Dave Ramsey, Peter Pan, & Movies that Quote Gandhi

“I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toy’s R Us kid” remains ingrained in the minds of an entire generation. While many in my generation have gone on to start careers, start families, and start their lives, too many in my generation are stuck in this mystical land in between the carefree memories of childhood and the actualization of what they thought life would be like when they grew up. We have been lied to. “Get a good education and you can become anything you want,” we were told. Yet today we have the most over qualified menial task workforce ever. I have friends with multiple Masters degrees, who get paid just above minimum wage, working security patrol jobs while living at home with their parents. We are called lazy and immature by our elders, the same ones who deceived us with their individualistic, materialistic, and autocratic propaganda leaving an entire generation completely and utterly nihilistic.

I just finished reading Dave Ramsey’s book Financial Peace Revisited for a class at school. In this book Dave Ramsey, I think correctly, identifies the fact that the twenty-something generation is disabled. He says we have come of age but yet many are not adults because of their lack of ability to be self-sufficient. I agree my generation is deep in debt and only a short arms length away from the financial support of our parents. But honestly, not to cast blame, what do you expect of a generation that was passed back and forth between mom’s home and dad’s house, all while they were too busy to be there so they pacified us with “things” and money. But Dave Ramsey was right in his diagnoses that my generation as a whole, from the home to the school, was never taught how to live.

I remember when I was young I loved the movie Peter Pan; I love the story of kids who refused to grow up. I cannot help but draw the parallels of comparison between my generation and Peter Pan and his Lost Boys. Growing up I, like many my age, sought escape from the harshness of life’s dark mist. All night every night my friends and I would fly off to Never Never Land, where we were, if even for a moment, away from the skull duggery of everyday life. But Never Never Land came with a sharp price. The price we paid was mediocrity. And in the midst of this mediocrity we struggle to find significance in our lives.

Today I watched the movie Remember Me. The movie starts off with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, “Whatever you do in this life will be insignificant, but it is important that you do it.” I would be lying if I told you I did not have a habit of falling in love with quotes by Gandhi, so I won’t say that, but I will say that I added this to my growing list of loved quotes. Without ruining the movie for those who have not seen it, it is in short about a young man, Tyler Hawkins, who is struggling to find the significance in his life. The movie ends with the same quote by Gandhi except this time Tyler adds his commentary to the end.

“Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it because… You can’t ever really know the meaning of your life… And you don’t need to… Just know that your life has a meaning… Every life has a meaning… whether it lasts one hundred years or one hundred seconds… Every life… And every death changes the world in its own way… Gandhi knew this. He knew his life would mean something to someone, somewhere, somehow.”

So yeah maybe Dave Ramsey is right and my generation is a bunch of Peter Pans who struggle with the actualization of childhood dreams forgotten. Maybe like Peter Pan we shun the shackles of responsibility. But maybe, just maybe, Peter Pan got it right and life is not about growing up, but rather about finding enjoyment in all that one does, about loving deeper, and about sitting down and listening to a good story. Children dream about doing the impossible and only come to believe they cannot once someone tells them to grow up and be responsible. After all I do not think that most of our parents would say that Jesus was irresponsible or immature, yet he forsook all the trappings of life to do the impossible. He spent countless hours telling stories, camping under the stars, fishing with his buddies, and still managed to live the most significant life in the entirety of history.