The Elder Millennial’s Lament

There’s a point in a person’s life, where it becomes easier to romanticize the past than it is to think about an uncertain future. The effects of nostalgia – or more accurately, a yearning for a mythical past that never really existed – have been discussed to death over the past decade or so.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is FRUSTRATION.

This isn’t the future that any of us envisioned.

I don’t mean in the way that all children imagine a future of limitless possibilities and freedom, or the way that people in the 1970’s thought we’d be living in space colonies by now. I watched Back the Future 2 like everyone else my age did, and I fully expected we’d have flying cars and auto-drying jackets by now… but I don’t actually CARE that we don’t. They also thought we’d be communicating via fax, and what we have today is obviously so much better than that.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m perpetually in awe of the incredible technological advances many of us take for granted as being a part of our daily lives. Never could I have imagined as a child that at any given moment, virtually any question can be answered nearly instantly. Or that we would have access to the sum total of all human civilization’s art, entertainment, and music, in our pockets, nearly anywhere in the world – for virtually no money at all. The poorest people today have access to more entertainment than the richest people did just a few decades ago. It’s INCREDIBLE to be alive today.

What I’m talking about is something else – something a little harder to put your finger on, but that I think everyone knows that it’s there.

I’m turning 42 in a few weeks. I was born the same year the Commodore 64 was invented and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was inaugurated in Washington, DC. The Soviet Union was already starting to teeter under the weight of its destructive war in Afghanistan. By the time I was seven years old, the Berlin Wall fell. When I was nine, the Cold War ended and the United States re-established itself as the world’s foremost military by annihilating Saddam Hussein’s army in just a few weeks. The entire post-Vietnam War zeitgeist had ended. America had won. The forces of totalitarianism were on the run while freedom and democracy were ascendant.

This is the world that many of us came of age in. The world was getting better, seemingly every day. Poverty was decreasing everywhere on Earth. Medical advances were coming fast and furious. Infant mortality was dropping. AIDS shifted from a surefire death sentence to something that could be managed. The US deficit was actually shrinking. It’s like the scene in the Matrix (released in 1999) which depicts a shining, yet generic city, as Morpheus talks about how the late 90’s were the peak of human civilization.

Was he right?

Because it seems like all of that (naive?) hope was annihilated just a couple of years later on 9/11. And as we began to emerge from the Global War on Terror we then were nailed by the Global Financial Crisis, that wiped out some of our best earning years. But more so than the financial impact (which thankfully has mostly been reset since Covid), the twin terrors of the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor, followed just six years later by the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, really shook our faith that we would be better off than our parents, as we were brought up to believe.

Was this really what adulthood would be like?

Then, in 2014 – right as our generation was beginning to enter the prime financial and cultural years of our lives – the world began to change again. The stock market had recovered, home prices were about where they were before the collapse, and in most places the unemployment rate had gotten under control… but there was something else below the surface. A nihilistic malaise that had been growing since the late 2000’s began driving people to explore the possibilities of upending the existing system, in favor of something else…

Russia downed a civilian airliner and invaded eastern Ukraine without suffering any major consequences. A series of elections across Europe led to populist candidates taking power, running on an anti-immigration platform, that carried on through for several years after. In 2016 the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. In the United States, right as it seemed things were finally getting back to normal after a miserable 15 year run, Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating the most establishment candidate anyone could conjure up. A wave of democratic backsliding in Hungary, Turkey, India, and several other nations chipped away at democracy’s seemingly inevitable march. A global pandemic killed millions of people, emptied grocery store shelves, and shook our faith in our institutions and leaders.

And then, in an incredibly sick bookend to 9/11, in January of 2021 we were treated to the grotesque spectacle of Americans attacking and ransacking our own Capitol building – the one target that al Qaeda failed to hit on September 11th, due to the bravery of the passengers of Flight 93. It was the one thing from that terrible day that gave us hope that we could persevere — and now a group of AMERICANS were trying to finish Bin-Laden’s job.

