I know I'm not the only one, and that's why I don't normally think it's a big deal. But this could lead to several disasters in the near and far future, for myself and for this generation as a whole.
One such disaster is the inability to live in the present. So focused on the future -- on new adventures, on the next big thing -- this generation of twentysomethings has a hard time committing to the now.
As college students, we get hung up on the fact that we'll only be around four years -- we church-hop the whole way through, we don't engage with the off-campus community, and we jump from relationship to relationship because we're convinced our post-graduation plans will separate us anyway.
As graduates, we settle for a particular job in a particular location, but we don't expect it to last long; we're just killing time until we get the job we really wanted in the first place in the city we've always wanted to live.
RELEVANT Magazine posted a blog about two weeks ago, calling this dilemma The Great Escapism. Read it. I couldn't have said it better myself.
If we are to make the most of each day God has given us, we need to stop focusing so much on dreaming about and making plans for the future and start seeing the opportunities surrounding us now.
This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
-- Psalm 118:24
This is an excellent topic. The relevant buzzword is "extended adolescence", and it's been receiving more and more attention as each generation increasingly refuses to "grow up" and commit. The obvious impact is on marriage. When we lived in Germany our thirtysomething neighbor and his girlfriend lived together in a house owned by his parents. They had no interest in marriage or family, and were symptomatic of the overall problem in Western Europe and the US, where marriage is becoming rarer, childbearing is delayed, and families are therefore small. We now sit on a demographic time bomb, where your generation is going to have to figure out how to support my and my parents' aging generation when there are so few of you.
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