Today, I was watching Girls, and I realized how much I
empathized with what they were going through.
For those who don’t know, Girls is a show on HBO which I
have heard referred to as “our generation’s Sex and the City.” It follows 4
women in their early twenties as they discover themselves in New York City.
I’m not super familiar with Sex and the City, but there are
some major differences between the two eras and the issues they follow within
the women’s lives. In the episodes of Sex and the City that I’ve seen, a lot of
the episodes revolve around the women’s romantic lives, or lack thereof. There
are often segments about their distaste of work, their family issues, or
something else, but they seem so sure the whole time. That everything is going
to turn out well for them, one way or another. That they are independent women
in control of their own destiny.
Girls feels so much more unplanned. The women in the show
have no earthly idea what they’re doing. Life just kind of comes at them, and
they do their best to combat it. And while one of them has a definite idea of
what she’d like to be, her goals are much more free form. And pervading the
show is the sense that things aren’t the way that they were supposed to be.
See? They're just sitting on a bench. Like it's their favorite thing.
I have found in my own experience, and in those of my
friends, that we are in perpetual shock that life becoming an adult is not what
we were promised. I’m not sure what’s more startling: the idea that we thought
that growing up and becoming independent would be easy, and that we’d be able
to become who we would be immediately, or that idea that someone somewhere
along the line made us believe that.
Among my friends, most of us have no idea what we’re doing.
We have ideas. We have concepts. We see things we’d like to do, and they type
of person we’d like to become. But the steps between here and there have been
obscured. And it seems that no other generation has been so wholly lost, or at
least that must be what it feels like for each maturing generation.
Then again, in being lost I believe our generation is found.
In our not knowing about jobs and destinies, we have been more able to focus on
interpersonal communication, and discovering, at least, the way we would like
to seem to those who don’t know us yet. Our generation is more philanthropic,
more likely to volunteer. We value each other and our lives behind the scenes,
not necessarily defining ourselves by what we do, but by who we are.
In a world that seems to shift so suddenly, to be ever
moving, there is little else that can be expected but for one to grab onto
anything possible, and to follow that until one is thrown, to catch onto the
next foothold. Like one massive, racing carousel.
This is not meant to categorize one generation or another,
or to say that one is better than another. It is to say that I, at least, have
little idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, and it is comforting
to find a show where the characters feel the same way.
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