The Burnt Generation: A look into our fried senior class

By Francesca Lo Basso
Collegian Editor
December 6, 2006

In lieu of a crazy liberal ranting, or maybe because of it, I’m writing about a revelation was spawned during a phone conversation with my best friend.

We’re burnt out, all of us. This whole generation of budding twenty-somethings is just fallout from the Reagan-bomb. “They” – that ephemeral, that elusive “they,” those latent and omniscient powers that be – have been telling us for over 20 years that we’re supposed to go to college and get a job. It’s on TV, at the dinner table and in magazines. But what “they” don’t tell you with their clipboards, lecture notes and overbearing presence is how you’re supposed to achieve this end.

That ridiculous “they” say college will change your life, and it does, but they neglect to mention that it also sends you into a tailspin. During this time, when you’re supposed to be defining and preparing yourself for the future, you’re being barraged with so much new information that by the end, just months before graduation, you have no idea which way is up anymore.

Ever since I was in the third grade, all I ever wanted to do was be a writer. I always said, to use Madonna’s words from her first nationally televised interview, “I want to change the world.” But have I really been prepared to do so? My only comfort used to be in defining myself as a writer. When life seemed mystifying, I would be reassured by the fact that I could write, that I had written and that I would continue to do so. But now I haven’t written a story since the summer, and, before that, my work was sporadic and all revoltingly similar.

I’m tired of myself, of my characters and their lives. My desire to write is lackluster, the drive diminished, and now I don’t know who I am. But I still have those three research papers to write, and those finals to study for and, oh yeah, the rest of my life to prepare.

I used to want nothing more than to travel around the world and write. Now that wish just seems self-indulgent, and the faith I had in my abilities has waned. I want to feed the starving, house the homeless, end the wars, destroy capitalism, fight the good fight and win. But who would I be doing it for? College has taught me some, but it’s given me more questions than answers. I feel like Carrie Bradshaw, my eyes narrowing on the cursor as it slides across the page and highlights the question, “Do you ever really know who you are?”

I’m tired of busy work, tired of the monotony of assignment after assignment, but, at the same time, I’m petrified by the afterlife of college. The only world “they” taught us about is the academic one. The world we’ve lived in is the one that involves going to school, sitting in a classroom and doing what someone older and wiser tells us to do. We’ve been doing this for most of our lives – since we were five years old. But now what? What do we do when we take those jobs and move into those apartments in those new cities and sit by ourselves on our very own couches? How do we meet people outside classrooms and bars?

I have never learned as much as I have in the past three and a half years. I have expanded my knowledge and grown more mature. I have met people I could never have imagined meeting. But I feel no closer to any answers or resolution. All I know for sure is, the older I get, the less I know. But in true Sex and the City fashion, there’s no point to hopelessness. Maybe we never really know who we are. Alan Dean Foster, a writer of Star Trek books in the ’70s, once said, “Freedom is just chaos with better lighting.”

Maybe there are no answers, no definitions, no indisputable truths. But maybe that’s not the point. It’s all chaos in the end. I don’t know where I’ll be five years from now – or even this summer – but I have the benefit of time, and (some) knowledge to use it wisely. Maybe the only real advice we can get is not to waste it. In the eternal words of William Shakespeare, “We burn daylight,” and that’s all I have to offer. Go out and burn it all.

lobassof1@lasalle.edu