Sean Penn received the Oscar for Best Actor this weekend for his remarkable performance in “Milk,” a film about the first openly-gay elected official in California. Accepting the award humbly and graciously, Penn then proceeded to use the platform as a ground for political and moral commentary, shaming those who were protesting against his beliefs outside the building earlier in the evening.

Sprawled out on the couch, I couldn’t help but ask myself if this was who I was supposed to be absorbing political and moral standards from. Not to demean his impeccable talent, but wasn’t his performance able to speak for itself?

As a part of “Generation Y,” we characteristically are inclined to listen to those who are rich and famous because that’s who we want to be. USA Today enumerated it clearly in an article about our generation, saying, “Ask young people about their generation’s top life goals and the answer is clear and resounding: They want to be rich and famous.”

Chuck Palahniuk, a contemporary satirist and gifted writer, said this about our generation: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war ... our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.”

One scroll through someone’s pictures on Facebook will let you know that we have a predisposition to fall in love with our popularity and ultimately, ourselves. Whether it’s comparing how many friends you have or tagging yourself in all those crazy pictures from that crazy party, the result is the same: self-promotion.

To make it in the world today, you can’t survive without promoting yourself. Being able to make yourself look not only good, but better than others, is an essential aspect of job acquisition and general success, in the most archetypal, white-collar American sense of the word.

Chuck Klosterman, an author, journalist and pop-culture critic, called the last five years in America as “the era of predictable disillusionment.” Applying it to a more specific setting, Klosterman may have hit upon a much bigger issue than he realized. With respect to his assessment of American living as a disappointment and somewhat depressing, our generation may very well be predictably disillusioned.

Once we become cognizant that we’re not rich enough or famous enough, the real enlightenment begins. Like they always say, the end is where we begin.

Unfortunately, to continue Palahniuk’s quote, he seems to think that anger is the most common response to the disillusionment process, saying that, “We’re slowly learning that fact [that we’re not all millionaires, movie gods, or rock stars]. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

So whether we take the “Klostermanic” depression approach or “Palahniukian” anger response, we have been rendered paralytic in a culture submitting to the ones with money and/or fame.

The one thing that seems to unite us all is how we handle our disillusionment — we drink, party, smoke, have sex or whatever else our creative minds can conjure and we do it together, like enthused infantry lining up for battle in a war that never ends.

Reach Houston at hfriend1@asu.edu.