As you age and your brain develops, you forget what it was like to be a stupid, hormonal, irrational, impulsive teenager. When you become enveloped in “the real world” you begin to look down your nose at the mindless actions of these kids. These kids nowadays are getting out of hand. Certainly you never behaved like that, did you? WRONG! Look, whether you behaved properly in your time, which I guarantee you didn’t, your generation had its fair share of miscreants. Surprise! All generations have their own miscreants and monsters. They just didn’t stand out to you back then because your brain was still teenager mush. Now that you’re older with a solid, wrinkly brain you see each small misstep from a youngin you feel entitled to judge because you literally do not remember what it was like. I’m no therapist but I don’t doubt you’ve all got some built up anger from always hearing the same thing from your parents. Now you’re the parents, and now you’re doing the same thing they did. Even if you were a good kid you always had to hear how “your generation is going to ruin this world” and “your generation doesn’t have any clue what the real world is like.” You feel like the life of a teenager is trivial because you’ve forgotten what it’s like to live it. Somehow rather than self reflecting we’ve managed to perpetuate the cycle by pointlessly pointing fingers at each other. I hate to say it but the older generation is not the only group accountable for this misdeed. We as the younger generation tend to forget that even if they are older, it is still their first time living, too. They will not always be right and they will make mistakes based on their different lived experiences. Their lives differed greatly from ours which makes it hard for them to adapt and understand sometimes. At the core their intentions are often to protect you. It takes time to read the message between the long lines of their lectures but it is filled with love. We are all humans trying to grapple with the curse of time. Struggling in a cycle that seems inevitably ending with bitter distaste for young life. As the young we might feel inclined to retaliate and as we get older we might feel inclined to harshly judge those younger than us but to end this cycle we need to introduce empathy into our daily vocabularies. Understand that a person is just a person operating within the world they have come to learn. Everyone’s world tells a different story and every story deserves time to be understood on a deeper level. Understanding the diversity in our worlds will diminish the incentive to judge each other and we can finally put to death this useless “generational war.”
