Millennial Angst
Millennials are a liminal generation. In between millennia, in between parents and children. For millennia, elders were respected without question, but millennials were born into an era of introspection. Now the inner child must be answered to, even when they're hangry and incoherent. Millennials were born at a time that they had to listen to their parents, and gave birth when they have to listen to their children. We really are a liminal generation, as the dictionary says, “barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response.” Born at the end of a millennium we had little to do with, but bearing the consequences on our backs.
Back In My Day
Born in 1982, I still grew up in an age when we worshiped our elders. I bowed to my grandparents and still do to their photographs. I never even thought about talking back, I didn't know it was possible. Elder respect and even worship had been the way for millennia, and I was born into that. For millennia, the question was never what parents could do for children, but what children could do for parents. Ancient philosophy (especially in Asia) is all about filial piety, but parental piety was taken for granted. Take the Ramayana, recited by Rama's children after he effectively abandoned them and their mother, which never criticizes him. Instead he is worshiped. That was before the Kali Yuga and filial piety lapsed. I really caught the tail-end of that.
Take, also, the story of baby Ganesha and Skanda, when they decided to race around the world to see who did it best. Skanda set off at great speed on his peacock while Lord Ganesh leisurely ate a laddoo and then circled his parents. You are my world, he said, to the delight of parents for generations hence. I tell my children this story and they just laugh. Little cretins, they take everything for granted. But whose fault is that? Great effort has been taken so that they can.
My kids are growing up in an age where we worship children. Everything is about them, their feelings, their development, their entertainment, their self-actualization. The world really revolves around them. This is really a different world than I grew up in, and who can I blame? I made it for them. It's like complaining that the cows don't behave like aurochs, after you've penned them in.
Once I was standing at the gate, picking my kids up from preschool, when I saw a mother talking to her child, saying ok, and how did you feel about that? I felt nauseated. That's exactly what I would say, the same way. It's like we were all reading from a script. I went home and said we should decolonize our parenting and just slipper the children. But of course we can't, because the same people that hit us will hit us again if we do anything to their grandchildren.
Once I told my children to shut up and the boy got so offended that he called his grandparents and great-grandparents and I got such a scolding from people that can't even hear well so what can I say back? I can't tell them to shut up because I'm cursed to be in this middle generation, forever giving respect and getting none. Now we're caretakers for both grandparents and grandchildren, and they're in cahoots with each other. We're supposed to be responsible for everybody despite having neither the resources nor power. We are forever children to the past and forever inner-child-respecters to the future. So I'm caught between my children and my parents, subject to their rages and increasing ages, but if I try to tell anybody anything they just laugh at my ministrations. As Rodney Dangerfield said, I don't get no respect.
Kids These Days
After millennia of children should be seen and not heard, Millennials were born into a time that can't shut up about children. Everything you do can raise or ruin your children, and you have to be optimizing everything from birth. Children used to just grow, but now child development is a thing, and the most important thing in the world. Everything is blamed on the parents, and we live in constant terror of ‘fucking them up’, as the Philip Larkin poem goes. Thus Millennials get the worst of the both worlds. We were raised without too much concern for our feelings, but are expected to be super concerned with our children's, using a vocabulary we don't necessarily have, because we grew up in an entirely different milieu.
Sometimes the boy has to educate me, talking about how he feels about this or that and how I could talk better about it. I'm a bit flummoxed because he should shut up, but he seems to know more than I do. My emotional vocabulary is largely limited to fine and fine (not fine) with few gradients in between. But the children can talk about feelings like Inuit talk about snow. They simply have more vocabulary for it, whereas all I know is white and yellow.
I was raised in an age when we just listened to elders, even if they were wrong, and did our dirt on the low. But everything is transparent now, which means parents also have to grow. But I'm too old for that shit and my brain creaks when incorporating anything new. But what to do?
Today, you can't say because I'm your father, you have to say because of reasons, which is frankly unreasonable. So now we've got emotional retards like me raising emotional savants and training, effectively, our own overlords. The secret was that parents were always a bit powerless, but now the secret is out. Now children know that they have power, and can appeal to a higher power in their treasonous grandparents! Our parents are turncoats, showing more loyalty to the toddler tyrants than their fellow parents.
In so many ways, Millennials get the consequences of a millenium we barely experienced and the bill for a buffet we barely tasted. We're just left with the overflowing toilet. Society has gone from being elder-centered to child-centered without any of the money and power moving over, just the emotional baggage, and we've got to lug it. We still have to listen to our parents, but our children barely listen to us. We have to save a world which was long lost. We have to build homes we can't afford and work jobs that don't work. And to add insult to injury, we've only gone from the tyranny of our parents to the tyranny of our children. No wonder we have bad backs. We're carrying a lot.