Sheep part deux

Baaaaa....

I see you're all still being herded. Or allowing yourselves to be.

Don't bother waiting up for me. I've got another path to take. You just go on ahead with the rest of them. Maybe we'll meet again someday. Or maybe not.

Fucking slaughterhouse is around the next picket fence and you know it. You just don't want to see it.

Excerpt from Sheep

Why we as a generation and as individuals have come to this state of not knowing what to do with ourselves isn’t hard to figure out.

It is because we want something more than the stereotypical nine to five existence out of our lives. Ironically, we are constantly being told to take the safe conventional route to happiness - and because of this we are confused, paralyzed and scared shitless.

We want to climb Mt Everest, save the rainforest, join the Peace Corps, take weekly road trips. We dream of being free to do what we really want to do while the conformists whisper that the only way to make it is to hold down higher management positions in companies that pay well and cater to the demands of family, friends, colleagues and various charitable organizations.

Tall order.

Twenty-something, we’re often told, is an age we’re supposed to do what society expects us to do – find jobs, make money, get married, settle down, get it all together. But getting it all together is the last thing we’re doing.

Sure, maybe some of you out there have achieved all there is to achieve. Some of you may believe you’ve already got it all together and that you’re living the perfect suburban life. Some of you have allowed yourselves to be swept along the tide of popular Styrofoam culture. If you fall into this category, know that this was not written for your reading pleasure, so bugger off.

For the rest of us who are still woefully lost, well, there is an up side to our semi nomadic state. We are, by default, the only remaining rebels of our age. Everyone else has settled down, or worse, just settled. Tell me you refuse to yield to the same fate. I for one, hope I do not fall into the numbing cycle of home-work-fast-food meals-work-mall-home. Someone poke me in the eye with this article if you find I’ve turned into the living dead four years from now.

We have chosen what the generations before us could not or would not choose. At least not most of them. We have chosen to forgo the safety of white picket fences and floral bedspreads. We do not comprehend the need for traditional timelines and eschew the old notion of one having to be settled down by thirty to be “complete and happy”. We choose to bask in the happiness that now has to offer and do not prescribe to the long-suffering tradition that youth be spent slaving away in pursuit of a happiness that may never come.

If we as a generation are going to crash and burn, we will do so knowing that for a little while we did justice to the notion of not being slaves to society’s misguided dictates. Yes it sometimes sucks being alone, following a path others may refuse to take with you, but in the end, don’t you feel all the crap was worth it when you realize you have actually lived and were not merely being herded into the slaughterhouse with the rest of them?