19. Pinegrove - “Size of the Moon”

I place this song within the canon of jams that perfectly describe us millennials. (I should probably make a playlist of all of them so I can play them for my future children as some sort of historical narrative to help them better understand their parents). Anyway – I place it in this canon because I feel like it captures the uncertainty many of us have known for our entire adult lives. This sort of eternal (and internal) wrestling with what it means to be self-sufficient. It’s this sense of tenuous self-confidence in our future that in turn has permeated the rest of our lives. We don’t know who we are. Everything around us moves so fast that it often seems to move without us. We’re caught within an infinite nostalgia for what was and could have been. We want the success of our parents, but such success often seems so out of reach that we instead try to create it in our own image. We’ve turned success into something subjective, but rather than being freed by such a task, we’ve become enslaved by the comparative nature of it. Ever since birth we’ve had this pressure placed upon us to be ‘happy’, but nobody is ever purely happy. We’ve been told to turn a mercurial emotion into something permanent, and therefore think we should, but it’s an impossible task and its failure is only exacerbated by the selective perfection that inundates us upon social media. As a result we find ourselves a manic mess, anxious and depressed, vacillating between the two, unsure of where were going or what we want, and uncontrollably frightened by the existence of each.