Hey, listen for a minute. I need to talk to the younger folks out there, the ones trying to navigate this absolute mess of a world we’ve handed you.
I see you. I hear you. All of you.
I see the pressure you’re under. The insane cost of everything, the feeling that the future you were promised is a scam. I see the desire to just check out sometimes, whether it’s scrolling on your phone or something stronger. Trust me, I get it. I’m the last person who’s going to throw stones about finding ways to cope when the world feels like it’s on fire.
Life goes by faster than you can possibly imagine right now. My only real advice? Take today, right now, and just embrace who you actually are.
I know you look at some of the older folks, maybe my generation, Gen X, or the Boomers, and you see a lot of anger, a lot of judgment. You hear people calling your generation lazy, or entitled, or whatever the insult of the week is.
And I need to tell you something about that, with all the honesty I have: That’s our fault.
We, the older generations, dropped the ball. We got complacent. We forgot the lessons we ourselves learned when we were young. My generation? We were the anti-establishment kids. We had the loud music, the spiked hair in bright colors—yeah, the same stuff people give you grief about now. We hated the self-righteous hypocrisy we saw, the people telling us how to live. Our “devil worshipping” wasn’t real, but we leaned into it because it freaked out the establishment, made them clutch their pearls.
We were raging against a system we felt had failed us. Sound familiar?
The anger you see in some older people now? It’s often the curdled version of that same frustration. It’s what happens when you spend years fighting a system, and then you either give up, or worse, you become the very thing you hated. It’s the fear of being left behind, manifesting as bitterness. It’s not an excuse for their behavior, but it’s the schematic.
So, here’s my point. Be who you are. Loud, quiet, bright colors, dull colors, figuring it out, got it locked down—whatever. Embrace your authentic self, because that is the most powerful tool you have.
But—and this is the difficult part, the part that takes real strength—remember that the person standing next to you is on the same ride. They deserve that same space to be who they are. Respect is a two-way street. Make people earn yours, absolutely. But be prepared to give it back when they do.
That’s the only way this works. That’s symbiosis. My hope, my real hope, is that your generation can get this right in a way that mine, and the ones before, so often failed. That you can build a world where our differences are genuinely celebrated, not just tolerated, and where we remember that we’re all just living, breathing, thinking, feeling creatures flying around space on a giant rock, trying to do our thing.
And if someone isn’t hurting anyone else, if they’re doing their part, why should anyone treat them differently?
I see you. And I respect the hell out of anyone, of any age, who is brave enough to be real in this world. Keep going.