The Disappointment of the Millennial

and my own experience of it.

2009 was a big year for me. I had just transferred to Rice University from Lycoming College, a small liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania. Lycoming had a respected archaeology program, and I was given a theatre scholarship. However, despite some very important moments, my year in Pennsylvania had been the worst year of my life. There are many reasons why this is true, but the most important can be reduced to what you might call “pervasive millennial disappointment.”

I had wanted to get out of Texas for most of my life. Despite the beauty and excellence of life on my family’s farm, my aspirations originated in books, specifically books from England and the Northeast. I got waitlisted from the Ivy Leagues, so I went to Lycoming, the only Yankee school that accepted (and paid for) me.

Looking back now, I wonder how I could have been so stupid. If you know me at all, you know one thing about me: I love Texas. So why did I go?

The fact is that I was seduced by something beautiful. I believed that in the Northeast, I could find that world of Skull & Bones, Washington Irving, and Anne of Green Gables. I wanted the apple orchards, the snow-covered fields, the red barns, the smoking rooms and libraries and grey, Gothic stone of the Ivy League. I wanted to experience real autumn. The cigars and port after dinner. The sailing yachts and fencing lessons. The tweedy, ivy-covered, colonial charm of the Northeast.

But more than just the aesthetics; I wanted the exclusivity of it. I wanted to contribute to civilization. I wanted to learn how to see and understand great art and literature. I wanted to work in a dusty old bookshop as the rain pattered down in a fishing village called Yarmouth or something vaguely English.

To be more specific, I wanted a culture that felt complete. A culture that surrounds and penetrates your mind, that delimits experience, that corresponds with history and ancestry.

I had a tenuous claim on this culture through my grandmother, Harriet Wells. So I ignored the rest of my ancestry, and the society in which I was raised, to relentlessly focus on the part of me that came from Essex to Massachusetts in 1672.

But one year at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania proved something to me. The culture that I longed for exists only for people who can afford it. And those people that can afford it are actively in the pursuit of killing off the last bits of dignity that it affords. The Northeast isn’t decadent; it’s fully (post)modern. It is self-effacing, interested in banalities, and is increasingly without grandeur or etiquette. It is dead. Not only is it dead, but the Yankees themselves are the gleeful murderers.

They took lots of drugs, especially pills. They wore shapeless hoodies and washed out jeans. They drank shitty beer. Most of them were your run-of-the-mill jocks, basement-dwelling nerds, or brainless popularity contests. They played video games all the time. It wasn’t just my college; I visited Penn and they were the same. Columbia? the same. Chicago? the same. Pajama pants and t-shirts, casual drug users and casual sex havers. They didn’t like reading. They listened to whatever was on the radio. They had nothing but contempt for the brick architecture and preferred McDonald’s to local burger places. They vandalized the streets with alarming frequency. None of them ever wore a tie.

Slowly, painfully, I began to realize what had happened. Although I couldn’t express these feelings adequately at the time, what I was experiencing is best classed as a sense of loss—a cognitive dissonance in which something I loved was found to be gone, before I could take part in it. My expectations were disappointed.

What I expected was not merely nostalgic, especially considering I grew up on a rural farm in central Texas. My expectations were positive and real, even fifty or so years before I got there. They still exist in little pockets. I didn’t have an overly active imagination; I expected that what was represented to me had some basis in reality.

Let me be perfectly clear about that last bit, because it is vitally important. I expected that what was represented to me had some basis in reality. When I found out that it did not, I felt…unmoored. The thing to which I had tied my identity and expectations and aspirations had been smashed.

This is not a unique experience. My father recently described this to me; but it was in reference to Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Once, my mother and him, tipsy and joyous, stumbled down the street in safety. They had hurricanes at Pat O’Briens to live piano music, listened to jazz through every door, ate at fine restaurants and enjoyed the eclectic shops. Now, Bourbon Street smells like vomit and excrement, and rainbow-colored lights beat to techno music as milling crowds down cheap, multicolored liquor from plastic tubes. This is certainly not the first time he’s experienced this. His hometown, New Braunfels, was a sleepy river village. Now it is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States.

