Getting lost to be found: Life in your early 20s

Trump has just been re-elected, the end is nigh, Brits are selling their souls for a loaf of bread while a new billionaire is minted because of a product no one has ever heard of. Wars rage, power shifts, money grows all the while the fall of humanity to AI looms over us. While we most likely let these events breeze through our minds as we sip a coffee or find a moment of thought before relapsing to the hypnotism of endless scrolling, I find that I return to what is most pressing in front of me: “Can I afford a kebab?” or “How am I supposed to graduate considering I can't study for more than an hour?”. 

The world which we “Gen Z” have become accustomed to thrusts upon us the brutalities of the life to come with every breath we take. For as long as I can remember the world seems to have come up with a different way to end itself, so eventually we tell the boy who cries wolf to get a life, treating alarm bells as ambient noise. With this reality, how should I find anything that I deem reason enough to get out of bed to be of any importance? I understand that perhaps life’s purpose is not some angel Gabriel that descends upon you bringing your eternal mission, but having lived on autopilot through the adult manufacturing plant of the education system this so-called preparation we're receiving doesn’t feel like it's of any importance at all. 

“Archangel Gabriel” by Gustav Dore

Everyone older and supposedly wiser always says that these days hand you the tools with which you can form the socially accepted format of success, but they always seem to leave out the part in which any of it gives your present self any meaning. I always considered the start of our parent's lives to have been more straightforward than ours - with less noise, demands and more time on their hands, but then again the highlight reels of their present lives seem to be divorce, midlife crises and piling receipts from weekly therapy. I suppose they’re just as clueless as we are. Despite that, some of them still became leaders of companies, nations, and icons of whatever they figured out they were good at. I’m sure there are those around me who are well on their way to being our elder's replacements, only I haven’t met them. What are you passionate about? This has been asked of me as well as everyone I know, the buzzword of life gurus and motivational speakers, explained endlessly but never really answered. Perhaps we simply haven’t been around long enough to know yet but the question is always met with hesitation and an “I don’t really know”. Perhaps the entertainment we so copiously consume might feed delusions of grandeur, our ego telling us that we must be the main character of some epic that is our life. Here lies the root of my problem, and what I think separates us from the generations of yore. 

Since the first time we heard our parents say we’re going to be great someday we believe that some grand feat of excellence is our only acceptable outcome, after all, we all want to do something important. Now it's all around us, likes, views, respect, they all come from expressions of exuberance making us feel like we're chasing carrots on sticks, catharsis can only come tomorrow. So we sleep through today hoping we’ll be satisfied tomorrow. Only by forgetting today, we end up relinquishing all of what is necessary to get to the tomorrow that we are desperately looking for, so we turn back to our screens to live in other people's dreams. 

“Sisyphus'“ by Titian (1548)

This is our divergence from the past. No screens meant no distractions, and no distractions vehemently onset boredom, that thing that others are toiling tirelessly to eliminate by stealing you from yourself. Our forefathers had no such drug, they were forced to think, think for themselves and unshackle themselves from that uncomfortable feeling our dopamine junkie brains can no longer fathom. They got lost, went outside and took on anything that was there to be done or seen, they tried and failed and then tried something else because they learned from their mistakes which led them to things they were better at. Thinking about what they were doing bred ideas of how to make it their own, they carved their own paths and met with others going the same direction, friends were made and skills were learned all the while they were simply doing what they wanted to do in that moment. 

We spend so much time listening to what everyone else thinks we should do that we stop exploring that which our conscious compels us to do. When you get an itch that there’s something you think is cool, look into it, try doing it yourself and see if you’re good at it, make it your own and improve it, you’ll find more knowledge through the people and places you see and collaborate with. If you have no experiences to think about then one cannot possibly find thoughts of what to do. So unplug the digital dopamine IV and lose yourself, becoming free. 

Finally, wake up.

“Ring Around the Rosie” by Edward Potthast (1915)