A common denominator of Generation Y is the experience of being mugged by reality. This generation grew up during the last flowering of post-WWII economic largesse and post-Cold War optimism. In an era when every day was Christmas, Baby Boomers’ promise that getting a liberal arts degree would guarantee a place in the middle class made sense to their kids.
Gen Y can be thought of as the checklist generation, and not in the way Conservatives on Facebook mean. Ys’ formative experience of the effort-to-reward ratio dictates that if you get five gold stars on the reading chart, you get a pizza. If you make straight A’s, you get a Nintendo game. If you drink your milk, stay off drugs, and sleepwalk your way to a generic degree, you get a McMansion in the suburbs.
That’s just how it was supposed to work. Nothin in Gen Y’s world indicated otherwise until 9/11, the 2008 mortgage debacle, and mass migration brought reality crashing down on that fools’ paradise.
A generation who’d been conditioned to think of anyone without a white collar job as a loser emerged from the young adult daycare of college to the paradox of Clown World. The cognitive dissonance that set in produced what I call the Breaking.
What does this rather melodramatic term mean? Different Ys break in different ways, but each is symptomatic of a wholesale retreat from grim reality.
Let’s explore a few examples.
Steve grew up in a nominally Christian household that was split by divorce when he entered junior high. He studied computer science in college but failed to land the coveted internship required to get his foot in the door of a major company. He took a job at Geek Squad and had to room with two other guys to make ends meet. While letting his car warm up on cold winter mornings, he would fantasize about sitting back in his dilapidated garage and just drifting off into oblivion. During the aughts, Steve read The God Delusion and spent the decade pestering his shrinking sphere of friends about selfish genes.
Justin had always been aware of Star Wars, but his love for the holy franchise didn’t take root until he got Super Return of the Jedi for acing his math test. He soon took to collecting action figures from the re-released toy line and reading the Expanded Universe novels. Those hobbies led straight into the Special Editions. Seeing his beloved trilogy in theaters for the first time gave Justin the closest thing to a religious experience he’d ever had. He made the local paper for camping out to be first in line for The Phantom Menace and spent the next three years convincing everyone–including himself–how great the movie was. His collection has grown over the years, to the point that he devotes what would have been his kid’s room, if he’d had any, to Star Wars merchandise. He pays for new items, and rent, with superchats from his moderately successful YouTube fandom channel.
Being raised by a single mom wasn’t easy for Kevin. He and his three sisters learned to fend for themselves since their only parent worked all the time. In school, he suffered from social anxiety and never had more than a couple of friends. Going to college for a communications degree saddled him with fifty grand in debt, but it was worth it to get out of his mom’s house. Kevin also learned why everyone from his family to his mostly female teachers and bosses had seemed to resent him. His professors’ lectures on patriarchy and colonization finally cleared up the confusion he’d felt his entire life. Kevin joined a campus activist group. There, for the first time, he felt a sense of belonging and could be around women he wasn’t related to. After graduation he started writing for Gawker. Now a foreign NGO pays him to police Twitter for violent language.
During their weekend visits, Tom’s dad always told him that the secret to happiness was finding a good woman. Since the messaging he heard from his parents and the media implied that all women were perfect, he operated on the assumption that finding his soul mate just meant manning up and being worthy of a strong, capable gal. Despite showering a succession of girlfriends with gifts, praise, and attention, Tom struggled with relationships. Even when he found out his GF was cheating–which a troubling number of them did–Tom always tried hard to forgive and forget. Since he’d been taught that any romantic problems must be his fault, he vowed to work on himself. But somehow, it was never enough. Tom’s 20s passed him by, leaving him without the wife and kids he’d been led to expect. At age 35, Tom finally hit the jackpot and married a great lady with three kids from two prior relationships. Even better, she turned out to be totally trad, insisting on staying home with her kids while Tom worked to support them. Lucky for them, Tom can work lots of overtime since he dropped most of his hobbies and ditched all his male friends in the pursuit of love.
These are just a few representative scenarios. They may not seem to have much in common at first glance, but all re united by a common motive: escaping reality by withdrawing into false idols. The NuAtheist copes with his middling intellect by worshiping it. The Pop Cultist tries to fill the void of meaning left by materialism by consuming more product. The Death Cultist deals with being a nonentity by embracing a negative identity. The Beta Male installs a fellow fallen creature on the throne reserved for God.
It’s been said before, but these hypothetical case studies bear it out: The answer to the crisis of meaning is re-embracing Jesus Christ. When man places He that is most worshipful in the proper place of worship, all other areas of life fall into right order.
That’s not to advise retreat into the equal but opposite error of thinking we can bring the 80s back. A second major cause of the Breaking is Gen Y’s lack of the courage to part with the past and contribute to a fundamentally new future. Regardless, tomorrow is going to happen with our without Gen Y. Their choice is to show up for it or keep wallowing in nostalgia.
