It sometimes feels like I was of the last generation: the last to grow up in a world with a familiar texture, a texture future generations will never know.
I was born in 1996, according to society’s conflation of individuals into generations based on their order of arrival, I am the youngest of the millennials.
My childhood played out on the tempo of adventures outside the limits of the family yard, floors covered in dolls and legos, and birthdays playing hide and seek.
When I started reaching the boundary of adolescence, facebook had not yet taken root, and msn was but an irregular curiosity. Although I grew alongside the popularity of social media, we walked parallel paths, rarely encountering one another. Our way of building friendships had already reached escape velocity, and were able to persist in their older ways despite its pull.
I met the love of my life under the shadow of a bicycle shed.
Time marched on, but taking notes on paper was still a thing. As I moved towards higher education personal computers started blooming around me, officially for note taking, confidentially for anything but. We had coding assignments crowned by frantic all night crunches, partially unsolved math homework, and rookie broken linux builds. What we could not do we slowly learned.
We graduated into adulthood, grasping at our cultivated learning ability, fighting to stay afloat in the sea of complexity. With a slow imperceptible movement the tide receded, leaving us standing firmly on the sand as our legs were caressed by the waves, admiring the wide endless sea extending before us.
Some choose to stop and admire the sea disappear over the horizon, others frenetically chase it despite the incessant fear of drowning, committed to growing with each step.
Today I wish to chase the sea.