josh Allan

“Well, at least we can still pass for college students,” I said to Allison as we got out of the car in East Lansing, home to some forty-thousand-ish college-age kids at Michigan State University.

Well, I think we can pass… until I see a freshman. Damn, they look so small!

Or maybe I just look old.

We sat there amidst the relatively small numbers of college students (as it is the end of June and the majority of people don’t go to school then), and as I ate my quesadilla, I watched them. And I thought about this “grown-up” world I’ve been inhabiting for the past couple years, with my office cubicle and my commute downtown and my mortgage payment and my income taxes. And I said, “It’s obvious to me that college students didn’t create this world we live in.”

And I think it’s true — college students are idealistic and passionate, excited and laid-back. This “world” I’ve been living in is absolutely NONE of those things. It is an obvious byproduct of a baby boomer mentality, grown from their parents’ (and probably their parents’ parents) manifestations of industrialization and big business takeover (go watch Wall Street if you haven’t). It doesn’t care about vacations or family time — unless those things can be squeezed into evenings or 10-day windows around Christmastime. It doesn’t even really care about your personal well being, save the fact that you are “well enough to show up for work.” It’s machinistic and reductionistic and individualistic, and when I look at it I see a hopeless, writhing, self-propagating piece-of-shit that makes you crave a bit of Zoloft just so you can get through dinnertime.

And I fucking hate it. Perhaps that’s obvious.

Now, I don’t want to sound like the most curmudgeonly ancient 24-year-old you’ve ever met (too late?), reminiscing ALREADY about “how great my college days were” and that they were the “best time of my life” — how pathetically fatalistic is that; I might as well off myself now — but I can’t deny how much that period in my life influenced/changed/shaped/whatever’ed me. And I can’t ignore the fact that I truly believe people my age view the world very differently from the last couple generations. It’s like we’ve seen the consequences of their choices, and where one result is ludicrous amounts of money, the other is a sad emotional disconnect from their friends and family. I sincerely hope — and I believe it will — that by the time my age group is 60-something and effectively ruling the world, it will look completely different than it does now.