A Letter to the Gen Z
If you’re under 25, this one’s for you.
It’s now 2024…
23 years since 9/11
21 years since the Iraq War
20 years since the South East Asia Tsunami
5 years since COVID-19
4 years since BLM.
The world has gone through a lot. You’ve witnessed a lot. And guess what? You’re the ones who will have a bigger pivot to live through this world. You’ll be our next leaders, our next working masses.
We were told that the future was about flying cars and hovercrafts like in the 1997 Movie “The Fifth Element”.
Instead, we brought you a world of war and famine, a mindgame of self-deprivation and scarcity of self-love, an egocentric reality you see every day through your phone.
Right now, the Palestinian genocide is still happening. Many third-world countries remain oppressed.
As I write this from my first-world home, and you read this with internet access and a soft chair to sit on, we don’t fully feel the gravity of these issues from our privileged spaces.
[And if you are one who barely gets on by with the daily challenges of life, and for some random reasons this reached you, I thank you for having the privilege of time to be here.]
For this, I am sorry.
I am sorry that we feel helpless as our world turned out like this.
I’m sorry that we were too scared to defy our norms and conditioning from the old world; a world before it was easy to fly and meet people across the globe, a world before the internet.The Boomers taught us what they knew and what worked for them, in full confidence that it would work for us too, but now we’re caught in the cracks.
Though, feel free to shift the helm and avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did and our generation continues to do.
Question what feels wrong when you’re forced to go against what feels right.
Don’t blindly follow the footsteps of those ahead of you, thinking it’s the only way.
Carve your own path instead.
Merge the good things and reflect on the bad that the world has done.
Feel okay in feeling wrong, especially when it feels like the world is against you.
Nothing is wrong with you in your attempt to be different. Instead, do wonder if those who stay the same are fine, for change is the constant in this world.
The key to evolution is to embrace change and be versatile with it.
Allow yourself to be different from us.
Not all of us have the courage yet. We don’t know better yet.
Most of us are still learning. And we want to learn together.
I wish the Boomer generation had told us this when we were growing up:
The world is a messed-up place, and it’s perfectly okay to start something real and beautiful until that’s all we see.
Instead, we were crippled with fear of defying their world and blindly followed their teachings thinking nothing is going to change along the way. They were under the illusion of exterior prosperity, believing they were heading in the right direction for humanity’s wellness, but they failed to cultivate their inner world.
They didn’t know how to teach us to feel. We’re still figuring it out now as your middle adults. They didn’t know how to speak humbly or be sensitive to real-time experiences. Hence, many are still calling your generation ‘sensitive’ and ‘easily offended.’ They were fixated on goals that glorified what they knew and were scared of anything outside it.
We are the Millennials, most of our parents are Boomers, and though much has shifted since the boomers were the primary adults who rules generally before most of your parents the Gen X, we want to reach out to you for help, to work together and approach it differently.
I am not painting the Boomers as the enemy, for they were also only taught by their previous generation.
You see, it’s like an ocean current that everyone rides on, but this current is one we can only shift if we work together. And a way to do that is
to shift our dynamics through awareness.
Awareness that can fully bring us to our present, making us realise what action needs to be shifted.
As children, we were all powerless without the approval of our adults. Our self-validation is weak when we are not encouraged by our older generation.
Now as your Adult, a Millennial, let me give you this permission:
Listen to what feels right with your own authentic definition of right, not based on external information.
Allow yourself to fail.
Allow yourself to deeply and wildly celebrate your wins.
Don’t shy away from these genuine celebrations and failures.
What matters most is that it fulfils you first, before it fulfils anyone else.
And kindly please, don’t be consumed by angst, hatred, or defeat.
Instead, make these energy your pillars to support your foundations, transmute them as a source of beauty and kindness into your wonderful world.
Use them as your guidance on how NOT to become the current chaos.
Finally, this is a hard one cause its intangible:
Let LOVE be your foundation.
We are not faultless victims either; we did not know anything better. A lot of us are awakening and seeing this, being the children caught in the cracks, we are teaching ourselves what I urge to remind you of in this message.
We are here, and we’re realising the gap between our generation and yours.
We may share this sentiment from our youth: We’re not seen. We’re barely appreciated.
The old narrative painted the young as rowdy and undisciplined.
But not this time. This narrative ends now. The only way to make a better world is for us to learn from each other.
Listen to each other rather than point out the differences.
Not to undo what our old generations did, but to empower our world to shift direction as we move as one.
With love,
Gee — The Curious Millennial