Now in 2024, the world feels as confused as ever. In some parts of the world there has been a reversal to this trend, and unlike in 2014 Russia is paying an immense price for its renewed attempts to destroy Ukraine. China is also in a much weaker position, as its multi-decade One Child policy demographic-time-bomb detonates, at the same time that the United States attempts to re-shore critical industries to reduce its reliance on the world’s supply chains.

But it sure doesn’t feel as if democracy and freedom are ascendant anymore does it? Did any of us ever think that we’d be faced with a question about what the future of our democratic institutions would look like — in AMERICA?

What a tragedy that at precisely the moment that Millennials have finally begun to assert ourselves as the dominant cultural and economic force that all of this is now in question.

When we go to Target, it’s all music geared at us. Collective Soul was featured in a cereal commercial. The Super Bowl halftime shows are Rhianna, Jay-Z, J-Lo, Eminem, The Weeknd – these are all our people (sorry Gen X, but you never really owned the culture). The movies are all comic books we read as kids, or remakes of Star Wars. Commercials showing people buying homes and trying not to turn into Baby Boomers – that’s for us! We know how to navigate the world better than anyone else… the older generations are confused by new technology, while Gen Z is still too young to have the spending capacity to just say eff it, I’m going to a Foo Fighters concert, who cares how much it costs.

Even today’s music really hasn’t changed all that much from when we were in high school. Today’s pop music still sounds basically the same as pop music did between 1999 and 2019. Today’s hip hop sounds basically the same. Rock and Roll hasn’t really changed much since alternative and grunge sounds came on the scene. Dave Grohl is still selling out stadiums. Right now, as I type this, I’m listening to Greta Van Fleet, which is really just a 21st century Led Zeppelin clone (even if they themselves won’t admit it). Even EDM is basically the same as it was back in our day of listening to Faithless, or whoever it was that put out that Sandstorm song (you know of what I speak…). I’m not saying there’s been NO change, but it’s certainly not the same huge leap from the music of the mid-90’s to today vs the mid-60’s to the mid-90’s.

We are entering what should be a time when we have the most power over our lives, and over our reality. But it doesn’t feel that way at all. We are still embroiled in the same cultural and political revolution that has been going on since 2014. And it is EXHAUSTING.

Aren’t you sick of it yet? Genuinely and totally sick of it? Don’t you just want all of this to be over? I don’t WANT to think about whether a politician ACTUALLY means to end democracy in America or if it’s just a gag. I don’t WANT to think about whether or not we can co-exist as blue states and red states. I don’t WANT to think about whether women should be able to cross state lines to get an abortion, or if presidents should have absolute power, or if gay people should be able to get married, or if contraception is a problem, or if IVF is a problem. I don’t WANT to know what Elon Musk thinks about the border, or if we should be forcing people to have more children for some reason. I don’t WANT Putin to win! And I don’t WANT to know that all of these people think the Olympics opening ceremonies were some kind of Satanic ritual – how are we even talking about Satanic rituals again? I thought this all ended after everyone freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering 30+ years ago!

I CANNOT BELIEVE we are having these conversations now when I am 42 years old, when I thought all of this was resolved when I was 12! In fact I thought most of this had been resolved before I was even born!

You know what I want? I want to enjoy raising my two boys in a world that is a little different than my childhood, but more or less safe and stable. I know there will be things they enjoy that I won’t understand – just the way that my parents didn’t understand why I needed to spend 5 hours a day trying to get past the long jump in world 8-2 of the original Super Mario Brothers. Things change, and that’s fine – that’s human progress. As long as it’s gradual, it’s fine!

I don’t need to “get” everything or force everything to be the way it was when I was a kid. I had a great childhood! There’s plenty of new content that’s produced every day that’s geared towards me, but even if there wasn’t I’d be perfectly fine re-living Spaceballs, Mission Impossible, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Lord of the Rings, or The Sixth Sense (another 1999 movie – one of the best years for film ever, Google it if you don’t believe me) for the rest of my life. Not to mention older films that I watched as kid like Caddyshack, Rocky, Plains Trains and Automobiles, or Blazing Saddles.

