A reader writes in to share a Gen Y tale of his own:
It was 2005 and I had just turned 18. I was at a Tower Records with a bunch of high school friends. It was a neat, two story place and that particular night it was lively and energetic because my buddy was performing live. I remember thinking, “aw hell yeah, welcome to adulthood, time to tear shit up!” (I was a sheltered Catholic school kid).
One year later, on a lark, I decided to go back to Tower Records. I hadn’t been back since that particular night and I was looking forward to browsing the store.
It was gone. It had closed down at some point during that year and got replaced by a Burlington coat factory.
I vividly remember getting this eerie feeling which made the hair on my arms stand up. I had lost touch with all of my high school friends so I just stood in a sea of memories. It was like having my past erased behind me.
Nowadays stories like mine are commonplace but for a Gen Y kid, all of our relationships seemed to center around consumerism. Once we came head long into an economic crash and our favorite spots started shutting down, it was like learning the fragility of things.
I think this is why Gen Y is so susceptible to the nostalgia trap.
Gen Y is the Rip Van Winkle generation.
Only we have less excuse for not knowing what was happening since we weren’t asleep, we just stopped paying attention.
But that didn’t stop our spiritually poor yet materially rich world
from turning into this …
And these …
I could have just posted this next image, since it says it all:
To get as Gen Y as possible with you, it’s like in A Link to the Past, when you get sucked into the World of Darkness.
And you find that the nice house where you used to get money out of the portrait
Is now a gambling den run by a sketchy alien weirdo.
There’s no going back, but for another wistful tale of Gen Y nostalgia, read my #1 best seller:
“. . . all of our relationships seemed to center around consumerism. Once we came head long into an economic crash and our favorite spots started shutting down, it was like learning the fragility of things.”
Geezum, that statement hit hard. We definitely lost something when some of the culture tied to businesses and the communal experiences they gave us, went belly up. It’s part of the reason why, at least on the outside looking in, I can admire Japan because it seems like they are still able to embrace the art and experience they get from the companies which shape the aesthetic and the identities of their culture.
In a way too, the visual/aesthetic deprivation in some of these companies, I believe, has only escalated our cultural downward spiral. I could be speaking nonsense, or maybe I’m just missing a potential point that we in America outsourced our culture to the corporate sector like we did with everything else and this is just the logical conclusion we are reaching.
Speaking of visual aesthetic decline, how about McDonalds? Gone are the giant Golden Arches, the iconic mansard roofs and many of the indoor playgrounds with bright colors everywhere.
Now they have a square warehouse design with soulless giant touchscreens and muted colors.
Thanks to the weed legalization bills, a lot of them smell like weed now. With a bunch of migrant workers workers behind the counter with a questionable grasp of the English language.
Beauty costs money and that’s money that the big wigs can’t afford because they need to buy their 20th house and 5th yacht.
They respected you enough before Cultural Ground Zero is appeal to you with the best service, product, and quality, they could manage. One can be cynical and say it was just to “get your money” but it still required respect and understanding the customer to get it in the first place.
Now they are a protected class with a monopoly. They don’t have to do crap, and they don’t.
Thanks for the write-up, Brian. Great stuff as usual.
There’s definitely a childhood nostalgia tied to consumerism that seems to particularly resonate with Gen Y.
The arcade wasn’t just a place where you played video games, it was a place where you hung out with school friends on the weekend and made new friends (particularly if they had extra quarters.)
Pizza Hut is where you’d go with your teammates after a baseball tournament in your dirt caked uniform.
DZ Discovery Zone was the go-to spot for just about every one of my classmate’s birthday parties for a brief period. That went the way of the dodo as well.
My pleasure. Thanks for filling in for my muse.
I’m trying to pinpoint the moment Generation Y woke up and realized they had been left behind by the culture they were chasing.
I say this because in the late 90s when a lot of this was going on, they were still listening to nu metal and getting frosted tips while singing the praises of Blockbuster and Xbox Live. Now they have little good to say about any of those things, choosing instead to lionize the things that came before them. At some point it hit them like a freight train that it was all gone and their own culture wished they were too.
I found it more disturbing the time I walked the Mainstreet of my youth and discovered it all boarded up, rusted, burned, and the pavement torn up. And not a single soul say anything off about the place that once represented something more now nothing more than a memory. Your entire existence is seen as nothing but a stain and those in charge would see that it becomes swept away in the wash. It’s not just about plastic red cups at Pizza Hut anymore. It’s about how noticing that no one in charge thinks you are worth anything.
There is a sense of sadness in sure most generations get when seeing the places of their youth gone, but there is a bit of a difference between something fading away and something being purposefully erased. We no longer even know what is organic anymore. Everything is fake.
“…but there is a bit of a difference between something fading away and something being purposefully erased.”
And that’s how it is with everything.
“Hey Gen Yer! Ya like Willow? Well then you’re really going to like our new series which denigrates Willow and features no other white male protagonists because they have been replaced with biracial and/or queer unlikable females. We’ll be tackling Chronicles of Narnia next!”
The realization was present earlier than this, but 2013 strikes me as a year where the conclusion became unavoidable.
-In games we had the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U, all largely interchangeable with the systems they replaced. It was clear that vidya had plateaued.
-Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu start pushing exclusive original programming which both signaled the end of the broadcast TV era and also showed that streaming would just end up becoming another cable plan.
-Youtube starts subscription channels, making clear that it will no longer be a place for the internet community to express itself through video but rather just another bland controlled corporate site.
