Millennial’s are often grouped together, and when I think about what that means I see mild images of smartphones and adolescence, but overwhelmingly my mind goes to September 11th and the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. I was not there, but I feel somehow close to the trauma, somehow closer to millions of people whose experience of the world was shaped the just like mine, as if the images that followed 9/11 are identically mirrored experiences shared between every person who saw them.
Even a cursory thought would confirm that reality isn’t true. So many people in my generation and across all ages have wildly different perspectives and ways of living well. There are real differences between the way even shared memories are felt and there’s a world beyond so full of experiences it makes the narratives at least I live by less encompassing. It does not seem as important that people have the same experience as it does that they remember to have their own experience.
I cant be terribly hard on myself nor can I ignore the millennial’s dilemma. What qualification or opportunity do I have to make a difference is a reasonable question, even with years of academic experience that’s just school and I am left unsure of what impact I am supposed to be having. I can add patterns and habits to my life but only after thinking a little forward and looking into the space-time of my own awareness.
There is room to believe in the collective effect others like me are contributing to in their own small way. My own knowledge of the world already seems dated, but when in time was a person ever aware of all things? Never. But even with my smartphone and the Internet and the ongoing occurring of humanities genius it’s hard to keep up, as if so much of myself is connected to the world that whatever happens is equally present and unknown, waiting just past the known to be discovered.
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