Screaming into the void

Just some personal thoughts on these trying times as a millennial and wanting to scream into the void as history repeats itself.

I was thinking about how some of the messaging I grew up with in high school regarding bodies is coming back in full swing. I also have noticed that we are shifting towards a Conservative lens in the media. I don’t think this is an accident, and I think there is a common agenda here. You also have to bear with me because some of these thoughts were hard to put into a nice flow of words. Here we go…

---

Are there any other elder millennials out there who feel existential dread? I know that other generations can relate as we are all living through crises together, especially the younger Gen X’ers, but I would really love for us millennials to catch a break. It’s been one event after another, and many can’t afford to purchase a home or aren’t sure about the future we were promised as kids.

I was a freshman in high school when the Columbine High School shooting happened. It seemed unfathomable and frightening because students shooting their fellow classmates seemed utterly unrealistic. I remember my teacher and classmates talking about it in homeroom, shaken, but thinking that it would be a one-off incident because, again, nothing like that could really happen. If only we knew…

Then my senior year, boom, 9/11. I attended high school in Brooklyn, and from the window of my sociology class, I could see the billows of smoke from the towers. I also remember my dad happened to be flying to Florida that day, and my mom and I hadn’t heard from him until evening, so we understandably were freaked out the entire day. Many of my classmates and teachers were married to firefighters, police officers, and other first responders to the site. It was scary and unsettling.

Then George W. Bush announced we were going to war, in 2008 we had an economic recession, a reality television star and predator got elected into the highest office (round 1), and we also entered into a pandemic… and it just seems to have been event after event after event. I don’t know about you all, but my nervous system has not been neutral for some time now.

Now, with our timeline of what’s happening in the world and especially our current administration, my body is stressed out. I’m uncertain of the future regarding the planet, finances, and society. Is this what we were taught to look forward to? Is this what we were taught? To work hard for our futures? It’s sort of like, what future? What social security? What housing? I know that this sounds like a rant and in some ways this is, because sometimes I sit back and think what the actual fuck?

Speaking of elder millenial dread, when we were in our teens and early 20s in the early 2000s, one thing that will always stick out is how diet culture prevailed. I remember thin celebrities being put on the front covers of gossip magazines, asking “What happened to them?” when they were photographed from a different angle. Thin was a body trend, and the smaller you were, the better. I remember all the different diets that took center stage. I attended an all-girls Catholic high school (not Catholic, and I think this could be a story for another day), and girls were drinking SlimFast as meal replacements and doing the Special K Challenge. You know the diet where you were just eating bowls of Special K? Yeah, that one.

Why am I reminiscing about the good ‘ole days? Because I think they are coming back with a vengeance. I am noticing that the body trend is thin again. We had a short and sweet bout of body positivity in 2020, which made sense. We were at the height of COVID-19, and everyone was scared because we had no idea what was truly happening and how to overcome it in the beginning. We also had the same leadership we have now, which is why we should be concerned now. But have you noticed the influx of weight loss drugs, new diets, wellness tropes, and trad wife content that is pushing a certain “look”?