The middle-class nation.
The mediocre generation.
Success is taught and adapted; changed and refurbished; and destroyed and rebuilt. What I have seen is a loss for words. Luckily, I have some to spare…
I watch the elderly settle into retirement and I remember when I was 16 and told myself I would never end up like my parents. Not to say my parents don’t have decent- to well-paying jobs, and maybe—probably—they are superficially happy with the day to day of existence. But they’ve achieved none of the goals they ever set when they were younger and brighter and life was looking up rather than slowing down, like it is for them now. All this, assuming they even took the time to wonder about anything but getting by during those formative years…
Kids growing up in Smalltown, USA spend their entire lives worrying about nothing but getting by. And when they have children of their own, those kids are born into hopelessness too, because they don’t have a clue as to what success even looks like. Everyone in the town makes minimum wage. The roads are crummy. The streetlights flicker and don’t even make it a mile out of town. The only way out is that illustrious college diploma that will land maybe one of them at some suburban business building chalk full of nothing but cubicles and paperweights. There someone could meet their first ex-wife or baby’s daddy. Either way they fall into the grind—how literal—and they reappear as a soulless shell of pessimism, reluctantly visiting Home every year, then every other year, then every five years for Christmas, until finally they don’t go back. Maybe this person has kids and pays child support. Maybe they take a higher paying job filling out less paperwork and drinking more coffee. Maybe life goes on and on and on and no one ever remembers a fucking thing about who they were or where they came from. Maybe they quietly pass with a small service in some cemetery where mowing the grass is more important than a tombstone. Maybe there’s an excuse for every wasted life, because I know if you really don’t care, then you’ll probably make one…
Success isn’t fame, fortune, or happiness. Success is as relative as taste. If you dream it, it can be done. And if you are aware, then dimensions are innumerable.
Send me your thoughts to me at AOTFBlack@hotmail.com.
Until next time, stay gold.
1 comment:
I still hear you.
"Success is as relative as taste" oh god, so true.
I wander the streets on my lunch break every day watching the happy idiots and begging for a passing surgeon to deliver a quick one stop labotomy and save me from caring about actually achieving something in this life I'm slowly wasting away.
Thirty beckons and I'm still the same waste of oxygen I was ten years ago, moreso even, because these days, without the weed, without the constant hangover, and more importantly with the self awareness that comes after walking the streets of this life for nearly three decades, I'm painfully aware of the potential I could have achieved had I not fallen into the rather predictable trap of allowing the media to suggest what I COULD and COULDN'T be.
That's why the innocence of first love lost is so often at the forefront of people laments. Because it signifies something so much bigger. It reminds you of the time you realised that the world didn't owe you anything and that it has no time to tip those that don't take what they deserve. Spend the rest of your lives whining about what you could have been if only you had had the opportunities someone else did, you'll be in fine company; That end is our generations destiny anyway.
The wasted generation. God, we fit that moniker on so many levels it's not funny.
This message 'Fell on Black Days' so I can't offer the positive boost, the rallying cry at the end to make a difference, to not fit the mold, to break out and seek your own version of the truth, your own version of success, your own version of happiness (because none of those things fit the cookie cutter, they all have to be YOUR versions). Sadly, today pessimism is my uniform. We're fading away and we're not fighting anymore. Did we ever?
Maybe someone can fight in our name. Fight for the wasted generation. I think I could rally behind that. Even today.
Unbreakable
The Age of the Fall
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