Sympathy For The Millennials

When I think back to my early twenties — the intensity of emotion, the clarity of conviction, the insupportable arrogance — I am filled with a mixture of revulsion and self-pity. Seriously, can you really bear to reflect on the period of your life when you fervently believed that all those things that didn’t really matter actually made a difference? Perhaps the greatest gift of coming to the realization that your time here is finite and ludicrously unremarkable is the comfort in not having to really invest any of your energy caring about who said what about whom or how you feel about this and that. The sheer joy of deciding that you’re not going to do something because you don’t want to and you no longer care what that says about you almost makes the whole trade-off worthwhile. (Almost. It’s still a bad deal.) So anyway, maybe we should be a little more compassionate toward the twentysomethings. It’s not their fault that they don’t know how stupid they sound. And besides, life is going to teach them all about it soon enough.