David Pradere/ Contributing Writer
A concept that seems to have infiltrated the millennial mind is that with age comes an added responsibility and burden.
This can be traced back to the generation prior teaching their children that adulthood is nothing but taxes, bills, and obligations that one really doesn’t want to be obligated to. If seen through those lens, it seems like adulthood and joy are two completely separate things.
This could possibly be why many millennials refer to the mundane tasks of one’s matured life as adulting. It’s almost as if the word itself creates an invisible barrier between things one has to do and things one enjoys doing.
It sheds a childish light on hobbies or interests, and makes it seem like pursuing one’s dreams and goals is something that only children dream of, while real adults forego these dreams and get “real jobs” — jobs that always seem to have a soul-grinding and life-depleting essence to them.
Growing up and becoming old is inevitable, no matter what you do to distract yourself, but that doesn’t mean that with age the joys of life are taken away. Don’t think that happiness and contentment only occur in the first few tender stages of life.
Youth is a mindset, and it always has been.
Yes, jobs are required if you’re to make a living and yes, sometimes life puts you in situations where you don’t really want to do something, but that doesn’t mean that as we grow, that’s the only thing we have to look forward to.
Millennials seem to be so scared of growing up that they hide behind the walls of the past and regard everything they were never taught to deal with as adulting.
Instead of trying to live life nostalgically and tossing everything else under the blanket term adulting, we should embrace our coming age with grace and love, and keep in mind that youth in itself is a state of mind characterized by a hunger for knowledge, life, and freedom, not just the amount of times a certain date comes about.
Unlike what the media portrays millennials to be, they are not just “lazy kids” obsessed with their phones with their heads stuck in the clouds.
We are people with the ability to change the norms that prior generations have so easily accepted and forge a new society that tosses adulting to the side, and instead promotes a way to balance the responsibilities of the world while still retaining the flames of youth.
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