We can promise stressed millennials that things do get better
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
— George Orwell
Risking a derisive “OK boomer,” I cop a guilty plea to Orwell.
The year has begun with the continuing narrative that millennials are so pessimistic that, for some, life seems scarcely worth living. This is heartbreaking. But they do live in a world that gins up panic, like the apocalyptic survey concluding “don’t have children; it’ll save us from climate change.”
A recent Canadian Press story reported millennial misery amid rampant wildfires in Australia, a threatened and “imminent war” between the United States and Iran and the tragedy of Canadian lives lost in the Iranian downing of a Ukrainian jetliner.
The piece cited National College Health Survey data that 60 per cent of respondents were dealing with above-average or tremendous stress levels, 23 per cent diagnosed with anxiety, and 19 per cent with depression.
Even though some of these elevated negative perceptions are true, hopefully they are also due to better diagnoses and overdue attention being paid to mental health. But it’s never been easy being young, uncertain, and new at life experiences.
To be sure, millennials live in a world of ubiquitous digital culture, social media and its conflict and manufactured outrage.
Also, there sometimes seems a lack of context; missing are older people who assure the young that life means hope, and that never giving up on the future is critical to how we live in the present.
A few decades ago, as 20-somethings immersed in a confusing and dangerous world, many of us were at least surrounded by those who had endured the Great Depression and the Second World War. Their message: Better times would come. Perhaps not as self-actualized as many of today’s young, we just thought that scary times were something we’d have to get through.
The memory is vivid and depressing: December 1980, watching a U.S. news report set to the music of Merle Haggard’s “if we make it through December” — a recession seemingly without end, the death throes of U.S. steel towns, and the misery of people lined up having lost their jobs, homes and hope. In 1979 and ’80, the world really did seem to be going to hell. Strikes and strife had torn apart Britain; a group of ideologues launched Iran’s “Islamic Revolution,” seized power and triggered an energy crisis that drove gas prices higher than we could afford. They held the world hostage, along with U.S. captives, for more than a year.
The IRA murdered Prince Phillip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, off the coast of Ireland, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Iran-iraq War began and every year, without a raise, runaway inflation shrunk our paycheques by 10 per cent or more.
North America seemed obsessed with serial killers: We asked what created Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, or the real-life terrifying clown John Wayne Gacy.
In the U.s.–soviet Union arms race, we knew about “MAD,” Mutually Assured Destruction, because we had to; ditto for the acronyms ICBM and START. We knew names like Trident and Pershing missiles, and the terrifying Peacekeeper, a ballistic missile carrying 10 nuclear warheads; a single missile’s payload was equivalent to 230 of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.
We lived this every day, and wondered if we were next for a mysterious pneumonia-like disease contracted at an American Legion convention in a Philadelphia Hotel. If not legionnaires’ disease, there was that contagious and potentially lethal plague, discovered near the Ebola River in Africa.
Even the Olympics suffered in 1980, when the U.S., Canada and others boycotted the Moscow Games. And just days before Christmas that year, pop culture icon and Beatle John Lennon died from a gunman’s bullets on a street outside his New York home.
It didn’t end there. In the ensuing months, anyone who lived it would never forget renewing their home mortgage at 19- or 20-per-cent interest rates. Eventually we did make it through that December, and many more. And for the next generation of young people, it gets better. Gormley is a broadcaster, lawyer, author and former Progressive Conservative MP whose radio talk show is heard weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on 980 CJME Regina and 650 CKOM Saskatoon.