name callin'

[fyi: had this post in draft form for awhile. months to be more precise. ha. figured i should just throw it out there.]

baby boomers. x. next. y.
generations.

the world works and conspires to lump us all in one category – and so I offer up my own defining moniker:
generation url.

there are many ways to interpret this. first and foremost, the obvious- our love and hate relationship – in the end, utter dependence on the internet. we chat. we google search. we facebook. we twitter. we are people in our 20s, attached to our laptops and blackberrys, refreshing our feeds, wanting information now, wanting information without people knowing we’re looking it up. we’ve become invariably stalkers in our own right – googling potential dates, spying on public profiles, browsing through blogs, clicking through online photo albums (348 pictures and all). we work to brand our images and selves - building our linked-in profile and hiding our myspace personas through alternate emails.

but as generation url, there is a whole lot we don’t do anymore – we don’t call. we don’t write letters. we shun face to face interaction.

we are generation url. defined by posts, links, texts, and retweets.

i chose generation url because “url” can be broken apart and reinterpreted – since let’s face it, we cant be one dimensional – we need to be quirky, we need to be creative, we need acronyms.

URL – useless, restless, lost.
URL – uninspired, retched, loveless
U – ugly, underappreciated, unconscious, unusual, unhappy, unstable, unfocused, un(anything really)
R – runaway, random, raging, rigid, rotting, ruined, rancid
L – lurker, lover, lustful, lousy, listless, lacking, loner, lame
URL – U R a Loser

i’m not saying we all check off these words to describe ourselves. there are plenty of happy, content, and successful people out there, who would use words like unique, refreshing, loved. their side is obviously the one with the greener grass. but there are lots of people I know who identify with this article “welcome to your quarterlife crisis," who have hit a rough patch post-college. we are smart, talented, and confident – with nowhere to go. wanting to be everything but not sure which everything should come first. or else wanting to be something but getting nowhere close to it, since paths look a lot different out here in the real world than they did when we picked our majors and thought that jobs were easy to find.

the question is will we as generation url ever figure out how to be happy? we’re always trying to crack that code, trying to find those magic words that bring up the right results in our google search for satisfaction and contentment. when will this search end? will we be able to finally just stop clicking through life?

i hope so. but then again, generation url is quite catchy. and it definitely sounds a lot better than baby boomer.