What defines our generation?

                          At this point in my Senior year, I spend a lot of my evenings talking about college with my parents. There are too many questions beginning with "Where, why, and how", for me to ever come out of these discussions without a huge headache, or the strong urge to take a nap. I feel kind of bad for my parents, because I made it damn clear that they would convince me to go nowhere else but Manhattan. Although I'm not the teenager who thinks money is irrelevant and doesn't give a second thought about spending 200,000 on four years of schooling; trying to get all of the pieces and answers together when trying to live in this specific city, isn't an easy task.
                          My dad has asked me a lot why I want to go there. I've given him answers before that I felt good about at the time, but as time goes on, the answer has evolved. My mom loves Manhattan, but she wonders why I dislike High School so much, because she loved her High School years. She is always trying to convince me that I'm going to miss it for the rest of my life. That is such a miserable thought for me; that I could be looking back on High School 30 years from now, and feel as though that is when I peaked. In the mental state that I'm in right now, that cannot be an option.
            Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up, is because every time I talk to my parents about my future, I get a strong feeling that I'm not the only one having this same type of conversation. When the reasoning's for my answers come to my mind, and out of my mouth, I realize that I'm not the only young person who feels like this. I hear the question "What defines our generation?" being thrown around a lot, and asked by people some of us look up to, like Andrew Jenks, and The Buried Life. I try to understand the answer time and time again, but it's taken me awhile for me to even slightly understand all of the aspects of it. So to make what I feel a little clearer, I'll tell you what I told my dad(Not exact translation obviously,I wasn't writing it down as I spoke it) to the question of "Why I want to move to Manhattan?"...... "I hate High School. I hate teenagers, I hate immaturity. I'm not one of those people who can just go upstate and get drunk every weekend, and sit on my ass for four years. I need to be stimulated and working towards something at all times, or I will go crazy. I want to do something of substance, I'm tired of waking up everyday to work towards something that is meaningless to me." I understand that most of you guys don't despise High School as much as I do, or you may want to go to college to party and have a good time; and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with either of those things. I'm saying that our generation is focused on doing what we want with our lives. Right now, it is all about the individual, as opposed to the group. We are not listening to what society wants us to do, or our parents want us to do, or what is safe, or what is reliable; we are focused on doing what we need to do to fulfill ourselves-whatever that may be. No two people can do the same exact thing to be happy with themselves, and we seem to understand that. It may seem like we're selfish or irresponsible, and I'm not going to deny that some of us are(Maybe a lot...to be determined). But there are also a lot of us out there who need to do genuinely compassionate things for this planet and the people living in it, to be content with ourselves.
     We are all initially trying to make our own world better, but this focus will lead into some of us making the entire world better.