The Christmas Tree farm, in addition to cut-your-own Christmas trees, featured a corn maze to get lost in, and a pumpkin patch.
Because the tractor had broken down just as we were placing our tree on the tractor’s trailer, we decided to wait for a replacement vehicle given the tree my wife had selected was – as it always is – at the very farthest reaches of the acres and acres of the farm.
While waiting for the rest of the extended family to select and cut their trees, I busied myself wandering through the maze of seven-foot-tall cornstalks all while carrying a smallish Christmas tree overhead.
For any of the many families like ours out there that day that’s all they would have seen: a tree, lost, wandering in the corn maze, trying to find its way out.
The way-over-ripe pre-squashed pumpkins then begged for attention and I obliged by creating my own version of Frosty the Snowman – complete with cornstalk pipe and hair – there being no snow available.
I was lost in my own make-believe world.
So are millennials. They’re lost in the world of make-believe.
Four-and-a-half years ago Bradford Richardson’s headline in The Washington Times read “Millennials seeking fulfillment in work instead of faith or family.”
My thought then was that millennials would not find what they were looking for.
They haven’t.
“Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” wrote Derek Thompson in the February 24, 2019 edition of The Atlantic.
Thompson summarizes the recent Pew Research report on the epidemic of youth anxiety: “Finding meaning at work beats family and kindness as the top ambitions of today’s young people.”
Not surprisingly Thompson’s piece is subtitled “For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity – promising transcendence and community but failing to deliver.”
They’re lost. Workism doesn’t work. Millennials will forever be meaninglessly meandering through a maze, lost, because they’ve missed what matters most.
Fulfillment is getting lost in the field where are found community, family, and faith.