Imagine the dream of California represented in the Beach Boys and hippies confronted by homeless tent camps, giant corporations, and endless quinoa and acai bowl shops. Imagine loving New York or Paris only to find it overrun with tourists and unhappy people in hoodies. Imagine searching for the hard scrabble life of Appalachia, and finding meth labs and Wal-Marts. Imagine wanting England and finding nothing but kebabs, mosques, and football hooligans.

I’m not talking about a romanticized, idealized version of these places. If you come to Texas expecting nothing but cowboys, oilmen, and Indians, you will be sorely disappointed. But the fault is not in Texas; the vision you have of Texas has no basis in reality. Someone misrepresented Texas to you (in this case, and many others, the culprit is Hollywood). But in the examples above, I’m not talking about misrepresentation. These places really existed, and really were like this not that long ago. The sense of loss doesn’t happen when idealistic expectations meet gritty reality. The sense of loss occurs when gritty reality itself has shifted. And this reality has shifted recently.

This isn’t some fuming debate about authenticity. This is not nostalgia. This is not romanticism. This is not coming from hipsters. This is measurable, tragic change in the last decades of the twentieth century.

I belong to an entire generation of people whose lives have been characterized primarily by this sense of loss, and the subsequent bafflement and anger that it produces. The pervasive feeling among Millennials is this:

Everything we were taught is a lie.

It’s a state of confusion that was perfectly summed up in the lyrics of “Helplessness Blues” by the Fleet Foxes:

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me But I don't, I don't know what that will be I'll get back to you someday soon you will see What's my name, what's my station? Oh, just tell me what I should do I don't need to be kind to the armies of night that would do such injustice to you Or bow down and be grateful and say, "Sure, take all that you see" To the men who move only in dimly-lit halls and determine my future for me And I don't, I don't know who to believe I'll get back to you someday soon you will see ... If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm raw If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm sore And you would wait tables and soon run the store ... Someday I'll be like the man on the screen

This could very well be the Millennial anthem. It expressess, primarily, a sense of, well, helplessness: “I don’t know who to believe”, and a life completely dominated by a desire to be something other than what we’ve been told to be.

It bears repeating that this phenomenon is not the normal disillusion of adulthood, in which a child full of wonder and joy and possibility must come to terms with the harsh realities of everyday life in an often cruel world. Contrary to popular belief among previous generations and the mainstream media, this isn’t a story of a soft generation collapsing when adulthood and its responsibilities have us in its clutches.

No indeed. The adulthood we were expecting is no longer available. Note the great lyric: “If I had an orchard, I’d work ‘til I’m raw.” Does this sound like a wish to be coddled? To live a life of luxury? No. He wishes he could be a farmer.

[Note: The knee-jerk reaction to this statement from previous generations goes along the lines of “Well, no one is stopping him! It just takes work!” No one is stopping him? What about prohibitively expensive land, labor, and equipment? Is it possible? Yes. Is it a common, accessible option? No.]

We have yet to really come to terms with what this means. I get so angry at the idiots who post articles like this, whose basic argument can be summed up as “stop whining, your imagining that Bourbon Street was cool and authentic, but really you’re just a hipster.” I see it time and time again to justify the banal life that modernity has conjured for us.

It’s time for millennials to embrace our disappointment. I’ll go even further. Embrace nostalgia. Embrace romanticism and idealism. Wear your rose-colored glasses. Because I’ve still not found an argument against them. To see the good of the past while blinkered against the evil is still to see the good.

From Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Note how absolutely boorish and smug Paul (the speaker) is; in another part of the film, a tour guide calls him “the pedantic one.”

Those who are not millennials have an extremely difficult time understanding millennial nostalgia. Nostalgia can only happen after supreme disappointment. Perhaps that is where we should be focusing our questions.