The Second Lost Generation

When it comes to comprehending the emotional obstacles of an incoming generation to academia, I think creative writing professors like myself have an advantage. Our assignments pull from that same preternatural place of creativity that also houses all their joy, trauma, and anger. There is so much more happening to them than most teachers, the media, and even their parents realize.

Even though I warn my creative writing students against clichés, this is the only way to describe them. They are walking, talking open books. But lately, I have noticed many of them are ending up on shelves marked for tragedy, horror, and sad memoirs. Oh, and let’s not forget the very symbolic dystopian future, which many of them are convinced is just getting started. Last year, when 2020 started to ramp up into a category five shit storm, I began to receive poetry and fiction from my creative writing classes that made me question when people would realize this was becoming a problem. And, if we all don’t cut out all of our collective crap, these young people are going to have a mental breakdown of Hemmingway-esque proportions. In fact, in my mind, I don’t refer to them as “Gen Z”; I often refer to them as the second lost generation. And their writing has the same sad echoes of the one that proceeded them in the 1920s, ironically not long after a global bird flu pandemic and WWI ended.

I got odes to their dead family members that died alone on ventilators. When it was time for creative nonfiction, many of them were pumping out essays on how they had lost hope that anything would ever be normal again. I also got pieces primed with anger towards the authorities, the government, and anyone that they had every right to blame for not taking the threat as seriously as they should have. Then, I got work that was nothing but them just experiencing the terrifying void of isolation. Some were poetically crying for their mothers, like preschoolers starting their first day. The ones that gave me a chill were the pieces prepping for the possibility that they were about to die before legally being able to quite this fear a little through alcoholic means.  In 2021, I have noticed they have slipped into a state of sad acceptance that their lives will never be the same. Recently, I had them read Gail White’s “My Personal Recollections on Not Being Asked to Prom.” It’s a rather humorous poem. I’ll provide a link to it at the bottom. To sum it up, it is an English sonnet on how she didn’t find prom to be that big of a deal. Also, she would make jokes about how boys weren’t looking at her “that way” and, at the time, preferred “big boobs over brains.” I got responses from a few of my students that made me curl up in bed and cry for them.

In short, a lot of them could not relate to the overall theme of the poem. A lot of them did not have a prom before entering college because of COVID. One girl said it would have been nice to have the option to go or not to go. Another student said they would have preferred if they could have gone to their graduation instead. One said they would have been the first one to walk across that graduation stage in two generations. And the ones that stuck with me the most were them joking that they probably won’t have a semi-normal graduation experience at the end of their college senior year as well.

The first lost generation (a term coined by one of its talented writers Gertrude Stein) constantly created poetry and prose that reflected their tempestuous mental states. Their themes were often a turbulent mixture of loss, hopelessness, and disillusionment. Writers like Ernest Hemmingway, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were all suspected of suffering from crippling depression, war-related PTSD, Bipolar I and II, schizophrenia, narcissism, and borderline personality disorders. Many of them developed drug addictions to self-medicate. The most common one was alcohol.

Granted, these people were not saints. Hemmingway had an infamously lousy temper and was not above inflicting violence on someone who irked him. Fitzgerald was in a codependent marriage with the famous and equally talented Zelda Fitzgerald. They both had affairs on multiple occasions and suffered from depression and alcoholism. Pound was a well-known anti-Semite, charged with treason, and spent a large portion of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. He was diagnosed with a toxic mix of narcissistic personality disorder and schizophrenia. However, this current generation is not brimming with saints as well. They are ripping apart bathrooms and hitting teachers for likes on Tik-Tok. The problem is they have access to more technology, meaning they can do more irreversible damage to their reputations and futures.   

My students may be traumatized, but they are not stupid. They realize we live in Florida, where the COVID rates shot up because school mask mandates started to vary from county to county due to Governor DeSantis trying to appeal to Trump supporters by getting them banned from all schools. How about we stop quarreling over masks and vaccines and take a good hard look at how it affects young people and what they are missing out on and sack up and do the right thing. This generation has already seen a significant spike in many mental health/behavioral problems due to the pandemic.  Get the vaccine. Where a mask. Or I’m afraid they are just going to get lost on the shelves between young adult dystopian despair and the existential zombie novellas while being neighbors to the first lost, but not the last “lost” generation.

https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/303_download/texts/need_permission_1st/white/white_poems.html