the millennial crisis

Western-born millennials are coming out from under the illusion that we are owed a good life. Some of us are later to the game on this collective human issue than others...

Image taken by Nadia Meli

I spent an entire decade of my life navel-gazing.

I needed to be selfish and focus my energy and time on recalibrating my nervous system, addressing generational trauma, opting out of conditioning and habitual ways of being, and strengthening my body and my inner authority. Trying to unravel myself from the deeply distressing experience of being raised by someone who was not truly able to raise a child.

In my healing journey, I studied psychology and took psychedelics, went to silent meditation and yoga retreats, had therapy and hypnotherapy, studied NLP and Reiki, chanted in kirtan and did breath work, travelled to sacred places and absorbed cultures that offered me respite from the one I had been born in.

Many of the tools that I reach for when life gets hard, come from indigenous cultures. The breathing practices, the stillness and presence techniques, the mudras and mantras, and the functional philosophies of patience, tolerance, acceptance, self-awareness, courage, and respect.

I owe all these good things to cultures that are not my own.

As I took accountability for my inner wounds and pains — learning healthy ways to handle challenges, finding peace within myself, and an acceptance that allows me to navigate life in a way that is centred and balanced — I discovered that I had been sold a lie.

The more whole I became the more I began to understand that I had been proffered the illusion that ‘I’ was the problem that needed to be solved. Healing as an individualistic pursuit in which each of us is to blame and must be responsible.

Of course, I couldn’t have come to this conclusion without the aforementioned healing journey. It was necessary to be able to create the wholeness and space within myself to look up and around and truly see.

It turns out that the underpinnings of most Western ‘human’ problems are a result of a project that has been unsuccessful. The world we grew up in essentially has failed us.

That project is globalisation and capitalism.

As children, we were told to believe in it. I can’t count the number of times I was guaranteed that once I went to university a golden path of financial security and life success would be rolled out before me.

That project is built on the imperialistic, patriarchal, colonial systems of oppression. Oppressing the same cultures that we now turn to to solve the problems the Western culture has caused, and doesn’t have the solutions for.

We millennials have been in this constant period of upheaval since the start of our adulthood. That’s hard. And maybe that will be the case for our entire lives. Our nervous systems are tapped out because it feels like we are not building on anything solid. We are always assembling our thoughts and dreams on shifting sands.

Now, the world must readjust to a new reality.

Millennials are waking up to the collective human issues at hand and are deconstructing our own internalised isms. Racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, saviorism, and so on.

Many of the parts of our collective that we lean on to glean some good in this world are the same ones that we have repressed.

Let me rephrase that. Most millenials. Except for those who are still benefiting from all the isms. Which, truth be told, is at some level, still most of us.

For the generation before us, this was their project.

It doesn’t matter that it failed so much to them now because they accumulated the wealth and the land and they can use that wealth and don’t have to deal with the consequences.

Their privileges make them blind, as ours have.

Naturally, we feel lost and confused. It’s hard, when you’re living an individual life to understand the greater narrative that is going on around you and your civilisation.

It hurts to look. It hurts to see. It hurts to feel.

What do we do now that we are here?

We opt out slowly one step at a time, one day at a time, through our very practical day-to-day choices.

We boycott.

Boycott calls us into the right relationship with our values. It reminds us that success, ease and convenience are ideas formed at the expense of someone’s aliveness, under empire.

It’s an invitation to let go of these systems and structures and invent new ones.

Boycotting works because money is more important to governments and corporations than human lives.

What does that look like?

In a peaceful, nonviolent way, we voluntarily choose to abstain from the products, systems, organisations and perhaps even countries as an expression of protest. The purpose is to inflict economic loss to compel change.