#fourthgenerationproblems

On Thanksgiving evening, after the last slices of pumpkin pie were put aside for breakfast and the uncles washed the dishes and the cousins settled down to watch the Ravens game, my father’s mother told me about her mother. It was a long story and one that I’d heard before, but parts of it would ring true in many American households.

The immigrant generation was my great-great-grandfather, the baker. The first generation born in America, my great-grandmother’s generation, had a bakery. In the second generation, my grandmother went to college, became a teacher, married a lawyer. For the third generation, the professional class gave way to the creative class and their children became an actor and an author and a producer and a food stylist. After that, you stop counting. Ask this fourth generation American where her family is from and she will say Baltimore, not Poland.

As a student of American history, I recognized the story as a typical immigrant narrative. It’s a story of assimilation and moving forward and every generation sticking pretty close to what it was supposed to do—until now. There is no typically fourth-generation life.

My generation, the millennials, is famous for its aimlessness. I can’t get behind accusations of laziness or slackerdom, but the general sense of not knowing what to do with one’s life—especially considering the recession and trends in emerging adulthood—is all around.

Sure, plenty of families have been in the U.S. for more than five generations and they’ve managed to survive, and plenty of families came more recently and also suffer from millennial malaise, but the late 1800s saw a major wave of immigration and there are a good chunk of young Americans in the same boat as I am. So maybe our generational problems have to do less with the turn of this most recent century than the turn of the last. History cannot tell us what to do. We are searching in the dark for a narrative thread that doesn’t exist.

But it’s also its own reason to give thanks, isn’t it? We can do anything we want—just as soon as we figure out what that is.