The first question that I ask is this; to what generation DO I belong? For years now, I've been told that Generation Y is the generation of the future, the generation that will change the world. My own third grade teacher told me that I might one day be the person to cure cancer and make millions of dollars profit. It's funny that every time somebody told me that I could cure cancer, they automatically assumed that I wanted to cure cancer because I wanted to be rich and famous - not for the sake of helping other people.
I have found out that cancer will really not be cured, because it is such a natural part of the human life cycle. If you don't die of anything else, you will die of cancer.
The revelation that a tumor is simply a mass of mutated cells, and that cellular mutations happen at astonishingly speedy time intervals led me down a deeper and more widespread revelation: that much of the world is suffering from the same crippling disease that comes from a simple miscalculation by cellular reproduction. In other words, everyone is vulnerable, and there is no end in sight.
Do I really want to be of the generation tasked with the responsibility of dealing with this insurmountable task? If I make the cure to cancer, what happens next? What about AIDS, Diabetes, Obesity, and overall declining intelligence levels among the adult population?
I'll tell you something right now - I don't want to be a part of that. But that was what Generation X was all about. Most over forty people I know have gained a sense of duty and obligation to the world around them after their lifeless and vain youth. These days, it is hard for me to imagine my U.S. History teacher as the guy chanting "GENERATION F#$% YOU!" at a Kurt Cobain concert. I argue, however, that Generation X has realized the mistakes of a sterile anarchic youth too late in the game.
Primarily, Generation X didn't care about anything that involved bleak odds and outcomes, and they went by the slogan "F%^& You!". Whenever national tax day came, this generation's slogan could be heard all across this country. The downfall of not caring about something, however, is not doing anything about it.
Generation X is passing the torch now, and it is my opinion that they have been passing the torch for the last two decades. Generation Y is stepping up to bat, at least that's what I have been told since third grade.
Recently, however, I discovered that I was on the tail end of Generation Y, and that most of us Y people have already graduated college. A lot of us have already passed their primal optimum years, and they weren't there to quell the storms as I was told they would be.
I also discovered that I also fall in to another category - Generation Z. Besides being the last letter of the alphabet, Generation Z might also have a few other things in it's standing versus the already aging Generation Y: I would get the option of coming third.
I don't know if anyone I know bedsides all the people that I hang out with every day at school can call themselves as lucky as me, because I get to choose which generation I want to belong to. I don't know if I really want to belong to either one, because If history is any example, It is my fear that both will fail in creating the cure to cancer.
Follow
