Sunday, April 6, 2014

The Future Freaks Me Out (No, Seriously Though)

Pardon me, I’m about to go crazy cat lady on you. (Sorry I’m not that sorry.)

Get this: within the veterinary community, there exists a pervasive notion that cats who live relatively domesticated (read: indoor) lives will come to view their owners (ha!) as surrogate mothers and thus live in a prolonged state of kittenhood.

(By the way, that was totally a Jeopardy question. It’s definitely not like I know this useless piece of feline trivia because I stalk veterinary forums to ensure that my cats really are supposed to look at me with that hateful stank face all of the time. Just in case you were wondering.)

The point is this: adult cats, given food, toys, chin scratches, and a sizeable portion of every bed in their considerable domain, will retain their kitten-like qualities of playing, purring, and generally being the cutest fucking creatures to ever walk the earth.

Now, think about this: recently, every news outlet from The Wall Street Journal to Jezebel has published something (usually snippy) about the emergence of “millennials,” that much scrutinized group of people born between 1981 and 2000, as defined by the Pew Research Center. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re “America’s newest generation.” Even though it sounds like we ought to be rolling our hair in victory curls and letting our boys slip their hands up our skirts before they march off to war, all this really means is that Generation X is now old news. They’ve had their hay day (e.g. Reality Bites and pretty much any other movie Wynonna Ryder starred in during the 90s).  Gen Xers have kids now, and that’s pretty much the social equivalent of getting braces and wearing high waters. Nobody with crazed mom eyes or receding dad hairline gives a flying shit what’s on Twitter or Kik or Snapchat because they’ve got elementary-aged kids in their houses, and they spend most days trying to not pluck their own eyelashes out one by one. Justin Bieber? Miley Cyrus? Unless those name are followed by “microwave-safe” or “family size,” most of our Gen X friends don’t give a good God damn.

But not us. We’re Millennials. We’re basically the walking, talking, YOLO-ing future of America. Morley Safer even said so on 60 Minutes when he dedicated a WHOLE HOUR (get it??) to us in a show called, “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming.” I will kindly overlook the fact that CBS cast millennials as some amalgamation of 1950s B horror movie villains riding into town like the horsemen of the Apocalypse bent on making everyone dance. (Footloose reference. CHA-CHING.) The gist of all this talk is this: Millennials are entitled, unaccustomed to hard work, and unwilling to fly the coop. In essence, Millennials are the weird adult cat-kittens of the new technology-driven, socially-accepting, network-forming world. We are part of, what some neuroscientists are now calling, “emerging adulthood.”

Maybe that’s all true. Maybe I just feel a little defensive because I am a millennial and I have lived at home and I do occasionally need to mooch off my parents. I mean, I think it’s fairly general knowledge at this point that the human brain doesn’t fully form until approximately age 25, which for most millennials is coming up or very recently became a thing of the past. We all sure as hell know that we aren’t even remotely prepared to make complicated life decisions as teenagers. When I was sixteen, I bought bright yellow sweat pants and wore them to school as a completely legitimate fashion statement. Proof positive that the young adult brain is subject to periods of serious instability.

(Never mind the fact that I’m 25, and last weekend I bought a ring so big and ridiculous that it makes Kim Kardashian’s butt look believable.)
The point is that I just find it a little odd – off-putting, if you will – that the very people who raised us are now complaining that we’re not acting according to the values our parents raised us with. Does anyone else see a sizeable gap in logic there? Weren’t we told to go to school? To prepare for college? To wait for marriage and babies until we had a degree? Weren’t we the generation whose parents wanted us to be involved in extracurricular activities and make tons of friends and just be kids? Weren’t we encouraged not to be our parents by our parents?

Bottom line: this ain’t your daddy’s rodeo.

Life is different now. The world is different now. And millennials are the first group of young people trying to figure it all out. We were the first generation of tweens to have in-home computers and the first crop of teenagers to have our own personal cell phones. (And these weren’t iPhones, guys. These suckers were BRICKS.) We’re the first generation to figure out dating and jobs and love and kids and marriage and how to tie our freaking shoes with computers, phones, iPods, tablets, Nooks, Kindles, and God knows what else buzzing all around us. We’re growing into adults in the wake of 9/11, with the advent of social networking, and in the midst of one of the most precarious economies since FDR busted out the New Deal.

SO YEAH, I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. Go get a PhD? Take a few years off and work? Eat a bagel for breakfast? Somehow, my life has become a never-ending game of Twenty Questions that doesn’t seem to have any discernible answers. Meanwhile, all these Baby Boomers and Gen Xers keep demanding that we, the beguiling Millennials, act our age (not our shoe size). And I’m still kinda wondering, damn, what’s my age again?



The PIMP Ring. I wear it and immediately feel like Beyonce. 

All original content copyright Kimberly Turner, 2013-2013.