While the
Eye Weekly article on "quarterlife crises" people are forwarding around
is, for the most part, a Dumb Trend Piece, it does hit nearly bang-on
that special brand of mid-to-late-twenties dissatisfaction so in vogue
today:
He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends
several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers,
periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers.
He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling
with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move
to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.
At
her government job, she instant messages her friends and mostly ignores
the report she’s drafting because she’s planning on quitting anyway —
and has been planning to quit for about a year now. She spends her
lunch hour buying boots that cost slightly more than her rent, then
immediately regrets it.
He listlessly works through lunch, then
goes to the bar after work to meet up with some university friends,
where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes about other
people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after
spending time with them, but it’s mostly better than being alone.
She
walks to the house that she shares with three friends and spends a few
more hours on celebrity gossip websites, then clicking through the
Facebook photos of girls she knew in high school posing with their
husbands and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit
of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss. “When did this happen for
them?” she wonders.
They both eventually fall asleep, late and
alone, each of them wondering what it is that’s wrong with them that
they can’t quite seem to understand.
I used to think a lot
about what it would take to become The Voice of Gen Y. I have no
particular aspirations for the title, though I would by no means refuse
a platform of that height. I just wondered what such a voice would
possibly
say. I'm of the mind that the most effective writerly
voices sound as if they're speaking directly, and intimately, to the
reader. The Voice of Gen Y is, with what directness and intimacy it can
muster, saying something like, "
Shit, did we mess up?"
Though I wouldn't exactly call his prose intimate, perhaps
Tao Lin performs this function:
“Luis. What are we.”
“Fucked,”
said Luis. “Was that like a cheer. What are we! Fucked. Our shit can be
studied by an anthropologist 1,000 years from now to know what we ate.”
“Indian food,” said Sam.
“They will say 'Sam had a vegan diet of good food and wine and Indian food. Luis ingested Waffle House.'”
“I want to change my novel to present tense,” said Sam. “Is there some Microsoft Word thing to do that.”
“I don’t think so. I think you have to do it manually.”
“Manually,” said Sam.
“By
hand,” said Luis. “Get an interview on Suicide Girls, that should be
your next step. Do you think in five years the national media will
create a stupid term like ‘blogniks’ to describe us.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “Remember we had hope like 4 months ago.”
“Can you cite that day,” said Luis. “The day of hope.”
We
are the generation spending our days writing blog posts — or tweets —
about how we are, in Sam and Luis' parlance, fucked. It's getting
harder all the time not to suspect that something, somewhere, sometime
went
badly wrong. Wasn't life promising us bigtime
interestingness not so long ago? This isn't an echo of Gen X's
complaint about the Boomers hoarding all the jobs; we're not even sure
if we want jobs, or, more to the point, if we retain the capacity to
do jobs.
What
the article calls "that existential career angst that you were meant
for ‘more than this’" is only part of it. Most of us seem to fall on
the spectrum between hard metrosexuality and George Orwell's de-evolved
"little fat men," allowing our disused limbs to slowly retract into our
fleshy cores. What's worse, I'm not even partially convinced that this
is a bad thing, given the alternatives. But what are the potential
reactions to this anomie of the "benignly self-indulgent children who
were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to
fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to"? A
few spring to mind.
Suck it up, you brittle princesses, and contribute something useful to society.
In other words, get your @$$ to work doing something the world wants:
forging a better paperclip, say. A large part of me suspects, though,
that a move toward paperclip engineering (or endeavors like it) would
cause mass Gen-Y suicide. (Not that we'd run the car in the garage or
anything; we'd just lose the will to keep drawing air.) I myself buy so
few non-edible products that I don't even have a mental model of where
things "the world wants" fit in; 90 percent of my own utility comes
from media I don't pay for.
There's the money to be made, sure,
but there's also the abyss into which to gaze. One of the first movies
I remember seeing in-theater is
City Slickers. I don't remember
anything from it but the scene where the Billy Crystal character gets
up in front of his son's class to talk about his job, which I have
thought of every day since:
"I work for WBLM radio."
