Young Mans Mind

7/19/2024

At the emergence of my consciousness, I remember sunlit mornings enjoying breakfast at my grandmother’s house. The beginning, at least what I thought was the beginning, was probably when I was 3 or 4 years old. Though cloudy memories of past landscapes appear in daydreams, as you age, it’s harder to differentiate them from reality. So, at the beginning of what I thought, 3-year-old me sits in his grandma’s kitchen, experiencing French toast and maple syrup for the first time.

While most people might assume things were easier when they were young, I believe the world itself was much simpler. As a child born at the dawn of the twenty-first century, technology, media, and economics seemed more like additions than the epicenter of life. I can’t imagine being a child today, with the constant flood of high-quality stimuli and information. Now, as a young man at twenty-one years old, I feel my mind and perception of the world have been ruined.

To be fair, 2024 might be one of the worst times for young people in America. All I see when I open my phone is how impossible it is to pay rent and how my generation has three times as much difficulty purchasing property. One trip to the grocery store will take a mighty portion of your already depleting allowance, earned for your sacrafice of time spent on this earth, it feels as if living on your own terms is only possible through an impossible delegation of effort and resource that might not even work out, limiting the time we should be spending on exploring the world and expanding our conciseness. Many say the American dream is over; I believe it has just changed. Before my time, one man could work a single job and provide a house, food, transportation, and education for an entire family. Not saying it’s impossible now, but the options are bleak and depressing. Longer hours for less freedom, and promises of retirement if you sacrifice your best, healthiest years to whatever system you have aligned with. Even so, many of the older generation have had to return to work because the nest they put away just isn’t what it was when they built it.

Plagued by the harsh reality we’ve been introduced to, I’ve been desperately searching for a glimpse of purpose—something that will bring me joy and fulfillment in my everyday life while providing enough for me to live. Even a pinhole of light would give me hope, and I would tear down that wall to reveal the beams of joy I am searching for. So here I am, transcribing my misery through the keyboard.

Not always do I think so poorly about the situations I’ve found myself in; sometimes, I feel tremendous pride for our race as a species and the amazing things we have developed. Humanity has become less hungry and more comfortable. But at what cost have we achieved these commodities? Our planet lives at the mercy of our kind, as the many innovations built on the backs of our forefathers continually develop, becoming more efficient and capable of creating irreversible damage. This affects not just our home but the human genome itself, stripping us of the adaptations that allowed humans to live without the assistance of our own creations. I fear soon we may not be able to survive without feeding the insatiable hunger of our industrial technological creation, leaving us at the mercy of our own invention.