This was supposed to be about intergenerational healing
Instead, it’s a weird love letter to my generation
This was written as part of a self-developed 1000 words per week 5 week challenge. This is Week 1.
I was born in 1987. By the reckoning of the arbitrary generational separations dictated by a primarily Anglo-American hegemonic media and meaning-production system, I am firmly a Millennial. According to this system, the Millennial stereotype is that of someone who is disenfranchised, cynical, and betrayed by a financial-social system that is supposed to have protected me. That would be the case if I were in the Global North.
But the thing is, I live in the Global South. I live in a city 300 kilometers away from the mega-city of Metro Manila. Rolling blackouts happen at least once every two weeks. Between 10 and 11am most mornings, the water from our faucets comes out the color of strong tea. We don’t flood like it does in Manila here, but with deforestation reducing our mountaintops to silt and agricultural input slip-and-slides that inevitably flow into the eutrophication bonanzas of the Western Visayan shorelines, the flooding will reach my neighborhood streets soon enough.
So I am a Millennial of the Global South, heavily influenced by an Americanized media system that had, at one point, promised that we children of the 90s would live better lives than our parents had. And in some cases, that is true. Especially for those of my country-people who have managed to become economic refugees, marrying into or contracting (enslaving) themselves into the Global North and bringing remittances back here to build houses for family members who had pinned all their hopes and retirement plans on their children.
But those promises the US Media had lavished on its audience? Those had been for little White Kids living in US Suburbia. The global media syndication machine simply amplified the US’s considerable soft power and sought to profit by generating Cartoon Network Southeast Asia and Nickelodeon Philippines in the ideological “frontier” of former US colonies like the Philippines. I saw no brown kids having hi jinks in the barrio or the looban, I didn’t see any animated creatures who sounded like me, whom I could see slithering up my house’s mango trees or fluttering among the sugarcane. None of that. Those characters were meant to be relatable for American kids, those stories were meant to entertain and reinforce American societal values.
Those promises were for the children of our Masters.
We Global South Millennials simply absorbed them because we were an available market; a group led to believe that we had nothing else to consume.
But this isn’t supposed to be a screed against US syndicated media of the 90s and early 2000s. Who cares if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Adventures of Pete and Pete invaded my siblings’ and my dreams at night? Who gives a shit if the promises of Hannah Montana’s stardom offered my sister an me a glimpse into a teen girlhood to which we felt we had to limn to, but to which we could barely relate?
This is supposed to be about my generation. The Global South Millennial generation. The upper-middle class ones who had suckled on the teat of the American Dream. And who have been sorely disappointed by the apocalyptic hopelessness of the Millennial Condition.
Some of my peers are parents now. A couple of them have children in their teens. Almost all of them are raising those children in other countries; Ireland, the USA, New Zealand. The Philippine Dream is one of escape. We see no hope in staying in our country. We see no future in keeping ourselves rooted to the home in our veins and in the taste of coconut milk and rice-flour.
So instead, we decouple ourselves from our environments — from the sultry heat that comes before the typhoon, the smell of banana leaves, the whisper of rice being sifted in pandan baskets while adults chatter around us about the monsoon — and we fill that longing for home with things: the latest i-Thingy, the cutest little cardigan, the most functional family car… But also with the security of knowing that we can pay for our children’s tuition this quarter, for the knowledge that groceries can and will be bought with minimal anxiety around price.
It’s hard to be a Millennial.
We were betrayed by the profit-driven promises generated by previous generations, promises that have their roots in the colonial ideal of certain sorts of people and certain sorts of lives being the pinnacle of what our species could be.
But it can’t be easy being Gen X either. Or Boomers. To have seen the decay of our environments and the political systems that mediate our interactions with the rest of the world. To have witnessed the loss of distinct seasons, the crushing silence of insect and bird life slowly dying off, the alienation of a commercializing world deteriorating the tiny sensual delights of family, home, and certainty.
The grief must be unimaginable.
So our elders turn to polarizing politics for the certainty they have lost. So our peers dissolve into the numbness of material acquisition. So those younger than us vent their spleen and their terror and their inherited grief on discursive minutiae and on shallow trends.
And each and every one of us is deeply, profoundly alone.
Grasping and keening for intimacy and relief.
And that is how this world wants us. The Global Colonial Capitalist Hegemony? It wants alienated, isolated, scared, lonely people who eat and drug themselves into numbness, who work themselves to the bone to afford those numbing pleasures, who mindlessly and hopelessly generate profit for the ruling classes, because: what else is there to do? What else can we have?
But what if we didn’t do that?
What if I, a Millennial from the Global South, broke through my class-generation-positional isolation and reached out?
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? To have the spell of late capitalist post-industrial colonial alienation broken by a simple bit of kindness and hope.
But I would be sorely disappointed.
Because hurt people hurt people; violence and pain beget violence and pain, and there is so so much to go around.
My parents’ generation is set in their ways; they don’t want to change, they are happy with their retirement pensions and their grandchildren. What comes after their deaths is none of their business. My elder cousins, the Gen Xers… I don’t know what they’re up to, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know what’s happening to them. I don’t know how to reach them. I don’t know if they’re reaching out either. But I hope we can meet each other halfway.
And then there’s me: Liminal Millennial, hungry to understand what was lost and regain footing on a crumbling planet, but too proud and angry to ask for help.
But what if I did? What if I listened to my elders’ stories? What if I churned them through the hard emotional work my generation has taken upon itself, and said to our younger siblings, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, “Hey. We can fight this. We’ll be OK. We just need to listen and remember.”
“We are learning to be more open, kinder, fiercer, but we also need to learn to be humbler. To listen to our elders but to use the cynicism and critical eye our pain and disenfranchisement have taught us to live something different together.”
I need to be patient. My younger siblings are proud too. They are angry. They want change. My elders are tired and set in their ways. The world is strange and cruel and alienating, and it will only get stranger and crueler as collapse progresses.
But I don’t have to check out. I can plant my seeds. I can care for my animal friends. I can love my partner.
I can be kind.
I cannot change the way things are; not on the global scale that things need to change. But I can slide into the collapse with a sense of inter-generational groundedness: with respect for the grief and the wisdom and the loss my elders hold, with strength and confidence in my transience and the critical depths I am capable of probing within myself and within those around me, and with encouragement, acceptance, and gentle admonition for the younger siblings who are coming into the world and who have yet to be born.
Because communities are made up of people. And generations of people have power. And despite all noise to the contrary, I, the Millennial, am coming into my power.
And my revolution, my community, begins with me.
