You know…some of us just tried to do the right thing, the thing that was expected of us with promises of a solid middle class comfortable lifestyle. We were even pressured into it by our parents and grandparents, some of them saying they would go so far as to disown us if we didn’t attend college.

Any attempts at taking a breather and trying to figure things out were discouraged, and dissent was quelled. All we wanted was the American dream just like our parents and grandparents had, but the world had changed and no one was there to help us through the transition, just spit us out into the world with what they knew was a worthless piece of paper, left to drown without even so much as a lifeboat. How were we supposed to know better? This is how the world had worked up until this point, we left high school in the old world and graduated college into a new one, completely unprepared.

The first wave of us graduated in the middle of an economic crash and any meager prospects of finding a job that did exist were taken away…we were left to fend for ourselves, fighting for scraps and forced into “unpaid internships”…if we were lucky and not immediately rebuked as “overqualified”. Many of us doubled down and said “well if I get a masters degree, surely that will differentiate myself from the rest of the pack”…unfortunately that was what everyone did, and the next wave graduated into a job market over saturated with masters of none.

Then we were told to learn how to code… certainly that’s the ticket! You have to be highly intelligent to succeed in that realm! And that’s something not everyone’s got…surely this time will be different…fool me twice I guess…just as before, the field instantly became over saturated and it became, once again, impossible to differentiate oneself from the herd.

Not all of us are latte-drinking, handbag-sporting, instagramming aficionados. Many of us just did exactly as we were told, and fell prey to the false promises of a world that we didn’t realize no longer existed until it was too late.

If you want to hate on someone hate the zoomers who at least had the chance to learn from the mistakes of the millennials, but don’t hate the cannon fodder that, like the first waves sent to Normandy beach, simply followed orders.