Where the graphic/word tee game is concerned, there has never been a generation more in tune with expressing themselves via this medium than millennials (even though the fake lore behind the “Shit Happens” t-shirt/bumper sticker in Forrest Gump is almost competition-worthy as far as baby boomer offerings go). From the famed “Anti Social Social Club” to the “Broken Dreams Club” to the “Do Nothing Club,” there is no shortage of attire designed by members of the present “youth” culture (though when you’re a millennial, all of existence signifies the benefits of youth–e.g. cereal cafes and pop-up “museums” offering ice cream and pizza) to represent just how disaffected you are by how the reality of your adulthood turned out in comparison to all the fantasy and projection put forth during childhood.
The generation told that excellence was within everyone (hence the sustainment of trophy and ribbon stores mostly defunct after the 90s) and that they could be anything they wanted (even women!) has found it still somewhat difficult to process that their parents peddled them the greatest lie ever told–that they could, at the very least, have a better life than they did (accordingly, the result of that falsity is now rubbed in millennial faces with the pitying/goading fact that they are the first generation to be less “successful” in financial terms than their parents).
Well, at least they’re not as prone to being trapped in loveless marriages (just “situationships” that are far easier to get out of when things inevitably go south) and birthing all manner of latently unwanted children for the sake of filling a void that can now just be filled and expressed with t-shirts–t-shirts galore! And one of said shirts most indicative of the go-to millennial coping mechanism is, of course, “Namaste in Bed.” A testament to the obsession most lily-livered, overly emotionally delicate millennials have with re-creating the inside of their mother’s womb as much as possible (because, as you know, the outside world never has even half as much to offer), there is no space more coveted in the twenty-first century than a hyper-decadent boudoir. Not just the mattress and bedding itself, but also the entire decor scheme–that which makes up the “ambience” and “feng shui.”
Accordingly, another study posits that millennials are the generation that sleeps more than any other (granted, it is not a “peaceful rest,” filled as it is with stress about money and overall inadequacy because if you are not rich, you are nothing in this life). And who can blame them for wanting to stay unconscious for just a spell longer before having to endure the thankless work that pays them not nearly enough to remain at pace with the rising cost of living? As Lelaina Pierce (a Gen Xer with millennial cachet) put it to her fellow college graduates, “And they wonder why those of us in our twenties refuse to work an eighty-hour week just so we can afford to buy their BMWs. Why we aren’t interested in the counterculture that they invented, as if we did not see them disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes. But the question remains… what are we going to do now? How can we repair all the damage we inherited?”
Lelaina might not have had an answer, but millennials do: namaste in bed. Though it might go against the very “hyper-sensitive” nature of the first generation to accuse just about everything and everyone of cultural appropriation, somehow “namaste in bed” has remained acceptable despite its bastardization of an Indian greeting from the Hindu tradition. Incidentally, greeting someone is the last thing any millennial wants to do whilst in bed (unless it’s a girl greeting the increasingly rare sighting of a male erection, which seems reserved only for other males nowadays), instead preferring to binge watch amid binge eating (or “snacking”) as a means to self-soothe through the pain of an existence that is completely antithetical to what they were expecting.
If this is what “the dream” is supposed to look like–a.k.a. a waking nightmare that makes Nancy Thompson’s difficulties with Freddy Krueger seem rather tolerable–then no wonder they’d prefer to do what Fiona Apple couldn’t and sleep to dream the pain away. That, and it’s just about the cheapest way to cope with the stress of a life that is constantly weighed down by the burden of financial worry without any viable or even potentially remotely enjoyable way to remedy it (unless you want to tell yourself that working at a startup–one of the last of the Mohican institutions besides a major corporation that pays “enough”–offers plenty of “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life” opportunity). So yes, feel free to roll over and play dead. Maybe that way, the baby boomers won’t find you for a moment and stop fucking judging for at least the duration of a twenty to thirty minute episode of a narrative that is a sendup of life as a millennial–which means a lot of scenes in bed watching episodes. On that note, maybe a t-shirt of Gregor Samsa in bed watching himself on the screen of a laptop with a caption underneath that reads “META-morphosis” is in order. But then, that might be too arcane for the audience with any buying power. Namaste in bed it must remain. Facing the world be damned.
