For years, I have been telling people my thoughts on just how advantaged and disadvantaged Gen Y is.

OK, so here is the situation. You have got us, the Gen Ys, we are teenagers that just became or are becoming adults. Some of us have been married for 10 years even, and some of us are worrying about what our freshman year of high school is going to be like. Regardless of our age, we all have one thing in common: We are technology’s proving ground. Even for the few of us who were not raised with computers or touch screens, we are constantly adapting to it as if it were inevitable. It is one hell of a luxury; something I am very grateful for, as technology is my passion and I can not imagine living without it.

But with all of the awesome benefits of being a Gen Y, we are dealt some serious disadvantages along with them. The first is the issue of our predecessors, the second of our future.

Now, I am not going to generalize and say that all of our elders are opposed to technology. What I will say is that it’s very common for people who did not grow up with what we did to see our ways of life in a different light. Allow me to bring in a personal matter.

My father is an artist and grew up in Britain. All he did was play outside in his free time and do whatever you did when there was no such thing as a TV (that was only half sarcasm). All of my life, I have had a (probably) unhealthy addiction to technology. I have little interest in paintings or going out to play sports like my father did. Instead, I grew up in front of the screen, and here I am today. I have been battling with my dad every day of my life, and many other members of my family and society, that just because our ways of learning about the world and growing up in it are different, does not mean that they are inferior or somehow wrong.

It took me 18 years to convince my father that video games were a form of art and that they benefit society more than harm it. Finally, I showed him the most beautiful game I have ever played, and he cracked, telling me that he could now see how gaming is an art form. While that is an incredible milestone for me, he is just one person. How many other doubtful people do I have to convince that looking at a screen all day is in fact productive, even more productive than their seemingly ancient ways of pencil, paper and blackboard? How am I to show nearly every teacher I have ever had that when they banned electronics from the classroom they were hurting our learning capabilities? How on Earth do I prove my point without coming off as a complete jerk and not reinforcing the stereotype that older generations seem to have that we’re nothing but angry, delusional puppets? Well, I know it’s not impossible, but it might as well be.

So, with the older generation’s issue: I do not know how many times I have been told by 60+ year-olds that I should stop using technology and go outside and socialize. My own family friend, who is around 85, told me that I should be ashamed for playing “those damn war games because the real thing was anything but fun.” I am not even going to go into that. The point of all of this is that we as a generation, with all of our amazing abilities, are frowned upon by the majority of older folk. What infuriates me more than anything is a teacher that has a God complex because of the stereotype that we are an inferior generation.

Here is the summation of the older generations issue: Gen Y got the short end of the stick, plain and simple. We get to try out the awesome tech, but until we are 18, or for most of us, until we are in our own jobs and out of the house, we are governed and controlled by people who were raised without any sort of technology culture comparable to ours. We are the generation who is riding the wave of a revolution; a new era of communication and advancement. And our greatest flaw is just that; we’re the guinea pigs. We are lab rats for corporations and our predecessors to judge and manipulate because we’re simply the newest humans to exist.

What will happen in 50 years when we discover that all of our amazing smartphones that we had in our pockets growing up have given us ovarian and testicular cancer? What about the possibility of our generation becoming blind in our last decades because we were raised glued to the screen? If anything bad happens, we will not know till it is too late. We get screwed in more ways than one, and these are issues that I do not see hardly anyone else talking about in the way that I am.

I am an intelligent person, I know what is good for me and I know when an ignorant fool is trying to convince me that my way of life is wrong. While all I can do for the better is to ignore them, that does not change the fact that Gen Y is still stuck between a rock and a hard place. If our skeptical elders were right, then we will all die of some kind of mid-section cancer. If we were right, we will live healthy lives but still have to put up with the endless barrage of rubbish from those who think we are getting more and more stupid. Rage does not even begin to describe my feelings towards my dad when every time I talked to him he tried telling me how gaming was a waste of time. And yet, in the seven years I have been driving, I have never crashed a car, I have never been arrested, never done anything ridiculously illegal and been a straight-A student all the way from my toddlerhood to my graduate-hood. I attribute much of this to gaming and technology. With both of those influencing me, I’ve learned faster, smarter and deeper than my parents did when they were growing up.

I just wish we had more recognition and our reasoning was not falling on deaf ears. This is only going to change when our generation begins taking control of the world. Until then, we can look forward to the continual onslaught of demeaning stereotypes and ignorant mindsets of those who would rather live in the past and shun the future than accept that people change as much as the societies they grow up in.