Perhaps saying that we are members of a lost generation is misleading. Let’s say, instead, that we are post-ironic or that we are members of a post-intellectual generation.
Before us, every generation used the crises of its time to craft the platform for a new youth culture. People created a youth culture as a reaction to cultural and national warfare, political and economic disappointment.
Our youth culture is different.
When the homes of the baby boomers fell as much as “30 percent in value” and when the financial crisis “depressed the salaries” of Generation X-ers, our generation — Generation Y — became worried about the future. As Derek Thompson from The Atlantic notes, “a crisis that started in the housing market could wind up having the most lasting negative impact on the one generation that didn't own any homes before the bust.”
Consequently, our youth culture rebellion hasn’t been reactionary to social upheaval, but rather in anticipation of a bleak future. While the culture of preceding generations — take the angst-ridden punks of the ‘70s and ‘80s or beatniks of the ‘50s — expressed dissatisfaction with its time, our culture of nonchalance originates from a time in the future, one that isn’t here yet.
It’s not difficult to see how we became this way.
When members of earlier generations banked on the American Dream, we saw our parents lose their jobs; we witnessed higher education undergo unprecedented pikes in tuition and we noticed the chase for weapons of mass destruction. We grew up with crises of all varieties: growing American debt, the housing crisis, political unrest worldwide, nuclear threats and an education system on the verge of collapse.
As young adults, this language of anxiety permeates our understanding of the world, leaving an ominous uncertainty about the future. Things have become too intense, and we listen to Rebecca Black’s awful singing or watch “Dancing with the Stars” to cope. This is the post-ironic hipster.
Otherwise, we become “post-intellectual” hipsters, too intellectual to be cool, too informed and progressive to enjoy anything current. Every generation of the past suffered an identity crisis, but ours is different, too. It seems as if the Internet, this constant bombardment of information and data, makes it hard for us to grasp what is really meaningful.
We can’t sort through it all quick enough to build our own identities, so we borrow things from the past in order to do so. Hence, as hipsters, we buy vintage, we shop organic and we live green. We piggyback on the aesthetics of decades past.
We have no authoritarians “trying to put us down,” no adults to say “go to college and get a degree.” Our enemies are global warming, waning energy resources and nuclear destruction. William Deresiewicz, a columnist for The New York Times, is not wrong when he says that our generation of hipsters breeds a culture of entrepreneurship. Our authoritarians — our politicians, educators and parents — aren’t condemning us. They are on our side, they look to us eagerly — perhaps desperately — for entrepreneurship and innovation that will save the world.
We avoid this responsibility in two ways: We either desensitize ourselves with garbage pop culture or we symbolically side with authoritarians by feigning intellect.
The world will still need saving but well, whatever man.
Reach the columnist at ctruong1@asu.edu.
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