Hope They Get a MatheMagician

I've been wanting to do a post on the "Millennial burnout" that had been making the rounds a couple weeks ago but I just never sat down and got it written because while I feel a lot of it is just laziness (really? you can't mail a letter?) I do get where fellow Millennials like myself are coming from. I think I have this "adulting" thing down because I can work a steady job, pay bills, get groceries and feed myself, not to mention take care of a family, kid, and four animals. But when the author began mentioning other things that she was putting off (email, signing/mailing a book, library donations) I realized that I do that too. For me, it's the non-rewarding stuff. The cat box, dishes, taking the bag of plastic bags back to the grocery store to be recycled. Those little insignificant things then pile up. Instead of just scooping the litter, I now have to replace the whole box; we have no dishes and nothing to eat with; it's now three bags of plastic bags. And it's here where my burnout begins.

Millennials were taught, just like the three generations before us, that if you work hard then good things will come to you. But we're the first generation that is realizing that isn't true. And it's not true either because the system is rigged and so stacked against us now or it was never true to begin with. We can work eight hours and still barely pay our bills and get groceries. We can work twelve hours and still not get by. We can work 16 hours, live as frugally as possible yet still barely break even. What's the point? And just like that cat box, what's the point of scooping it clean when your cat is just going to take another dump in it? We have to keep working, in some form, if we want to survive, but washing dishes, taking out the trash, cooking dinner, are all chores that get placed on the back burner because we are tired.

That's part of the reason I have cut back on my writing. Part of it is to focus on my books and getting things published but the other part is burnout. And the next generation--my son's and everyone younger than him--will have to work even harder unless things get fixed. How do they get fixed? I don't know, I don't have a degree in that and I'm too tired.

So what am I doing? I finished chapter eight of one of my novels and am outlining the next few chapters. I finished two short stories that I'm going to edit and submit to places and am doing some research on a couple of local history items I find interesting. Not to mention my daily updates on my social media. If you would like to support my writing or research, you can buy me a cup of coffee over on Ko-Fi. There's no commitment or subscription involved.

I love cursive but I don't write in it. A lot of my students think I do because my letters are close together and several are connected but that's just the way I write. Recently, there has been an ever so small push to start teaching cursive in schools again. While I think that'd be great, I think just going in-depth on teaching handwriting would be just as effective.

As for writing everything down, they could just hide the paper or tear it up. Also, I love Gladys calling her nine-year-old son a "big boy" that can read.

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I'm off for the next week so until next Sunday, I remain...
~Brian