As Millennials, We Grew Up Without Hope — 'Boomers Have Never Done Right By Us And The American Dream Was A Scam'

The movie Fight Club, which came out in 1999 sums it up neatly:

“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very p*ssed off.” ― Chuck Palahniuk,

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When you spend your childhood being taught that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything, only to realize when you are thrown out into the world for the first time that you can’t, it creates a sense of disillusionment and loss.

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We are a generation of kids that grew up watching re-runs of shows like Leave it to Beaver, where mom stayed home and kept the house in her perfect apron. But in comparison, in our own lives, we were left home alone as latchkey kids. From 1996 research on latchkey children:

Children who are regularly left without adult supervision during a significant portion of the day, referred to as ‘latchkey children’, are a growing social phenomenon. The main reason for the rising prevalence of latchkey children is the increase in dual-income and single-parent families. Studies on the effects of the latchkey phenomenon report conflicting results. The potential positive consequences include learning to be independent and responsible. The potential negative consequences include loneliness, boredom, fear, academic underachievement, drug and alcohol abuse, accidental injury, and impairment of the parent-child relationship.

A lot of us were left home alone in the 80’s and 90’s. We had to fend for ourselves after school, many of us responsible for younger siblings. I started babysitting my sister when I was in the 5th grade, so 10–11 years old. There began my transition into adulthood.

In the 6th grade, I saw friends of mine smoking pot for the first time. I was dropped off early for school, and a few of us walked over to a friend’s apartment across the street from the school. A bunch of them were getting high before school.

Seeing that freaked me out, and I left. That was probably the moment that I officially became ‘unpopular.’ But drugs scared me. I said no for a few more years, before finally saying yes to drugs as a runaway when I was 16.

I felt thrown away. No one wanted me or cared about me. So why not throw my life away too with drug use? When nothing matters, it doesn’t matter what you do.

“This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.” ― Chuck Palahniuk

In high school, one of my girlfriends told people that either I or my then-boyfriend would probably die before we hit the age of 20. That’s who we were then. Hopeless, floundering. Taking the path of least resistance into the downward spiral seemed like the only way to go at the time.

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I was in the 11th grade when the Columbine shooting happened, the same age as the shooters.

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I remember the day of the shootings clearly, albeit differently than most people who were watching the events of the day unfold on TV. My own Northglenn High School was only 24 miles away, in another suburb, on the other side of Denver. That same year, our school had at least three different bomb threats called in. During one of them, the police found a duffel bag full of knives in some kid’s locker. I remember a TV commentator at the time saying about the shooters: They weren’t any different from anyone else.

That’s what family, friends, and neighbors remember. Just kids, like any other kids at the time. Then in the aftermath, they all started to place blame for the shooters being the way they were. Some blamed violent video games that they played, others blamed the music they listened to.

We listened to Marilyn Manson too. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, the interviewer says, "It’s easy to forget how much controversy Manson managed to cause in the late 90s when his name was linked to the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, whose perpetrators were alleged — erroneously as it turned out — to have been fans."

We listened to angry music because we were angry about life. We all had reasons. Trouble at home that no one cared about. A friend at school was shot during our freshman year. Trouble in our relationships both romantic and with friends. Loneliness. Feeling outcast. You name it, we all felt it back then.

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That April day in 1999, three of my friends and I decided to run away from home, away from Colorado. We had bought a car out of the newspaper for $200 that was barely drivable and were on our way.

The car, predictably, broke down on the side of the highway. This was after the floor in the back seat of the car had inexplicably caught fire the night before. But we kept on keeping on until we couldn’t.

We got picked up by a stranger driving by who decided to help us, though even now the reason why is unclear. The guy had our car towed to a shop to get a quote on repairs, took us into his house for a few days, fed us, and let us watch every Star Wars movie with him while crashing at his place.

After a couple of days, though, he was sick of us and wanted us to move on. So, I called a friend whose parents had money back in Denver and asked him to Western Union us some money. He didn’t. He called the police.

We got picked up by the police, taken into custody, and had to sit in the police station while they figured out what to do with us. Finding out what day we had left, that we were from Colorado, and all owned black trench coats, we were questioned about the Columbine shooting to see if we had been involved somehow.

Of course, we had nothing to do with it, though two of my girlfriends went to Kennedy High School, which is only six miles away from Columbine. We had driven past there that day, too, and seen all the police cars. In a now-chilling statement, one of my friends said that all the police activity meant no one would be looking for us as runaways. Scary, scary, scary. Kids, the same age as I was then, were the first notorious school shooters. 

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The millennial generation was the beginning of an evil that scars our nation. Hopeless, forgotten, thrown away, full of rage, just like everyone else.

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They turned their pain outward in a desire for revenge against those who had hurt them. But was our running away any different? Revenge against the parents who made us feel unwelcome in their homes.

Was it any different than the self-harming behaviors I turned to? I was trying to fill a void inside me that I never knew where it came from. A hunger and yearning for purpose, for belonging, for love that had always been withheld.

They say, hurt people hurt people. But how do we heal the scars in our own psyches that cause us to lash out? Much less heal this broken world we have inherited.

As one of the oldest Millennials, I am in my 40s now.  We aren’t kids anymore. Many of us — like me — have kids who are themselves adults now. But how do we grow from a generation of kids left to fend for themselves, teens thrown away, to reclaim our wasted lives and make something better?

According to a 2009 John Mayer song:

Me and all my friends
We’re all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There’s no way we ever could
Now we see everything that’s going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don’t have the means
To rise above and beat it

So we keep waiting (waiting)
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting (waiting)
Waiting on the world to change