Goes beyond analysis into action
Brian had always been aware of Star Wars, but he was equally aware that popular culture could become a religion. This was why, whenever it was appropriate, Brian would proclaim to his fellow Star Wars enthusiasts, “The original trilogy is the only Star Wars, and George Lucas is a false prophet. How sweet it is to analyze pulpy sci fi movies and to distinguish their vaguely Christian themes from Lucas’s pagan Buddhist themes.”
And the rest of his protestant—with a lower case “p”—star wars community replied, “Amen!” And they fell down and adored the flawless masterpiece that was THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
A Gen Y childhood was definitely the time when it seemed like progress would go on forever the future was greater than could be imagined. Whether it was computers, the internet, effects in movies, video game consoles, phones and other handheld devices, or anything else it seemed like what was a dream today would be reality in five or ten years.
A common trend I’ve seen is that when Gen Y-ers break, they desperately hold onto this belief in rapid and unlimited progress. The nu-atheist still believes that in ten, or at most twenty, years we will be uploading our minds into robot bodies. The pop cultist still believes that hoverboards are just around the corner (or at the very least that the next console will be as much of a step up from the last one as the SNES was from the NES.) The death cultist believes that we are just about to come up on a scarcity free Star Trek future where we can be comfortable before letting ourselves die out. Though I don’t know what the Beta male has hope for; maybe he’s just too busy overworking to hope for anything.
I’ve found an instructive exercise is to have people imagine describing the wonders of 2007 to someone from 1992. Then repeat the exercise for the “wonders” of 2022 to someone from 2007.
The Beta Male believes he has already attained the summit of his hopes by grafting himself onto Milady as a servile life accessory.
“I’ve found an instructive exercise is to have people imagine describing the wonders of 2007 to someone from 1992. Then repeat the exercise for the “wonders” of 2022 to someone from 2007.”
Ingenious. I’m stealing it.
I’ve only started using recently, but here is the responses I’ve gotten for what you would tell someone from 2007 about 2022:
-The internet is faster.
-You can stream more video.
-Graphics have more polygons.
-Social media is mainstream.
-Processors are faster (but not as much as you’d think.)
-“The internet of things”
-“Cloud computing”
-You can get rid of all of your physical media and then rebuy everything to use on your phone.
Now imagine if you were in 2007 and already thought those things were lame.
2022 looks even dumber at that point.
The Internet is faster, but it also spies on us, and lies to us, and mostly exists to sell us things. In 2007, I thought the Internet was a playground. Now I understand it’s a battleground, in which the media are as much the enemy as the identity thieves. If anything, the digital thieves are honest, when compared to the media. They aren’t pretending to serve the common good, as the propagandists often do.
I guess what I’m saying is that this is the pattern I see:
-Firm belief that utopia through technology (whatever the specifics of that mean) is just around the corner
-When technology stalls out at first there is a denial. It’s just a liiiitle further, you see?
-Eventually there is an admission that this is not the future we were promised.
-But that’s just followed by another round of denial, only this time attached to blame for not adhering to whatever cult the specific member of Gen Y fell into. I.e. We would have been there, if not for all the flat-earther anti-vaxxer Christians keeping us back. We would have been there, if only we had given democrats and megacorporations more support. We would have been there, if only you hadn’t been so critical of the latest round of entertainment. And we will still be there anyway since if you squint just right you can kind of see some progress.
Exactly. Tell anyone from 2007 about the “wonders” of 2020 technology, and they’ll be equally horrified of Big Tech censorship, drag queen story hour, hormonal therapy for children, open-book government corruption, and raising an entire generation to be hypochondriacs.
Isn’t it crazy how just fifteen (heck, even ten) years ago, stuff that’s totally normal right now would have been unthinkable? It really does help you get some perspective on the whole Wokeness phenomenon. Heck, in 2007 even Barack Obama had to dissemble and pretend that he wouldn’t support gay marriage.
If I had a time machine, I’d go back and show current CNN headlines to internet smrt guys who objected to arguments against butt marriage with “muh slippery slope!”
Embracing Christ and looking forward to the future is the only way. Thanks so much for this.
Give the glory to God.
I recommend every reader of this post to check out the next entry in my series on Fandom coming out this Thursday. This sort of behavior goes back far before reaching its peak with Gen Y in the early ’90s. Seeing how everything is currently crumbling certainly makes its beginnings look even more ridiculous now.
Looking forward to it!
The pattern keeps repeating, in many forms of art and entertainment. JD is opening a lot of doors into both the past and the present. This next post should be very good!
Your hypotheticals don’t seem all that hypothetical. They sound like people you would likely talk to in the lunch room at work. They are younger guys worshipping false gods and unable to understand why it isn’t working. They sit next to you at the call center, bag your groceries, and ask you if you want fries with that. Nothing hypothetical at all.
