The Anxious Generation

 The Anxious Generation

This year’s harvest of brand new adults is being referred to as the anxious generation. Established adults blame smart phones for all the troubles that plague our freshly manufactured grown ups. Smart phones make them lazy, stupid, isolated, depressed and stifle their creativity.

Smart phones make them anxious.

Can you blame them? They are graduating into a world where they can’t rent an apartment making minimum wage which is why the law was created. Where their good union job could disappear and be shipped to China and congress does nothing to stop it. They just graduated from a high school where they were forced to do active shooter drills because sometimes a heavily armed crazy person will break into a school and kill as many kids as he can before being killed himself, as if his life were nothing but a video game.

The active shooter was also a member of the anxious generation.

The advent of the smart phone is the greatest tool the working class has ever had. I’m surprised it was ever allowed to come down in price so that we could all afford one. I have to thank capitalism and it’s affection for Chinese slave labor for that boondoggle.

Letting us have smart phones was a stupid blunder on the part of the power hungry hoarding elites. The reason this generation is anxious is because they know what the hoarders are actually doing. There are so many holes in the dam they can’t plug them all.

People are screaming about public schools turning kids into tap dancing, cross-dressing queers that poop in litter boxes and are bound for hell because they’ve been taught being gay will damn their soul for eternity. The only people that believe that hot mess are old people who watch TV all day. 

You remember TV. It was that new fangled invention that everyone said was making grandma and grandpa stupid, lazy and anxious. Gramps needs to use his smart phone to call his grandkids and ask them about what’s really going on in the world. Well, they’re more likely to get a response if they text their grandkids. 

Maybe.

Capitalism requires people to buy things. For people to know that something exists in order to buy it, it must be presented to people in whatever way is available, with the latest technology that’s in style that season. 

For a long time it was commercials on TV. When the news was turned into just another revenue stream for national broadcasting corporations it was forced into a slinky dress and taught how to dance real sexy.

Because smart phones and the internet put porn in my pocket, sexy isn’t enough for the news to get my attention. Now they have to scream that the world is on fire and that I have to watch them, or I’m going to go up in flames myself. I don’t wanna die!

I have three kids. They’re all overly anxious. Were they more anxious than me or you at their age?

When I was their ages (18, 23 and 33) I was scared shitless that the world would collapse around my ears at any moment. When I sat and had a beer with my dad he told me he was scared shitless that the world would collapse around his ears at any moment.

The difference between our generations is that we Gen Xers and Baby Boomers were taught to deny our fears. To puff up and beat our chests to prove how badass we were. 

My kids know exactly who they are. And they’re not happy with the condition of the world we’re leaving them. The ashtrays are full and there’s oil all over everything. And they ain’t afraid to say something about it. Us calling them the anxious generation is unfair, because it’s our fault that they have good reason to be anxious.