Personal Narrative: My Generation

My generation is the worst that has ever existed. We are the laziest, most ignorant, most spoiled, most naive, most carefree group of people to walk this Earth.

Or so I've been told.

I see all over the news articles with headlines like "Millennials too lazy to pour cereal into bowl, clean up after themselves.” (I’m not even kidding. Google it.) I see criticism telling me that I’m not as connected to my family as I should be, or that I’m too reliant on fast food and an going to grow up to be obese and die a early death of diabetes, or that I am too attached to technology and that it is rotting away at my social skills. I hear how my generation is being babied by participation trophies and increasing parental supervision.

I find myself

There's a name on the seating chart, but they’ve been absent for a while now. They don’t try to make it known, but they failed most of their classes last year, so they won't graduate for another year, at least. Their teachers took pity on their grades for a while, what with the family getting a divorce and the inevitable emotional wreckage that can create, but there's only so much missing school that they can excuse. You suddenly realize that you haven’t seen them since school started a month ago. Maybe if you asked after them, you’d discover that they’re in a mental ward for extreme depression and attempted suicide, as they have for the past 2 months.

They are far from carefree.

And more importantly, they are not unique. None of these kids, none of these situations are.

This generation faces huge pressure to succeed in ever increasingly competitive schools and careers. This generation lives, as all others before have, through violence and economic troubles and food insecurity and difficult family lives. This generation suffers from stress and depression and a whole plethora of associated mental issues at disturbingly high levels.

Your thoughts turn to your absent classmate. There’s a FCW due today, you think. You absentmindedly wonder how they’ll manage to make up all the work they’re missing. Maybe you'll see them next week, you think.

You won't.

They attempted to overdose again today.

They succeeded this