I Tried To Represent The Confusion from My Generation
Remember that time in our childhood? From the morning till noon, we messed around the school. We eat a bright as hell candy, we fight (and one of us is gonna cry), we fall in love, we stress about how to multiply numbers, we play hide and seek, we bought pletokan bambu to create dopamine rush in our brain.
Then we grow up. Going to middle school. Still, we eat weird snacks, we started to hang out in the mall, we started to try cigarettes, we still fight, we fall in love in such a messy way, we struggle to get to our favorite high school, we started to learn how to make decisions.
And high school comes. Our capabilities of thinking are increased. We start to hang out a lot, we debated teachers, we fall in love way deeper, we fight (mentally and physically), we started to think about our future, we make friends and enemies a lot, we became way smarter in making decisions yet adult won’t take it seriously, we start to modified our uniform, and we’re just one step away from adulthood.
And, boom! The adult life. College life. Everything is on your own. We stressed out. Wars happen in our minds every damn second. We looking back just to make ourselves gain more pressure: why all my friends are achieving a lot of this and that? Gosh, their GPA is way higher than mine! I am a f-ing failure! Oh damn, he/she already working at a huge start-up! And here I am; unemployed! Am I a family’s burden? Geez, he/she is being a webinar’s speaker! Dang, why can’t I be like him/her?
Be special, because everyone is, people said. We used to be told about how we should feel special, how we should work hard to achieve things. But lately, I’ve been thinking: What am I? Is my major define me? Are my businesses define me? Is my bank account define me? Is my organization define me? Is my inability to be a high achiever like my friends define me? Is my fear define me? Is my high school define me? What actually am I? A million years of evolution bring me here, to question myself and society. We’re stardust that questioning themselves.
We’ve been consuming a lot of media since day one. So many glamorous things, so many successes we saw. At some point, we believe that one day, we can (and should) buy everything that we consume from media: buy a nice car, buy a nice condo, gain a million followers, buy lavish shoes, be a trendsetter, be a rockstar, be a speaker in national television, in another way: we believe someday we can buy all the stuff that we don’t really need but we always feel the urge to fulfill that. We are convinced that we should gain all those things. Yup, because the media said that.
We grew up at the cost of giving away our childhood-teenager dream. Every day we wake up as an adult, we kill some part of the childhood-teenager part. Those colorful paintings, those kits, those dolls, those robots, our stuff, our curiosity of the world, are killed.
So actually, we just need to ‘it-is-what-it-is’-ing things that happened. It doesn’t mean that we became passive, give up in life. We realize some of our desire, the chasing of material wealth, or social status, is can take our ability to feel alive in this life. It can be that we do not own our desire anymore, but our desire owns us. School teaches us how to make a living, but not how to make a life. A meaningful, good life. I quoted it from Manly P. Hall. So it is become our own responsibility to figure out how to make a life.
We keep trying, working, struggling. But we should realize that our value as a human isn’t fully based on that materialism stuff. Chase to be kind, responsible, mindful, and other value that has no limit, but ain’t make you exhausted if you try to increase it. One kindness done can make another thousand kindness arise.
It is okay to chase wealth. But, we should define what is wealth. Is it happiness, healthiness, friendship, relationship, or anything? We can’t deny that a parameter might be useful to measure our wealth, or our goals generally. But, when we are too focused on parameters instead of our goals, it just becomes a useless parameter.
So, then, what if we’re not special? At least we can be valuable humans by not creating disaster, by being fully aware of who we are, by being good people, by giving back to the community, by distributing our privileges, by being ourselves, and having the passion to improve it without genociding our inner child.
Good luck, everyone.
There, I tried to represent the confusion of my generation.
Surabaya, 2022
