maria gil ulldemolins

When I was a kid I used to hear about the Generation X and feel envious of them because they had such a defined identity, they had a name, they were a group (I guess this was before everything was called a community). Eventually, I grew up and so did everyone else around me, and someone decided we were not going anywhere and therefore we would need to get a name too, and Generation Y was proposed. Slowly, we turned into something rather more epic: the Millenials (officially those born from 1982 to 2000, although I feel, and I’m not alone, that those of us born in the 80s and the rest are different). And here we are, the Millenials, the year after we took to the streets.

I had the dubious luck to be the voice of Spanish youth unemployment (thanks goodness I am no more) in an article by The Economist. Predictabily, I was asked how did the 15-m change anything. And, to me, the most important effect of the 15-m movement was the confidence boost it gave us all. Yes, the 15-m was very plural, but from what I could tell, it was mostly 20-somethings. And we needed to know that we could own history. And, in a way, it made total sense that we would lead such revolution, because we are a historical Molotov cocktail.

We’ve witnessed two global collapses:

• firstly, when we realized the world order was not immune to change and that the safety we had given for granted because of where we had been lucky enough to be born was finite: the fall of the twin towers and the consequent war on terror.
• secondly, when we came of age and decided to take the future we thought we rightfully owned: we graduated bang on into the crisis, making us doubt of everything we ever thought we could do with our lives. We were about to get on our own two feet when the world collapsed underneath us.

But, on top of this we’ve also lived through two great obvious communication changes:

• The internet! Those of us born in the 80s had the privilege to live both a analogical life and a digital life, being able to appreciate the change the second implied.
• Low cost flights: what the internet did for us virtually, the cheap airlines did for us physically, at least in Europe.

Needless to say, if you add this to the fact that we are the most racially/culturally mixed generation up to now and, on top of this, the best educated one, you get quite a mix. And polls say that we are the most liberal minded people out there, too (which is totally logical).

It seems clear that we have inherited a world that was designed for a totally different bunch and attitude: we want flexible work times, we want to collaborate, we want to share information and culture, we work in jobs that did not even exist a few years ago. It is evident that we do not fit in the current system, but it’s less obvious that it might less of a matter of learning to adapt and more of a matter of building a new one that we agree with, perfectly suited to our expectations and possibilities.

The high we felt in the 2011 protests was greatly due to realizing we had some power, a possibility we had yet to acknowledge. And all that’s happened ever since it’s been based on a discourse that avoids mentioning this. It is said that we had no real alternatives to propose, but I think that’s due to a few factors:

• It all happened rather suddenly and we tried to organize everything very horizontally, which did not work quickly enough.
• I have the feeling that there was a lack of confidence in ourselves. We need to tell ourselves that not only we can change things but we must, and that there is not anyone else that can do this better than ourselves. Yes, we have been brought up to believe in ourselves as individuals, but not as a collective (for instance, we came close to witnessing the power of a crowd when we tried to protest against the Iraq war, but what we took from that is that no-one cared).

I keep on thinking that there is a time factor in what we might become. We are mourning. We are mourning the lives we never had. And we are going through the stages: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And then starting over. I find it difficult from here to decide where we are at wight now, but I know that the first concentration I attended was organized by a group called “Youth without a future”. That was April 2011. And we were all rather depressed: about to end the school year, no perspectives of even a summer job, national elections coming slowly at us in Spain (they were in November).

Maybe 2012 is the era of Aquarius, or maybe it’s our era. We only need to tell ourselves, as a collective, that not only we have to change and build a fresh new environment/system, but that we are lucky to be able to do so, and that it is a great responsibility we are ready to take and make ourselves proud.

pic: a bunch of millenials in La Hora Fetén