do it anyway, because relating to real people with real problems beyond the glass wall that stands between us and the Instagram photo of the world beyond our morning poached eggs and salmon on rye is just too testing. We spend as much time swiping on Tinder as we do with actual human beings, because let’s face it, it’s easier to be shallow and not be arsed to have, like, a conversation beyond the bare essentials or sex/age/location/DTF?.
We are 23, and we constantly try to tell outselves to stop complaining and enjoy our youth, making article very ironic indeed. Life isn’t that bad. It really isn’t, you know, apart from when Woolworth’s runs out of Fruits of the Forest organic eco-friendly soy yoghurt. We have families, our friends and our health. We are young and vibrant and the world is ours. We are closer to our parents than the 23-year-olds who came before us who weren’t shipped off to war. We are so lucky, and yet still all this fear remains.
We hear grown-ups – you know, those ones who arguably shared the same privileges as us? - urge us to calm down. We still use phrases like “grown-ups”. They tell us to calm down, that it will all fall into place, but we don’t believe them. Things just don’t fall into place – you know, apart from not starving or living under a brutal dictatorship or having to live on R9 a day or watch our children die from easily preventable diseases. We feel like every second we spend streaming movies from our bedrooms is a second we are not putting ourselves out there. You know, not because we’re sitting in our bloody bedroom streaming movies and not putting ourselves out there, but because reasons. And yet we stream on. Reasons. Sad. Are you crying yet?
We waste time the same way we did in college. We are at the point in our lives where we have realised the futility of sitting around watching whatever series we have privileged access to that we’ve have time and privilege enough to watch a hundred times over, but we lack the resources (not time or money or privilege, that we have plenty of) and maturity to actually do something about it. We are too old to go out every night, but we are too young to stay in and do nothing – you know, us, who apparently hate labels but who are also somehow only to happy to let them totally define us and control our every waking moment and fear and desire. We want to be more productive and live a more worthwhile existence, but obviously our values system is so warped along the lines of what constitutes a “worthwhile existence” that we are totally dumbstruck. We don’t yet have children or spouses or secure jobs – you know, these things than many people around the world can’t or don’t have and therefore are living worthless, meaningless existences. And so we sit in this limbo. Sad me. Cry. Wah.
You know, this started out as a tongue-in-cheek reply to that bullshit shallow garbage that is endless spewed out by trivial, vapid and moronic 'viral' media sites for self-loathing, self-victimising people my age to swallow hook, line and sinker, but I physically don’t have the effort to poke another stick into its decaying, festering ribcage.
I mean, do you even realise what you’re reading? It's littered with contradictions: "we hate labels" > proceeds to label all people aged 23; "we're too old to go out every night" AND YET "We dance all night to Taylor Swift"? For fuck’s sakes, you have the rest of our lives ahead of you and the fact that you agree with an article like this is a world of proof that you should get off the worry wagon. If you’re worried about your life, change it. Jesus. Do you really believe you are some modern-day tortured soul who is not understood by society, who doesn’t fit in, who feels they live in a world that has moved on?
Really? You really think that at 23 your life “detonates as we suddenly forget why we chose that major or moved to this city or loved that person”? Really?
You’re fucking 23 years old. Start acting like it.
