Three very valid questions and, to be honest, we’re not sure of the answers. Yet, at the same time, not knowing the answer is itself the point of this site.
General Overflow started as a place for a single writer to document his thoughts as he progressed through life. He was, and is, a Millennial: someone born sometime between the 1970s and early 1990s who found himself facing questions that his usual reference points couldn’t quench. His parents, bosses, favourite authors, church leadership and others all had traditional responses to the predictable questions of life, careers, sex, politics, family, religion and more, but they didn’t seem to fit his developing philosophy.
But the more that time passed he came to realise that this uneasiness, this dis-satisfaction, this rejection against the ways of his forefathers was one of the defining features of his Millennial generation. He, like his peers, were rebelling against the very models set around them. And the more he asked around the more he realised they too were asking questions, and remained in search of fulfilling answers. And so this site was formed to give them a place to muse and together, hopefully, find an answer.
So what will you find here? A host of New Victorians – which is maybe a better descriptor for the pioneering of this generation – writing, asking, and declaring their thoughts on all aspects of life as they forge through it, united by a common decision not be held back by traditional ways of doing things just for tradition’s sake.
And that’s what gives it its value: the fact it’s the generation who’ll one day be Prime Ministers, CEOs, parents and school governors expressing their unfinished thoughts; and maybe asking questions which will define what the rest of us are all about until others are old enough to take over.
So this place isn’t really a blog, nor a magazine, nor a lifestyle section of the paper, but just a humble overflow of unfinished (and unanswered) thoughts. The writers themselves are not tasked with articles, just encouraged to write what’s on their mind whilst the thoughts remain unfinished.
Maybe we’ll get nowhere? Maybe what will define us will be procrastination and an inability to finish anything at all? Or maybe we’ll live up to our Victorian inheritance of creating charities, political parties, companies and philosophies that will last another hundred years? We shall see…
