{"id":1,"date":"2020-02-24T19:23:14","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T17:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pubcrawlbrussels.com\/aure1\/?p=1"},"modified":"2020-12-13T12:15:22","modified_gmt":"2020-12-13T10:15:22","slug":"born-millennials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/24\/born-millennials\/","title":{"rendered":"Born Millennials Welcomes You"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It seemed like my primary school gym teacher had not been given the gift to speak, judging from her tendency to constantly scream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, bear in mind that I was born in 1994 (the frontline between millennials and gen Z) and these years were before the 2010s, so it’s been quite a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet I thoroughly remember the setting. We were sitting on the floor of the school’s gymnasium, getting yelled at for not managing to respect the guidelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And why would we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only thing we had been instructed to do since 8:30 AM was to shut up and listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just another day at school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gym teacher proceeded and told us that it was important to obey and to do as we were told as next year, “vous serez chez les grands”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This expression doesn’t directly translate to English. It means that next year, we would move onto “the next level<\/a>“, where things would get “serious”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ridiculously gullible, even by 10-year-old standards, I bought it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believed everything I was told at the time, an annoying habit I still have a hard time getting rid of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, I believed the next year would be “serious” and “difficult”. It scared me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Change scared me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thought of kissing a girl, going to university, or having a job scared me (I have since done the three of them). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything scared me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting next to someone I did not know was enough to make me cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used to think that if I could have a machine to freeze time and keep everything as it was, I would push the button without a blink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the next year was going to be serious and difficult, I would rather not go, I thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on what we were told, I imagined that growing old meant a gradual loss of quality of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time passing was a frightening thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking about these days, I’m unable to say what I feared exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it failure, effort, loss of freedom, the fear not to be able to “make it”? Maybe responsibility. I liked having nothing <\/em>to take care of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll probably never know for sure. But I did enter the following year eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approximately a year after the original gym teacher’s comments, I reflected: “it ain’t so much more serious nor difficult than last year, is it”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I concluded that if the gym teacher believed that what we were learning was “difficult” or “serious”, I was smarter than she was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was simply no way that we would have been manipulated, scared, or lied to by a professor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professors were perfect and represented the pinnacle of human achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professors were gods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as I was bracing myself for the next level each year, I eventually made it to secondary school without really understanding what was happening to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondary School<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Secondary school was different: we had a different professor for each topic on one hand, and we wouldn’t play football during break time on the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Girls started wearing make-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people that I had predicted would start smoking, smoked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As everyone seemed to grow up and start doing “adult stuff”, I was still anxiously preparing myself for that time when things were going to get serious. Each year, we were warned. “The next one” would be much harder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it did not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, without really noticing, I entered university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I entered a master’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day I woke up, and checked my mail. I had graduated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I lied in bed. I had passed my master’s thesis<\/a>, mostly written in a Medellin caf\u00e9<\/a> (called Velvet, great caf\u00e9, check it out!) between Spanish classes, gym workouts, and Tinder dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had been awarded a master’s degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had “made it”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The insurmountable challenge that education looked like when I was 7 had been completed (ok I kinda cheated, but more on that later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, something felt strange. I didn’t feel any different than I felt 18 years earlier. I was still the same 7 years old gullible kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had gained knowledge and experience. But not much else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If school’s mission was to prepare to live life, I had failed, I thought. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I felt like I knew nothing. I was still thirsty for knowledge like never before. That hadn’t changed since I was 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, my mum bought me a monthly teenage science magazine where I learned that the rhinoceros beetle was the animal that could carry the greatest weight compared to its weight and that water does not flush the other way around in Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that date, I was delighted with yet another edition of the magazine each month. I became quickly hooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought that if I could learn in magazines, I could probably learn in books as well. And so I started buying books about the topics I found interesting (mostly on how to talk to girls at the time).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then my interests diversified. As time went on, I read more and more on varied topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, the desire to share and connect through this knowledge appeared…except that around me, no one really cared about rhinoceros beetles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I joked with my brother that I should have a blog to express all of my ideas, he offered to host it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blog was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nathaniel Branden, a psychotherapist, wrote in one of his books: “in a world in which the total amount of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can only rest on our ability to learn.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He probably did not know how right he was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to Born Millennials, the raw and explorative place where we discuss uncommon topics and ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Picture credits: photo by Jukan Tateisi<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction It seemed like my primary school gym teacher had not been given the gift to speak, judging from her… Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1490,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[15,14,17,16],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-blog","tag-introduction","tag-millennial","tag-millennials"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bornmillennials.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/introduction.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bornmillennials.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}