And I don’t care that they “could never make Blazing Saddles in today’s world” – the film already exists! I don’t need everything new to cater to me. My time was my time and I’m ok with that. I just want to enjoy my nostalgia without feeling like it’s the driving force for so many people who are obsessed with the past, trying in vain to force the world of their youth onto the people of today.

There’s a Twitter account I follow that’s run by a guy named Mike Camerlengo. I don’t know his politics or where he came from, but he does these 60 second recaps of films or sports moments that I grew up watching. And it’s just so… fun watching these clips, narrated by a guy that’s around my age (he’s also very funny), that take me back to my childhood. It’s all just so innocent and decent and good and NORMAL. And then I scroll for like 2 seconds afterwards, and I run into some insane conspiracy theory, promoted by some of the most powerful people in our country, about immigrants eating people’s dogs and cats.

It’s so deranged and demoralizing to just not be allowed to enjoy my little nostalgia without being immediately slammed in the face by people who are obsessed with forcing me to believe that the world today is terrible and there’s no going back to my youth. I don’t want this anymore!

I want to spend Thanksgiving with my family and talk about football and turkeys or where my next adventure is going to be, not about whether or not democracy will survive the next administration. On Halloween the dread I want to feel is if my kid is going to eat too much candy, not whether or not the impending election may be the last. I want to think about what to do with all the cucumbers I’m growing next year, how to successfully navigate a long flight with my 20 month old, and when I can take my six year old to his next Yankees game, not whether or not the losing candidate will accept the results of the election! And most of all, I don’t want to feel like politics is the most important thing in my life anymore. I’m so completely and totally sick of it!

Aren’t you?

How did we let everything turn into a zero-sum game like this?

Can’t you remember a time when it didn’t really matter THAT MUCH who won? Even if it wasn’t your person, you still felt like things would be ok and we could just self-correct the next time around?

Because I can.

And I want desperately to go back to that world. Not that time – I am very cognizant of the fact that I will never be a teenager again. This whole blog is about understanding the changes in our lives and adapting our travel behavior to that reality. When I first started writing about travel, Ariel and I were totally unencumbered. We didn’t even have a dog! Now we have a Sammy, and a Jacob, and an Ethan. Of course things were easier in the past for us, but we love our family more than anything else and were willing to trade ultimate freedom for (hopefully temporary) restrictions on where we can go and what we can do.

I really feel like if more people could just internalize that truth – that life gets more complex as you get older – that we would not be seeing the kind of detachments from reality that we are seeing in wide swaths of the population right now. It’s not limited to any one generation either, plenty of my Millennial fellow travelers are as guilty of trapping themselves in a bubble as the Baby Boomers are. But all this obsession with returning to a mythical past that is mostly just based on your childhood memories, or movies you grew up watching, or (most absurdly) advertising campaign depictions of 30+ years ago is ridiculous and needs to end.

I don’t know how it ends. Maybe if the “right” candidate wins in November it will finally force a reckoning of our political parties. Maybe governments will take action against the rampant and pervasive, yet obviously fake content on social media. Maybe enough people will show that they’re sick of of culture war nonsense and we can exile the freaks and extremists to the fringes of society where they belong.

Or maybe not.

I don’t know what the future holds. I’m cautiously optimistic – there are some limited signs of this crazy period slowly ending as more people reach a critical mass of frustration with the daily lunacy. But I don’t know. And that’s the most disappointing feeling – and something I never expected to experience at this stage in my life.

As always I take comfort in the words of JRR Tolkien – specifically the words that inspired the name and spirit of this blog, so I’ll just end off with them.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Whatever happens in the future it will be on us to make the best of our time on this earth. Perhaps that is the best way to handle this time… maybe if instead of worrying about the prevailing winds and politics and whatever is the culture war du jour, we just focused on ourselves and families and appreciating the world… maybe we’d all be better off.

But please Millennials, let’s also not throw away our freedom and democracy just as we are reaching the peak of our economic and political power.

Because you cannot have one without the other.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

–Thorin Oakenshield to Bilbo, The Hobbit