"Are you a disc jockey?"
"No, I'm not a disc jockey. You know the commercials that are on the radio?"
"Do you make all those commercials?"
"No. Other people make the commercials. I sell them time on our station for the commercials to be on."
"So you decide which commercials to use and when."
"That's
right. Well, no, it's not right. It used to be right. Seems now that I
have to check with the station manager if I wanna wipe my nose. The
minute he took away my authority, I shoulda quit."
Similar
scenes would play out countless times throughout elementary school,
starring various parents holding jobs so enervated, such abstractions
of abstractions, as to be effectively inexplicable. What a vertiginous
moment of judgment it must be to learn that the pursuit to which you've
wound up dedicating the majority of your waking hours is so boring and
confusing that a roomful of nine-year-olds gives you the collective
raspberry.
We're stuck. At some point, we would have killed to
have the proverbial butcher or baker show up in our classrooms, but
we've turned out too fancy to fathom becoming those things.
What, you can't start families like all those other generations did? The
Eye Weekly
article seems to suggest that delayed marriage and reproduction might
be the, or a, main issue. The trouble is that marriage/reproduction
doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well for our parents, the
Boomers. Split after expensive, spiteful split, you'd think that cohort
would, at some point, come to suspect that they're doing it wrong, but
no.
Perhaps there's a totally understandable and reassuring
explanation for why I can't point to a single marriage that's racked up
at least a decade and say, "I want that" — even the ones that stand the
test of time raise a vague distress in me, and the grinding,
near-apologia-grade explanations for why I shouldn't feel that way
never help — but man, humanity has
not sold me on this particular institution.
Why not apply to grad school? ... get off my blog.So join the Young Achievers, then.
Actually, this seems to work out for some Gen-Yers: found a lobbying
group, helm a do-gooding non-profit, start a net startup of obscure
purpose that gets bought for a handsome sum, carve out a niche
monetizing pro blogs with turbocharged multiple-$tream ad revenue. And
they certainly seem satisfied with their choices, at least kind of.
I just can't seem to hang with it. Your experiences any different, readers?
Get off the boat. It might be no wonder that I find myself
openly advocating insanity.
It sounds, well, insane, sure, but what else is there? The trick to
getting off the boat is summoning the will to build your own. Despite
those alleged convictions about our own difference, our unique
snowflakiness, we Gen Y-ers remain in thrall to the Busytown thinking
of our toddling years. The mere idea of a "job," much less what the
Eye Weekly
calls "a cool and interesting job that leaves you fulfilled," might
well be wrong. My mission to obliterate the distinction between the
"job" and "not a job" compartments of my life continues. (How many
people whose work I strongly admire even have what you'd call a "job"?
Very few.) But this appears to demand a lot of action on the spectrum
from bold to irrational.
Gen Y — a bad name, by the by, but it
beats "the Millennials" — fears that the world won't cooperate with the
goals we've held so long and so vaguely. I think the solution involves
not caring whether the world won't cooperate with your goals. For a
healthy perspective on this, we must go back, before Gen Y, before Gen
X, even before the Boomers, to none other than Mr. Werner Herzog:
I
am not into the culture of complaint. Everyone around the world,
whomever I meet, starts to complain about the stupidity of money. It
seems to be the very culture of filmmaking. Money has only two
qualities: it is stupid and it is cowardly. Making films is not easy;
you have to be able to cope with the mischievous realities around you
that do everything they can to prevent you from making your film. The
world is just not made for filmmaking. You have to know that every time
you make a film you must be prepared to wrestle it away from the Devil
himself. But carry on, dammit! Ignite the fire. Create something that
is so strong that it develops its own dynamic. Ultimately, the money
will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between
its legs.
For "filmmaking," read "doing anything worthwhile so you don't have to keep checking Facebook to dull the pain."
