This article by Daniel Gilbert in the New York Times attempts to explain why everyone our age hates their lives. (Lately you've heard the term "quarter-life crisis" being thrown around like frisbee at a Memorial Day bbq, right?)
It's not the fact that we're coming of age in the shittiest economy since 1929 or that we watched the Twin Towers fall during our formative years or, even, that our TV dosages are steadily subsidized with bad "reality" programs that make you wonder if people really are that stupid/vapid/obscene/annoying (and if you are really that pretentious/righteous/self-actualized, etc.)
Apparently shock volunteers in an experiment at Maastricht University felt less nervous when they knew they would be zapped with high voltage everytime than when they didn't know if their shocks would be tiny or earth-shattering.
So we are miserable because there is no certainty, and we don't know how big the electric shocks will be. We have no idea what will happen next. We're all running around cracked-out on coffee in the mornings, stomachs nervous about absolutely nothing and everything, and then we go to the bars and drown our consciousness with gallons of beer: the vicious cycle of our generation.
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