They call us the last generation, those born once all hope was lost, those that would never live to adulthood. It’s a strange thing looking into the eyes of people who have lived to see past their 21st birthday. The pity that oozes out of them at knowing I will never understand what it is like to live with hope for an uncertain future. Some even have the gall to feel guilty at being born before I was. Like they had a say in when I would be born.

In my 19 years of life I have watched as those who know better than I buckle under an unseen pressure of fulfilment. I am told that life before was a prosperous time with new inventions being made daily. The sentence I would hear regularly: ‘We were in pursuit of a better future, not worse.’ This always set off my imagination, I’d daydream of a future with comfy beds made of impossible soft material, like the one I slept on when I was a toddler, before we moved to a “safer” place with like-minded people.

Depressed, defeated people, who clung onto the past as strongly as the talked about a future that would never come. This is how I grew up. And people chose to feel sorry for me and my generation! I could never understand that. We knew no different, we had no sorrow for a lost past or hope for a future of false opportunities. No, we are a generation brought up on truths and certainties. We are taught from a young age to accept our fate and move on. Hope is a misconception that the old must live with.

It is not the old that should pity me, but I that pity them. You see, for my whole life I have lived, I have lived. While the old, they have been living death, restrained by their conceptions of what life should be, rather than living in the moments they have left.

I may not live as long as they have, but I never wished to, 19 years is long enough for me, and the certainty that I have enjoyed those years. Now with 3 days left, I can say with certainty that I have enjoyed every second of my worry free life.