Look, It’s been four weeks since I launched this blog, and I still haven’t introduced a real story about “Millennial Burn Out” theory. It’s been easier dining out on trips to Nepal and CFA letters, because those things don’t hit so close to home. In truth, I am scared. Millennial Burn Out seems like such an excruciatingly vulnerable topic that it’d rather relive the dirt trails of Annapurna forever more; however, as a proud blogger, I think I should begin doing what it says on the tin. This last weekend, I was on the tube with my wife and son. We were gathered around the double doors on the Jubilee Line, yelling over the noisy railroad tracks between Baker Street and Oxford Circus, when I asked my wife what she thought being a millennial was all about. The topic of Exceptionalism came up. I could feel myself squirm underneath my own skin. Attempting to stuff it inside, I shut it out of my head. In truth, I am guilty of fabricating lofty dreams; of being exceptional, hell, even launching this blog, I was half-hoping it would explode into some viral stratosphere or trigger an all consuming desire to scripple a novel onto the page in one night, instead, every week, I’m simply thumping my pencil against the wall looking for some easy way out. As it turns out, while doing a fifteen minute timed “free thought” session, this topic of exceptionalism kept coming up. Percolating through my words, there was this feeling of yeah, I think I am exceptional, why not. How I have always thought I’d be exceptional in some capacity. Now, I look back and all I see is a shambled derivatives career and, a view exceptional amounts of MDMA I stuffed into my mouth. How it hasn’t gotten me anywhere I thought I would be or anywhere I like that much, living in a foreign country that half the time gets me passive aggressively honked at while crossing the road. That doesn’t change the fact that this need for exceptionalism is within me. It barks and causes me to act in ways I am not proud of. So, I ask myself why did I began believing ‘I had to be something’; to work in finance? Why leave the United States of America at all?
Well, it started with a screen name.
SnowboarderShub
Many readers probably remember hammering away late into the night with that moniker. I remember when I barged through the front door of our ranch-style house in Vancouver, Washington after 6th grade basketball practice. My brother was sitting at the home computer in our dinning room.
“Dude,” he said, “Get over here.”
Darting through the kitchen to the home computer, I saw the screen. It was on a disgustingly huge monitor: white framed casing, backdrop display, the background was a photograph of my brother and I posing salaciously in All-American outdoorsman attire somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. There were flashing messages from an assortment of my brother’s friends.
This was it: America Online (or AOL).
A screen name was critical in my development of the Exceptionalism Condition, because it gave me something to live up to. Before this, I was happy just being Craig, nothing more, nothing less, nothing exceptional.
