R Taylor Grow
My roommate once suggested that we — the privileged Millennials who have never really suffered — are so separated from our emotions that we rely on musicians to feel sad on our behalf. The day he offered this insight, I had one earbud pouring a gloomy Ingrid Michaelson song into my ear. I contested his thought, convinced that Michaelson or Tristan Prettyman or Rachel Yamagata simply shared my emotions and could express these feelings in terms I could not articulate.
After some reflection, I now argue that I have trouble articulating these thoughts for a particular reason: I have not been trained to properly express these thoughts because Millennials have not been encouraged to poetically explore their interiors. The educational system has consequently nurtured a generation content with surrogate lyrics and borrowed emotion.
In the larger educational system, a world where science, technology, engineering and mathematics seem to run the world, the poet has been long obscured by a culture that does not seem to understand the necessity or power of the word, or, more particularly, the creative string of words that allows man to express himself in a unique manner. Instead, the creative education that we receive exists outside of the formalized classroom without a respectable instructor; it is, in fact, media and personal motivation.
It is nearly impossible to say something serious and beautiful about one’s sadness when we live in a society where we confront only the trite imagery and tropes and mark contemporary ballads. Further, in our nonexistent state of poetic training, an endeavor to articulate such a thought seems vain when we cannot construct a line comparable to the beauty of those few sirens whose verses shatter the cliché. In the aftermath of such an encounter, we forcibly kidnap these lyrics, posting baby pictures on social media sites, allowing our circles to understand the depth of our emotion through verses that we have stolen from a set of proud parents.
I argue passionately against my roommate’s claim — that dejected Millennials have never suffered. Anyone who has cried on the back of a bus after parting with a lover or shared an impassionate kiss with the love of his life has suffered, though we must acknowledge that it is a privileged sort of suffering. However, my complaint against this kind of suffering rises when the dejected Millennial chooses to express this condition through appropriation — a complaint that extends past the melancholy twenty-something to the culture that has inhibited his ability to write for himself. Indeed this leads to the emotional immaturity to which my roommate pointed that evening and which I find in the posts of online friends who think that Nicki Minaj’s “Marilyn Monroe” is a means through which to express their understanding of the human condition.
Until our educational system allows for a critical and productive medium that teaches us to express the melancholy that inevitably infects our angst-ridden selves, our generation will continue to drown in the insubstantial sea to which our piano sirens lure us — forever convinced that “Most every morning, [we] wake up crying,” as Yamagata writes, when, in fact, every morning our eyes are remarkably dry.