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the 2020s and Gen Y
Gen Y, also known as ‘digital natives’ and ‘millennials’ are those born between 1982 and 1994. By the early 2020s they’re about to become or already are 30-somethings, which makes them not ‘young’ anymore, but not ‘old’ either. But, as generations go, those following them—Gen Z, born between 1995 and 2010, born into a world of smartphones and tablets—see Gen Y as old fogies.
Gen Y feel like old fogies, even though once upon a time they were at the forefront of technology use. They’re not sure who they are and even who they want to be. They still have an inkling that maybe older romantic notions have value, while at the same time being battered by an onslaught of romance-denying dating and hookup apps, whose very existence call everything they might have thought had value into question.
Add other social changes and Zeitgeist convulsions, and Gen Y qualifies as a ‘lost generation’, searching for meaning in a world they feel they should understand but don’t.
Louisa and Rick are Gen Y ers, each carrying a heavy load of uncertainties, histories or false starts, meaningless corporate jobs or ultimately unfulfilled promises of their academic successes; followed by the lingering but inexorable deaths of dreams maybe once had… Realizing that they’re not likely to going to be able to change the world for the better and catching it before it collapses under the weight of the all-pervasive reality of human greed, myopia, and above all stupidity.
Also, in the case of Louisa and Rick, each in their own way, they have lived through sometimes traumatizing romantic disappointments, which have left them bewildered and maybe even emotionally paralyzed; trying to chart a course through stormy seas of that aspect of their lives and uncertainties, without any lighthouses to help them avoid the treacherous rocks on which so many eventually founder.
Gen Y, more than other generations I believe, are the most troubled when faced with the phenomenon so grimly elucidated in Eva Illouz’s The End of Love.