This Is Why Our Generation Doesn't Believe In Settling Down
Settling down is the same thing as settling for a mediocre life.
Nikola Spasenoski / Shutterstock By Allie Braun
We are a crazy generation.
We self-acknowledge that fact; the older generations call us crazy, and the younger generations might be trying to be an inch crazier. And maybe each new up-and-coming generation will think the same thing about themselves or even be called crazy by us one day.
But I don’t want to focus on that right now.
What I want to talk about is the fact that we are one of the first generations to realize that “settling down” like you are supposed to isn’t the only thing you can do with your life or even the best thing to do with your life.
You see, we were told to never settle. We were told to reach for the stars and then build a rocket to get there. We were told that the weak settle for content lives instead of striving for happy ones.
We were told to look for the best and only accept the answer once we know it is the best. We were taught these things by the older generations who now call us crazy for believing those things.
We explore. We travel. We grow. We meet new people. We are creating families out of connections that have nothing to do with blood. We look at the white picket fence homes that we are supposed to settle down into and only see limitations.
For us, settling down is the same thing as settling for a mediocre life.
There is still a whole world to explore. There are empires to create. There are dreams to achieve. There are places to go, people to see, and memories to be made. And buying a two-story house in the suburbs of the small town, USA would only get in the way of all of that.
We’ve discovered that you don’t need a house to be at home. We value experiences and connect rather than material investments such as huge houses.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t out there getting married or starting families, it just means they don’t look the way our parent’s families did. We are having kids and traveling with them.
We are marrying who we want, when we want, and then seeing the world with them. We are doing the jobs we want to do, where we want to do them. We are still creating life it just doesn’t look the way they are used to.
We understand that life isn’t meant to be lived in one place anymore. We live in such a globalized world now.
We travel as far as we can for as long as we can and then just maybe we consider staying put.
Maybe that makes us a crazy generation. Maybe this makes us unstable. Or maybe it just means we are squeezing every drop out of this life we were given and doing it in the way we want to.
Maybe we understand that change isn’t a bad thing and that life is going to shift with or without us.
Things are going to constantly change no matter what we do, so why not change things ourselves?
Allie Braun is a writer attending Furman University pursuing a degree in Sustainability Science. Her work focuses primarily on relationships, current events, and lifestyle topics.