“So what are you working on these days? What’s on your mind?”
This is usually my go-to question when meeting friends, acquaintances, or business partners—partly because I’m genuinely curious, and partly because everyone loves talking about themselves. I listen to an update or two, they return the question, and then we move on to whatever brought us together in the first place.
But it didn’t go quite so smoothly when I met Vladislav Radak the other day at Bonn. While waiting for him, I vaguely remembered him from RTS’s Program for Youth, where I’d first seen him back in 2008. At the time, he’d just published his first novel—or was it several? “What a pretentious guy,” I’d thought back then. (I’d thought this, mind you, while working on a similar program—just on radio.) Later, I caught him at a TEDx talk arguing that “math just has bad PR,” and his name kept popping up in other contexts I couldn’t quite place. So I did what anyone would do—I Googled him. Novelist, mathematician, classical musician… and then an agency report: “Radak wins prestigious award in New York for best young director for a film he made at 18, for which he also wrote the script and music.” Come on, you can’t just go around calling yourself a director like that! (Though I’d proudly declared myself one on day one—no, hour one—after enrolling in film school.) And just like that, Google helped me cement my impression of this “pretentious guy”—another former youth show host and self-proclaimed director—before he’d even arrived.
“So what are you working on? What’s on your mind?”
For the next few hours, we dissected career highs and lows, workplace challenges and solutions, but mostly how life is hard, unfair, and generally devoid of perspective. At some point, I had to stop and think: Vladislav now works as a consultant at one of the world’s top firms and teaches at TU Dortmund. He’s happily married. And I’m no slouch in the achievements department either. So what the hell is the problem?
What connects us isn’t just our past careers—it’s our generation. Millennials. And not just any millennials, but the kind who started serious work before adulthood, achieved results, and now live lives we’ve chosen and built ourselves. Yet none of that has stopped us from sharing the same existential dread as our peers.
Globally, 73% of millennials don’t believe political elites have any positive impact on world affairs. A third of those surveyed across 42 countries don’t trust traditional media as a source of information. And the 2019 Deloitte Millennial Survey, published this May, paints a bleak picture: young people worldwide are disillusioned with institutions, distrust companies and their motives, and are overwhelmingly pessimistic about socioeconomic progress. Only 26% believe their country’s economic situation will improve in the next year. Half have no confidence in their personal finances and would quit their current job in a heartbeat.
All of this echoes in our conversation. Suddenly, the “pretentious guy” across from me feels like someone I fundamentally understand. Maybe because we both went through struggles far beyond our years early on, and now, in our thirties, we have the time and luxury to lament fate. (Said lament, by the way, happens in a swanky 17th-floor bar overlooking the Rhine, where neither of us asks how much anything costs or who’s paying as we order drink after drink. Turns out existential dread is more of a generational quirk than an actual crisis.)
“So what are you working on? What’s on your mind?”
“On myself. Every day,” I say. On trying to see where I am and what I have as success—on not letting the creeping sense of doom that seems to curse millennials ruin my life, plans, career, relationships. With that, we toast—me and Vladislav, the wunderkind from Palilula. I don’t say a word in the Uber back to my hotel, thinking maybe we should’ve had one more drink. That would’ve been… just right.
Is this my life now? Forever feeling like success is “just a little more” out of reach? The worry cuts deep. But then again—it’s all up to me.