Why Life Feels Meaningless for Millennials
And will likely get worse for Gen Z
As I sat on a toilet in a bathroom stall at an Oakland punk bar, I noticed some graffiti to the left of me that said “ALL OUR HEROES ARE DEAD,” and I couldn’t help but to agree with the anonymous graffiti artist displaying his ability to point out the obvious in a dirty Bay Area bathroom.
After I got up, I wiped my ass and headed to a mirror that was rendered useless by significantly less profound graffiti than what I had witnessed in the bathroom stall, and I started to think about what the artist meant as the weak water pressure dampened my hands just enough for me to use the communal bar of soap that seemed to have been there since the ‘70s as a way to compensate for the empty soap dispenser sitting uselessly beside the sink.
What is a hero? Some people define a hero as a singular person who achieved something you always wanted to do or something that seemed so unlikely you forever held that person in high esteem. Think Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Michael… someone. To a lot of us, a hero is someone who did something we admired.
I don’t define heroism that way.
I think heroes are different than that, though. I don’t think heroes are people, I think they’re ideas — ideological safety blankets that we wrap ourselves in to ward off uncertainty and insecurity. Growing up in America, we were always told about the ‘American Dream,’ and what it meant to achieve it. From my understanding it went something like this: you go to school, get a job, find a partner, have a family, and buy a home for you all to live in. All of this would ideally be achieved by our late twenties, maybe early thirties – if we were late bloomers, of course. And this stability would grant our lives meaning.
One of the most harrowing words in the English language is ‘why.’ When dealing with existentialism, every question is a disease and every answer is a cure – as long as we believe in it. The foundation of belief in the minds of the rational is rooted in proof, to some extent, and the generations before us seemed to have seen the proof and experienced its riches.
They lived in a world without ‘why,’ and it served them well. Maybe because they never had to ask. They just knew. The generations before us took meaning for granted. They graduated high school because it MEANT they’d get a job, they’d get a job because it MEANT they’d have enough disposable income to support a family, and having a family MEANT they wouldn’t always be alone. It gave them purpose and made the world make sense.
But we don’t have that hero. That hero tragically died. The pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ have always been one and the same. The Millennials witnessed it get replaced by the internet and empty bank accounts. We watched our collective heroes be assassinated at precisely the same time as two planes hit two buildings that served no other purpose than to count money we’d never get. Our wellbeing, and the wellbeing of the generations that followed us were deprioritized to make way for every type of grift imaginable. We all went to school, but never seemed to learn enough, we all got jobs, but never seemed to earn enough; we all fucked, but we never found partners, we all rented, but we never found homes.
And we’re left with the realization that the dipshit tagging in the bathroom stall was right.
“ALL OUR HEROES ARE DEAD.”
Each one of us had our own idea of the ‘American Dream,’ each American with their own little hero. But when the dream dies, the hero does too. Leaving us with one word when trying to figure out the complexities of life…
Why?
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We got no meaning no more, but someone will come to fill in the void no date