The 9/11 generation turns 40

September 2001, I and my fellow 1984-born classmates were a week and a half into our senior year of high school.

I was newly licensed and driving a maroon 1989 Mustang passed down to me by my uncle. You could hear the muffler coming from a mile away, but I distinctly remember the start of the school year as a time when we felt like everything was ahead of us.

Aside from perennial bullying, being in school still felt generally safe. As a teen in 1999, what happened in Columbine, Col., felt like an aberration, not the beginning of a trend. It was a one-off massacre in a high school orchestrated by a couple of psychos with guns who listened to too much Marilyn Manson and played too many disturbing video games. Something as vile as Columbine couldn’t possibly happen again — or so we thought — and while the school shooting was a monumental event, and maybe we did flinch a little more easily afterward, the term “active shooter drill” was not in our lexicon.

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Even Y2K (zoomers, ask your parents) had come and gone just fine, as well, and so the new millennium we were in seemed promising.

That Tuesday of Sept. 11, 2001, was, famously, a perfect September day. Suddenly that morning, while in American history at Paulsboro High School in Paulsboro, the teacher turned on the TV to the news where we saw the Twin Towers smoking, and instructed us, gravely, to note that we were living through American history: “You’ll tell your children about this,” the teacher said.

Two more planes went down outside Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania, and before long an announcement was made on the intercom that they were sending us home because someone might try to bomb the Exxon Mobil refinery across from the football field (our high school mascot was the Pegasus). Like rapid fire, every corner of the country was worried they were going to be al-Qaida’s next target. Not even the Dairy Queens were safe.

Each generation has within it a few peak years that define the times.

It didn’t take long for us high school seniors, about to turn 18, to wonder if this meant there would be another draft. Some of our parents had fought in Vietnam, or avoided fighting in Vietnam, and the idea it might now happen to us didn’t seem so far-fetched.

America was attacked, and we were all in this together — as long as you didn’t question why our government was salivating over the opportunity to launch a massive, endless war straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 (and that this was our birth year was not lost on us, either).

But, of course, the disastrous war we dreaded did come to pass and did drag on for nearly 20 years, and nobody won in the end except the arms dealers.

Many of my classmates enlisted in the military. I moved to New York City in the fall of 2002 and spent my first college semesters living through the days of yellow, orange, and red terror alerts. That we all didn’t develop ulcers is a miracle, considering how much drinking we had to do to cope with the stress of being told that any moment might be when you were maimed or killed in a terrorist attack.

Facebook didn’t pop up until 2004, so there was no way then to “mark yourself safe,” and the most debauched years of our lives remain mercifully digitally undocumented (unless you still haven’t scrubbed your LiveJournal).

Just when millennials started to catch their breath again, the Great Recession of 2008 funneled many of us into terrible part-time jobs, creating what is now widely referred to as the gig economy. But then Barack Obama got elected president, and hope was on the way! Occupy Wall Street emerged and the Affordable Care Act passed, as did marriage equality.

Obama was elected again, and we thought we’d have our first female president in 2016 and maybe progress was linear, but then … record scratch. Suddenly it did not feel like the American Dream/life/potential was all ahead of us.

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And so, like every generation, we aged, except at an accelerated rate. Between Donald Trump’s presidency, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court whittling away our rights, the ongoing pandemic disaster, a variety of heinous foreign wars, global inflation, and a brewing white-collar recession, many millennials have been left worse for wear.

And all the while, there is social media where we can watch the highly curated lives of our peers play out from the sleek screens of our ubiquitous iPhones. They might even sell us something while they’re at it.

Millennial teenagers once had to whisper into a corded phone line pulled around the kitchen wall. Today, we get heart palpitations at the idea of having to conduct a formal phone call. We ate every kind of cafeteria mystery lunch meat, but now recoil at the thought of consuming a nonorganic strawberry.

And here we are, turning 40, entering middle age, many of us still renting our homes and drowning in student loan debt, having to listen to boomer professionals who charge $600 an hour groaning about how three rounds of stimulus checks made everyone under the age of 45 lose the will to work.

And apologies to Gen Z if lumping them into our elder millennial plight is cringe.

I will admit that many things have not gotten better for those behind us, but want to point out that we did manage to make a few things better: not getting kicked off your parent’s health insurance until 26, marrying who you want to marry, and it not being OK for your boss to sexually harass you repeatedly at work.

Go ahead and make fun of our ankle socks and emotional support iced coffees, but please remember that millennials were the first modern American generation to have the dream of a better life than our parents crumble in front of our SPF 30’d faces. If Gen Z is the cynical generation, millennials are the earnest, hustle-harder generation. You can only be cynical when you can see what’s coming, and we definitely did not imagine this future when we were seniors in high school in September 2001.

Each generation has within it a few peak years that define the times. For baby boomers, it was those affected by the Vietnam draft. For Gen X, it was those who came of age during the invention of the World Wide Web. And for Gen Z, it was the COVID-19 pandemic.

But for millennials, it was 9/11, a cataclysmic event with ripples still disrupting global relations today.

Perhaps the mark of a truly great generation is leaving things better off for the people who come after, but who after the Greatest Generation can lay such a claim? Boomers told Gen X the answer was “Blowing in the Wind,” and Gen X answered, “Oh well, whatever, never mind.”

And what will be the millennial epitaph? “Shake It Off”? Maybe we should have tried to “shake it up” instead.

As we prepare to vote in our sixth presidential election, proving to be one of the most chaotic yet, maybe, just maybe, we finally will make the future better.

Nicole Pandolfo is a writer who grew up in South Jersey, just outside Philadelphia.