Life in Pink

You’re in your early 20s, you’re at university studying something you thought you loved, something you thought would pave your way in life, so you would achieve something. Up to this point in your life, University was sold to you as the best time in your life, the most fun you’d ever have, meeting people you’d be friends with indefinitely whilst simultaneously broadening your horizons and becoming a fully formed and functional human being.

So why are we all so fucking miserable?

My time at University has been tumultuous, having suffered with severe mental health issues in my first year, dropping out, and then deciding later to return and do another course, something I would “enjoy” more. But the running theme throughout the two years I’ve been here is that 90 percent of the time, I’m miserable. Throughout the time I’ve been studying, I’ve also felt a lack of achievement. I want to do something, something substantial, tangible, and interesting, but what can I do? What is there for me to achieve? Everything I set my mind to is just a pipe-dream, amounting to nothing.

University is annoyingly vacuous. Time consuming enough that you can’t really do anything else substantial with your time, but also endless empty days, sat inside your grim but highly overpriced student house, wondering what you can do that day that won’t cost anything but will kill time (the answer is pretty much fuck all other than aimlessly walking around in the freezing cold).

So, you turn to social media. You sit there on Twitter and Instagram, quietly exhaling from your nose when you see something humorous, endlessly looking on at what other people are doing with their time, filled with resentment but also happiness for them. The never-ending juxtaposition. The all-consuming misery.

This isn’t just me either. Everyone I know is, on the whole, very unhappy. There are so many reasons for this melancholy, summarised here into the top 5 reasons for my own personal misery, and those surrounding me. These are:

1. I don’t feel like I’m achieving anything.
2. I literally don’t have the money to eat.
3. There’s an insane amount of pressure to be the best at everything.
4. None of us are as happy as we think we should be and we don’t know why.
5. None of us are ever going to be paid such an amount that we can have a good life.

The generation prior to ours, Gen X, was so lucky. Everything was quite new to them. They came about just as technology really started to become commonplace, meaning that the Baby Boomers didn’t know how it worked but the Gen Xers were perfectly primed to be taught. Their university fees were lower, and there were more jobs that were easier to obtain. For example, my father studied fine art at Coventry Polytechnic and went on to become a graphic designer at Sky, where he was trained on the job.

Apply for a graphic design job anywhere now with no prior knowledge of the programmes and an art degree and watch yourself get laughed out of the building.

Feeling unfulfilled and full of existential dread is a state I’ve found myself in for the entirety of my time at university. The realisation that life is not fucking easy, the economy is fucked and we, the millennials, are getting the brunt of it was an unpleasant learning experience. The general overview of millennials that life is so easy for us is a narrow-minded, ignorant mantra chanted by gen X, who fucked us over big time. Yes we have technological advances, yes we’re more connected now than ever before, but we’re also all more unhappy than ever before.

We’re all lonely, we’re all filled with an internal battle between conceitedness and a feeling of worthlessness, and, worst of all, we’re all fucking miserable but we’re not quite sure why. These consumptive, negative emotions, contrast so heavily with what was sold to us by the media and by our parents in relation to their university experiences. It raises the question, if this is the best time of my life, then how bad is it going to get?

The nostalgic view from your parents about their youth, and their time at University, is nothing more than them looking back at the past through rose tinted glasses, choosing to focus on the good times, and the benefits that we, the millennials, have that they didn’t.