Saturday, October 28, 2006
Our peers, riding that express elevator to osolesence
Last, but certainly not least, my peers: The late-20-early-30-something, Gen-X, slacker generation. Admittedly, I’m on the tail end of the generation X thing, so I can’t claim to have a direct connection to that particular demographic. For the sake of this rant, I’ll stick with what I have seen going through my 20s, living and interacting with my fellow 20-somethings.
What a mess. People my age have taken their parents’ willful abandonment of values and made it a form of faith. Materialism is God, TV shows and the web are the primary sources for nearly all cultural awareness, and intelligence is marketed as being a flaw, unless you are using it to belittle or berate another human being. Love is a joke at best, an outright lie at worst. Relationships are exercises in drama, deceit, and mutual selfishness.
Apathy is a plague. With good reason, we have lost faith in our institutions, but we have also lost faith in ourselves. Instead of embracing the failures of previous generations as a call to bring about real change in this lifetime, my generation(I can hear The Who) see these ancestral failings as a precedent permitting them to dig a deeper hole. Drug use is more common than ever. Promiscuity is mainstream, STD infections are at all time highs, abortion has become a form of birth control, and divorce has become the new American pastime. No wonder baseball's popularity has dwindled. On top of all that, our generation is the first in US history that will very likely end up in a worse financial position than our parents, as we grow older.
The system is failing, and this country’s 20-somethings are doing nothing substantive to change that. In a society that sees record bankruptcies, a divorce rate approaching 65%, and an ever widening gap between rich and poor, most people in their 20s keep themselves busy with distractions, rather than digging into something of worth. Think of how many people in the 20-29 demographic, that you know personally, who have their proverbial shit together. Somehow, we have bought into this bullshit notion that adulthood really starts at 30, when in reality, the most important years of one’s life are those between 18 and 30. This is the part of our lives when we set priorities, determine values, and decide what we stand for...at least, it used to be.
Many people have children in their 20s, without having first determined what their life is going to stand for. And yes, every life SHOULD stand for something. What does a person with no sense of purpose have to pass on to their child/children? What do they have to offer the larger world around them? Not much, honestly. Being average is not, and should not, be good enough. When I say average, I am not talking about monetarily, I am talking about mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. So much of the materialistic bullshit we’re fed contributes to our species’ perpetual failures, that the answer is obviously not in things. So long as a person’s basic needs are being met, they have an opportunity to become something much more, where intelligence, morality, and happiness are concerned.
The foolish and the weak will continue to buy into the same old lies, live the same old lives, and bring about the same old results. The intelligent minority will see the inevitable failures of such actions and make more reasoned, proactive decisions. In this way, my generation will be no different than those that have come before it, as motivated intelligence is always in short supply in all societies. The question is, how long can this particular society keep this up?
Each day we have more poor than the day before, our government becomes more corrupt, our families become more fragmented, our values become more diluted, and our spirits become less a part of our lives. We are a generation living for the moment, looking for immediate gratification, and starved for vision. I’ve always liked Tyler Durden’s monologues from Fight Club, because they all recognize the vacuous nature of modern existence in one context or another. This is one of my favorites:
Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs they hate so they can buy shit they don't need. We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars -- but we won't. And we're learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed-off.
We are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide.
What do we do about it? Most of us will do nothing, but there are options for the rest. This is long enough, so I’ll get to that some other time.
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