While none of the examples in the OP map one-to-one with real people, you’ll find people who’ve walked stretches of the same roads in every break room, FB group, and family court in America.
The number of men I’ve known whose hopes have been utterly crushed by life defies easy counting. More tragic by far is that they went willingly to their destruction by following their elders’ and betters’ advice.
But it’s even worse for the ones whose conditioning can be pierced, if only temporarily. Men whose beta mindset has turned their relationships into soul-draining vampires will shrug helplessly and say, “It’s how I was brought up.”
You can show utopian bugmen the grim reality of crime, IQ, and demographic stats. With a crestfallen look, they’ll sigh, “My dad always told me we’d have replicators, cold fusion, and flying cars when I grew up. That dream is hard to let go of.”
The common thread running through all these accounts is that a generation of men were sold fake maps to the stars that led them to dead ends. Now they are hopelessly disoriented, with no compass to follow. So they know no other way than to cling even tighter to their useless, tattered maps.
Gen Y’s story is an inverted Hero’s Journey. The NPC’s Journey, as it were.
I definitely went to high school with some of these guys, and, looking back, my own brush with becoming Beta was too close for comfort. There, but for the grace of God, go I.
You’re quite right that the way out is through Jesus Christ. He always was the Way, the Truth, and the Light, and He always will be.
Praise God for deliverance!
I don’t like this. It hits entirely too close to home for myself and many of the guys I’ve known.
It is not often I read something that I want to run away from, but you captured it.
Thank you. I am a horror writer, and only the best of us can evoke the feeling you just described.
“This generation grew up during the last flowering of post-WWII economic largesse and post-Cold War optimism.”
This is an important point. For the post war generations (though I’m not sure if this is true for generation Z) they act as if they believe history began with WWII. They also believe that the 1950s are the default society, as in, the society that we would go back to if nothing changes. Though opinions on the 1950s being the default vary: many of the death cult believers fear this is true, while many of the older mainstream conservatives hope that this is true.
But in fact the 1940s – 50s were extraordinary times from a world-historical perspective brought about by a confluence of unusual circumstances. They are not a good reference point for what is normal.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer. But one thing that’s interesting is that, while the current system promised everyone fulfillment of all their material needs and then co-opted their labor to feed itself, in traditional societies, people weren’t promised much, in fact, they saw people die around them semi-regularly, and yet their efforts were enfolded into a society that actually helped them and their neighbors.
Well said. Nostalgia-driven revanchism isn’t the answer. Going back to the 1950s would just mean ending up right back here in 70 years. It’s hard to imagine a worse earthly hell than repeating the same 2/3 century ad nauseam.
Jeffro Johnson has it right. We need to regress to the divergence point, then strike out in a new direction.
This is what bothers me about so much discussion online from Christians. They act and behave as if 1950s norms are the baseline for everything from art to dress.
Look at how the reaction to Blessed Carlo Acutis being presented as wearing the clothes he wore in life. The reaction? Why isn’t he wearing a suit. Shouldn’t he look good? The assumption is that the best one can look is as they did in 1950s dress. But one look at actual art of saints will show that there is far more to it than “looking good” by 20th century standards.
This isn’t even getting into how so many former coomers will rage over women wearing clothes while having big breasts or if they even so much as wink at a camera. It’s all based on standards that we cannot go back to and, to be honest, were very situational to begin with. We need better ones.
Of course, I even talk about their standards for art and how damaging they have been in a post here: https://wastelandandsky.blogspot.com/2021/10/art-of-god.html
If you have any kind of sense then you should realize by now that returning to any point in the 20th century is insane and simply not feasible or desirable.
You pose an puzzling question: ” Things have changed so much recently that it is a bit difficult to truly comprehend where we’ve steered wrong, what we need to walk back, and what we need to keep. Nonetheless, we will figure it out.”
If I may be forgiven for quoting a work of art written in the 20th Century (but drawing from much older, and therefore healthier, streams of cult and culture):
“All that is gold does not glitter;
Not all who wander are lost.
The good that is old does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
The rest of the poem is about Aragorn and Narsil, of course, but Mr. Baggins does frame a general truth, I think. The things that are both old and good will endure. Perhaps it is not so much a question of naming a year – any year – in history and rolling back, but finding what has lasted, and holding to that. I think the institutions of modernity are in the process of crumbling without much help from us. The real challenge may be to dig their mistaken ideas out of our heads by the roots. I’ve already gotten used to the idea that there’s no such thing as progress. It’s been harder that I would have imagined, however, to scrap the false dichotomy between different kinds of adventure stories – mythic romance and futuristic romance, for example – because I bought the same bill of goods fandom tried to sell everyone. One almost needs a need vocabulary just to do that.
It’s funny: when I was in school (b. 1980), history always *ended* with WWII. Everything else I had to pick up from my mom’s stories and We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Ah yes, the song that replaced “My Generation” as the Baby Boomer anthem after the hippies went corporate and bought BMWs.