fresh hell

Matthew Hennessey:

Given the eager acquiescence of millennials to the all-online world, Generation X has a formidable responsibility to keep faith with reality. They are the last analog generation. Raised in a prerevolutionary moment technologically, they are children of paper, books, handshakes, body language, and eye contact. They learned—even if they didn’t always practice or appreciate them—the virtues of patience, self-control, and delayed gratification. They knew what it meant to be out of contact with someone they loved. Some of them—too few—learned how to fix an engine or wire a light fixture. Most remember how quiet things used to be; how easy it was to be alone.

…So what can Generation X do to help save America? It can begin by reasserting the relevance of the flesh-and-blood world that formed it. On an individual level, this means putting the iPhone down, turning off the computer, and taking a book out of the library or visiting a museum. It means going to a movie theater instead of binge-watching a Netflix series. It means talking to your friends face-to-face more instead of mostly texting or e-mailing them. On a societal level, it means pushing back against those who blithely accept that technology can be the solution to all our social and political problems. It means adopting a healthy skepticism of millennials’ efforts to disrupt every industry, every institution, and every economy with technology and an ethos of “sharing.” It means fighting for your privacy.

Rich Cohen:

Demographics are destiny. We grew up in the world and mind of the baby-boomers simply because there were so many of them. They were the biggest, easiest, most free-spending market the planet had ever known. What they wanted filled the shelves and what fills the shelves is our history. They wanted to dance so we had rock ’n’ roll. They wanted to open their minds so we had LSD. They did not want to go to war so that was it for the draft. We will grow old in the world and mind of the millennials because there are even more of them. Because they don’t know what they want, the culture will be scrambled and the screens a neverending scroll. They are not literally the children of the baby-boomers but might as well be— because here you have two vast generations, linking arms over our heads, akin in the certainty that what they want they will have, and that what they have is right and good.

The members of the in-between generation have moved through life squeezed fore and aft, with these tremendous populations pressing on either side, demanding we grow up and move away, or grow old and die—get out, delete your account, kill yourself. But it’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.

…Irony and a keen sense of dread are what make Generation X the last great hope, with its belief that, even if you could tell other people what to say and what not to say, even if you could tell them how to live, even if you could enforce those rules through social pressure and public shaming, why would you want to? I mean, it’s just so uncool.

In a suspicious coincidence, these two pieces appeared nearly simultaneously to argue that my generation’s sense of jaded irony is apparently the only thing that can save us from true believers who take politics and technology too seriously. Allow me to raise a skeptical eyebrow in response. But then, I would do that, wouldn’t I? Look, I’m saving the world by continuing to do what I was already doing anyway! ♫ Hey, Dad, what do you think about your son now… ♫

It is a piquant irony that I, of all people, should be forced to defend small talk, a practice in which I am neither a skilled nor enthusiastic participant, but thus have the fates decreed it. I must say, my esteem for Dan Ariely has taken a plunge after reading this article, which reads as if a social engineer with severe autism has legislated that conversations become key parties.

Now, as many supercilious, antisocial adolescents have long observed, small talk is often frivolous and tedious. But like many sub-optimal practices, it has evolved that way for a reason, given the inherent difficulties of easing tensions and forging bonds with complete strangers. Ariely and Berman note that their experiment works precisely because it is structured, or “socially coordinated” — being informed in advance of the new rules governing this particular social interaction obviates the need for individuals to tentatively feel their way through it by means of light conversation. Festivals like Halloween, which temporarily subvert the normal order and expectations of social life, are also powerful and exciting for that reason, but only a freak raised in a Skinner box would conclude that we could and should routinely go around wearing masks and costumes because it makes us feel creative and liberated. Likewise, heady talk about “creating new social norms” which make all the participants “happier” based on superficial metrics is the kind of hyper-rationalist delusion one might expect to read about in a history of utopian intentional communities. A practice like this could only function in very specific situations with clearly-understood rules; blurring the boundaries between random strangers in public and PostSecret is not likely to end well.

The unexamined axiom here is that deep, profound conversation is what we all truly desire on a ritual basis, and if only the inefficiencies of the oppressive system were removed, we would blossom in our natural, uninhibited state. But perhaps bad faith is our natural state. Perhaps we secretly appreciate shallow living while making occasional aspirational gestures toward deeper meaning and significance. Perhaps the forced intimacy of Ariely’s dinner party would be an unwelcome mirror and harsh light to our self-image. Only the most naïve idealists go around overturning rocks that have been secured in place for ages and expect sunshine and charming melodies to come forth.

I mean, I get it. Really, I do. It’s tough to be a progressive. Always trying to find some new angle, some novel way to put yourself in the moral vanguard. It has to be exhausting, running around like Mencken’s definition of a Puritan, telling everybody that they’re doing everything wrong (and for shameful reasons to boot). And as fewer and fewer people bother to take you seriously, you start becoming desperate, trying to find a previously-overlooked source of sinfulness that will make them pay attention again.

And so here we are. While I’m sure that, like most of their pathetic outbursts, it’s best to just ignore this, I have to admit that I don’t consider this sort of outright blasphemy against my lord and savior to be amusing. I suddenly have a strong urge to join the NRA, buy an AR-15, and take a selfie in front of my AC unit, daring them to come and take both. Some arguments just deserve nothing but trolling in response.

Laurie Penny:

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are. Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice.

Well, that’s certainly one possibility, that there’s an ancient neoliberal conspiracy, stretching all the way back to the Stoics, to keep us from rising up collectively and smashing the ruling class by deflecting our attention toward small, personal efforts at self-improvement which pose no threat to the system. But if the amount of liquid oppression in the glass of society is equal to half its volume, then it depends which part you choose to emphasize. Alternatively, it could be that you’re just a congenitally miserable crank whose entire laughable, clichéd ideology is merely an attempt to transfer responsibility for your contentment to the rest of society. It might even be that your pose as the world’s whiniest bodhisattva is less genuine concern for all the suffering beings in the world and more a means of making millenarian fantasies such as, uh, “the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system” the necessary conditions for your happiness, thus conveniently guaranteeing that you’ll never have to stop complaining, and never have to risk being crestfallen should it turn out that all your revolutionary reveries came true and you were still unhappy, leaving you with no more excuses. Finally, there’s the troubling likelihood that most people have considered, yet still reject, your false dichotomy of individual vs. collective well-being in favor of trying to strike some sort of imperfect balance between the two. Everything in moderation, as some damned neoliberal Greek once said.