Waking up is hard to do, Gen-X lacks motivation

David Roepke

Some days I feel lazy. You know what days I am talking about. The one where you roll out of bed, look at the clock, and low and behold it’s 1 p.m.

Having already missed two meals, you order some chicken wings for breakfast. While waiting for your food, you lie down on the couch, flick on the tube, and promptly fall asleep because picking up the phone was so tiring that by now you deserve a nap. Not too bad for a Sunday — unfortunately, it’s Wednesday. These are the lazy days.

When people call me lazy, I like to give the good old American standard answer: “It’s not my fault!”

But I really have a reason for this one not being my fault. I truly believe that the reason I am so lazy is because of my generation.

What facts do I have to support this claim? Being a “Gen Xer,” I did no research. I do, however, have a half-witted and mindless block of so-called evidence which I can use to back up my assertion.

First of all, look around you. How many lazy people do you know? OK, now how many of those lazy people are over 35? Any of them at all?

If you do know any, I doubt it’s more than one or two (unless you happened to grow up in the trailer court). It’s quite obvious to me that our parents work harder than we do.

Maybe it’s because we’ve had everything easy — technologically speaking. Maybe it’s just because we had too much money in our formative years. All I know is that somewhere, something went wrong.

We might end up being the first generation since that last litter of dinosaurs to not live better than our parents. And we really have no one to blame but ourselves.

Faced with this reality, how can I possibly do anything but curl up in a little ball and continue on my path of laziness?

Second, our generation is lazy because we don’t have anything to be excited about and no one to excite us.

I read a Newsweek article a week ago that said that the ’90s seemed almost like a fake decade, a weak carbon copy of events that happened during other time periods.

I agree 100 percent. Whenever something of even minor importance happens these days, the parallel occurrence from a previous generation also seems to be more important.

Want specific examples, you say? They got the JFK assassination, we get the Princess Di crash. They got World War II, we get the Persian Gulf War. They got Babe Ruth, we get Mark McGwire.

They got Watergate, we get Lewinskygate. They got the Beatles, we get Nirvana. They got to see men land on the moon, we get to see a murderer drive a white Bronco 20 miles under the speed limit on a California highway for three hours.

We don’t seem to be able to come up with any new ideas. It’s like God is getting his ideas about how to play out history from Hollywood screenwriters. Just take an old idea, throw some color on it, throw in some computers and call it “Mr. Ed: The Movie.”

I’m not saying it is a bad thing that we don’t have any big wars or big historical events anymore. I’m just saying that it should be no big surprise that people in my generation don’t want to do anything.

What motivation do we have? Nothing new and exciting is happening in the world to make people want to get up and scream out.

That is excluding one big exception, though. The one area of society that our generation does have that is brand new and sparkling is computers. All things in the world right now that are really exciting and truly new have something to do with the sinister silicon smartbox.

But it only helps promote laziness and apathy that people our age who know the most about computers are usually the biggest geeks and slackers.

The geeks aren’t going to help anybody become less lazy. They’re too busy getting off on the fact that they can hack into porn sites. The slackers won’t improve the work ethic. They only have computer proficiency because they’re too lazy to do anything else.

We don’t have political leaders to inspire us through their majesty or through their devastating collapse. We have political leaders that just make us nauseous.

We don’t have ground-breaking movements and historical rallies to take part in. We have small groups of pissed off people to try ignore as we walk down the sidewalk.

So where does that leave me? I have two choices. I can either join my generation and slide down into the bottomless pit of laziness and all its wonderful attributes (video games, pizza, sleeping during the day, staying up all night, etc.) or I can at least make an attempt not to let the boredom of the times bring me down.

The choice is mine.


David Roepke is a sophomore in journalism and mass communications from Aurora.