I’m from Generation Y. Apparently I’ve learnt from the generation that precedes me – the greedy, career obsessed thirty somethings that gave up relationships, babies and their soul for money and an office job – but am much less tech savvy than the generation quietly catching up on me. Unlike the Gen X’s, I actually admire the generation following me – I think they will do wondrous things for the world. But that’s not my point. My point is that I’m sick of the Gen Y bashing. The shellacking we’re constantly receiving in the newspapers regarding our work ethic, responsibilities, spending habits and every other single thing that seems to be oh-so-wrong with us. ‘We’re not interested in looking to the future, but rather living for the now.’ ‘We don’t know how to save.’ ‘We’re not planners, but drifters.’

I wish I were a drifter. I wish I were a flaneur. Or a beatnik. Jack Kerouac, my favourite beat poet, once said, “standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.” I wish I were that powerful. I wish I spent my nights in speakeasies, listening to improvised jazz and breathing in cigar smoke…but I wasn’t born in that era or that generation. I was born in 1984. Generation Y. And I’m damn proud of it.

I grew up (and I don’t mean my early formative years, the years filled with endless summer nights and toys and a safe home where you watched The Wizard of Oz rather than National Nine News, but rather my teen years, the years that test and explode and create and push boundaries) in a world where you woke up at 3am because you heard the television roaring and saw its glow sneaking in through the gap under your bedroom door. In a world where the reason the television was on at 3am was because The Twin Towers in New York had been crashed into with aeroplanes and were blazing with flames. On purpose.

I grew up in a world where people went on a holiday to Bali and got blown up. On purpose. And in a world where people went on holiday to Thailand, or Sri Lanka, or India, and got washed away in a tsunami of horrific proportions. I grew up in a world where, despite all the promises from previous generations, third world countries were still exactly that; third world. Where basic diseases still killed people, and complex diseases only grew even more so.

I grew up in a world where a President, who had absolutely no idea how to spell let alone think or feel human emotion, was able to govern the most powerful country within it. I grew up in a country that had a stuffy, stubborn man at the helm; a man that could not even muster the courage to say sorry to an entirely different generation of people. I grew up in a world that had countries filled with men who did horrible things to women and got away with it. I grew up in a time when everything suddenly went in a direction it’d never been; when technology exploded and privacy ceased to exist and economies became incredibly unstable.

That is the world I grew up in.

So when people want to question why Generation Y isn’t concerned with long term goals, or financial security, then maybe they should have a peek at our world. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because we see very little point in planning and much more sense in living.

Maybe we live in the moment because history has proved that moments are all we have.