The World We Want

On Grieving the Future We Were Promised and Fighting to Want One Again

My parents told me, in my last year of high school, that if I could find a job paying $40,000 a year, I would be comfortable. That’s where the goalpost was. They said it the way people say things they believe completely— matter-of-factly, with the quiet confidence of someone who has tested the math and found it solid. Neither of them ever made $40k/year, but they had the answers and it was up to me to prove them right.

So, I shot for the stars. I did what they said. Exceeded it, actually. I went to college — something neither of them managed to achieve. I settled into a career in early education, shaping young impressionable minds for the future, wholeheartedly believing I was making a difference. I worked really hard, sometimes working 7 days a week, 10-14 hours a day. Making $70,000/year.

And I was barely getting by.

I had believed a promise made in good faith by people who had no idea the world they were describing was already disappearing beneath their feet—while they were still in the middle of drawing the map. The goalpost moved and they lost it.

I was told to find a partner. Buy a little house, nothing beyond my means. Get a camp or a lake house somewhere to retreat to on the weekends in the summer. Take at least two vacations a year—one as a couple, one as a family. Get babysitters and go on date nights. Build something small and solid and call it a good life.

I believed them. We, believed them.

We did everything right with interest.

And then we opened our inheritance and found dead 401K’s, interest rates that contributed to snowballing credit card debt and purchasing a home an unrealistic expectation just out of our reach. We were encouraged to pursue college degrees whose costs far outweighed their real return. And bosses who took your best work, put their name on it, and handed you a termination letter instead of a promotion. A for-profit health care system that will let you die slowly because there’s more money in putting band-aids on the symptoms than curing the actual disease. We’ve also watched a climate cashing in on fifty years of warnings everyone chose not to hear.

And guns.

God, the guns.

We took away the lockers and gave them bullet proof backpacks instead. We installed metal detectors. We threw their mental health into overdrive by training our children to be silent and small and pressed against walls in darkened classrooms while we argued about the Second Amendment like it was more sacred than their little nervous systems. We sent them to school every single day knowing we had not done the one thing that would have actually kept them safe. And they knew it too. They knew it at seven years old. They learned it the same week they learned to read.

Our children grew up with their hands over their heads.

And we wonder why they can’t dream—when everything they have goes towards staying alive first.

I watch my children now—grown, technically. Adults by legal definition, but underprepared for the horrors and disappointments of the current world. And I watch their dreams sitting in a chokehold. Not because they’re lazy. But, because ambition requires a belief that the future is worth building forward. And somewhere between the lockdown drills and the student loan debt and the rent that climbs every year while wages stay perfectly, almost insultingly still—that belief went out. Rightfully so.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just quietly. The way a fire goes out when there’s nothing left to feed it.

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get to be a grandmother—to hold my children’s children and pass on the kind of hard‑earned wisdom only a grandparent can give to the generations that come after. I still hold on to hope, but I can’t escape the sense of tragedy that hangs over it.

I wonder if my children will ever feel stable enough, safe enough, hopeful enough to bring someone new into this world. I don’t blame them for the wondering. I blame a world that made it necessary. That took the most basic human continuity and turned it into a luxury item.

You can’t afford a baby. You can barely afford Starbucks, let alone a baby.

I watched a local news reporter tell struggling people—actual people, visibly struggling—to just buy one less Starbucks coffee and they’ll be fine.

One less Starbucks.

How insulting. As though the distance between where we are and where we were promised we’d be is $4.50. As though the thing standing between this generation and stability is a single small indulgence they should be ashamed of wanting.

That’s not advice.

That a theology. The theology of bootstrap and discipline and personal responsibility, wielded like a club against every generation that inherited a worse world than the one before it and had the audacity to say so out loud.

You’re not working hard enough. You’re not sacrificing enough. You’re too soft. Too sensitive. To entitled.

We are not entitled. We are exhausted.

There is a difference. And the people who confuse the two have never had to explain to their children why the pathway their grandparents walked—work hard, stay faithful, build slow—had been paved over and forgotten. Turned into something that only works if you started with something. If someone left you something. If the zip code you were born in had the right numbers.

We were promised a world.

We got the bill for a different one.

We got a war we were told was over, came back. We withdrew. We exhaled. We believed for one fragile moment, that our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers were coming home for good. And then two years later, the uniforms came back out of the closet, and we stood in airports and parking lots and driveways and said goodbye again to people we had just learned to stop worrying about.

Because old men who will never face the consequences decided the world needed another war.

Old money. Old grudges. Old ideologies dressed up in new language. The same extraction, the same greed and machinery that has always needed bodies feel like volunteering.

We are not volunteering. We are tired. We are dying—not always in the dramatic, visible ways that make the front page of the paper or evening news channel, but spiritually. Emotionally. In that subtle, hollow way, that happens when a person realizes the contract they signed with the world was never honored, and nobody who was supposed to care about that seems to notice. Or mind.

And still we are told to pull up our bootstraps, while still trying to find the lost goalpost. Still, we are told to buy one less Starbucks coffee. Still we are told the problem is us—our attitude, our expectations, our failure to simply work harder inside a system designed to ensure the working never ends and the arrival never comes.

This is not the world we want. This is not the old age we dreamed of when we were young enough to dream. This is not what we were promised, and are done pretending it is. We are not asking for everything. We are asking for what was already ours.

The small, solid, good life. The little house. The camp on the lake. The two vacations. The date nights. The future that feels worth building toward.

We are asking to want things again. We are asking our children to want things again. We are asking for a world where a woman doesn’t have to wonder if she’ll ever be a grandmother. This current world made motherhood too expensive, too frightening and too uncertain to risk.

That’s not radical. It’s human.

What is happening right now will not continue. It can’t. Especially when the old men are gone and we are the ones left holding the rubble.

The future is in our hands and it’s time to take it back.