-Facebook and Twitter start ramping up and openly discussing their data harvesting. It is now the age of “the algorithm.”
-Amazon buys up Goodreads, in yet another example of a corporation exerting its control on the internet. They also acquire Ring and would snatch up Twitch in the next year.
-I don’t have any specific event, but by this point radio has been completely purged of any music that someone in Gen Y would find palatable. In contrast Gaming Ground Zero 2007 at least had the death gasps of numetal and bands pretending to do rock.
-The coup d’etat in Egypt followed by the war in Libya solidify the fact that the middle east is broken, and Iraq/Afghanistan will be forever wars.
-The George Zimmerman trial, which forced Gen Y to admit that a “colorblind” future wasn’t in the cards. Race riots weren’t just an oddity of the early 90’s, and racial tension would be here to stay.
-States start pushing through gay marriage against the will of the people. (Remember, even California had a proposition from the voters preventing it.) This was one of the first blatant signs that the left would not even pretend to do anything but destroy the culture that had come before.
Not coincidentally the very next year was when we got #Gamergate which was just an opening salvo for the Trump movement. The Culture Wars started and really took off in late 2019.
As someone who started college in the mid-2000s, a big part of my experience was how all of my communal activities, and the entertainment I was into, moved from shared cultural experiences, to subcultural ones. I think a lot of that emerged naturally, or subconsciously, in reaction to the jarring experiences of Gen Y’s coming of age you illustrate here.
The “hipster” subculture which I was into back then can be retroactively identified as a reaction to what was happening. At least at first, it consisted entirely of Gen Y and older constructing a mishmash identity out of fashions, music, books, and so on from times past. You probably wouldn’t really have an 80s punk in skinny jeans reading mid-century lit-fic and watching French new wave films and working as a barista, and this sort of thing got roundly criticized, but it was all a product of reacting to the culture that had dumped Gen Y in the trash, desperately grasping for something real and authentic in the midst of an ever-fakening culture. Organic sandwich shops, craft chocolate, weird experimental music; these disparate hipster lifestyle markers were a reaction to something that the mainstream didn’t know, or just didn’t care, was happening. But now I think we’re sufficiently distant from the hipster movement to actually analyze it in the proper context and identify it as a Gen Y existential crisis.
More specifically, this also reflect a connected but distinct phenomenon of shared cultural experiences being sliced into subcultural ones. I had shared experiences with people who like the same Japanese indie bands, or watched Battlestar Galactica or played Dragon Quest games, but the average person had no familiarity with those things. While if it had been the 90s, I’d be talking about last week’s X-Files episode with various different types of people. My shared experiences were shared with an ever-shrinking spectrum of peers. The very last time I was “into” something with a mass market appeal would probably be LOST.
And meanwhile, the older entertainment things I was into – like Star Wars – left *me* and morphed into something unrecognizable from the 90s when I bought Micro Machines and Action Fleet toys, played Dark Forces and Rebel Assault, and had the Essential Guide To Vehicles And Vessels on my bookcase. My very identity as some sort of nerd was under assault, and culturally strip-mined by soulless gigacorporations for money. Nothing highlighted this better than the proliferation of the execrable Big Bang Theory sitcom, which turned being a nerd into an acceptable, marketable lifestyle brand.
Now in my mid-30s I’m an absolute cultural exile. When I’m at my Orthodox parish I’m around people with a very similar outlook and interests; but outside the Church, my interests and entire way of looking at the world is utterly alien to the mainstream and I live in blissful, near-total ignorance of popular music, movies, social media stars, and so on. To be honest, I don’t really miss pop culture or being able to listen to the radio and not immediately be seized by the desire to vomit, but I can also recognize that a hyper-atomized culture where nobody shares anything in common with those who aren’t exactly like them… is a deeply unhealthy culture on the verge of collapse.
Part of that is probably my natural gravitation towards things outside the mainstream, but I think the ongoing division of culture into subculture, both as a reaction to the mainstream and a natural effect of isolating technologies like the Internet, played a massive role as well.
The odd phenomenon of once-niche properties going mainstream while scenes splintered along ever-narrower lines is an underexplored aspect of Current Year culture.
As you alluded to, back in the 90s at any given high school on any given Monday, the latest X-Files episode would be the talk of the chess club and the baseball team. Yet getting caught by the jocks with a comic book would get you stuffed in a locker. Now movies based on rehashed versions of those comics are all anyone is allowed to talk about.
“As someone who started college in the mid-2000s, a big part of my experience was how all of my communal activities, and the entertainment I was into, moved from shared cultural experiences, to subcultural ones.”
This is similar to how I felt about the non-popularity of Scott Pilgrim. It felt like the things I loved growing up were being hoarded away and repackaged as a diluted brand, divorced from its original intention. It was the first instance of pop eating itself in a way that irritated me, because it felt like it was intentionally taking things meant for everyone and making it into a secret club locked away from the wider world. Even now, anyone who raves about the property raves about things that normal people do not connect with, or things stolen from other properties. It always rubbed me wrong, and still does to this day.
As someone who has always liked art and entertainment, and has never been a pro-clique person, I’ve really detested the way the things I love were turned into a makeshift religion for vapid people. The nostalgia movement that never seems to die does both a disservice to these old things as well as the concept of nostalgia itself. It’s all so tiring.
That’s interesting; when it came out I quite liked the Scott Pilgrim movie (being previously unfamiliar with the comics) but thinking back now, it does feel like it was both a part of the nerd culture strip-mining (a la Big Bang Theory), and reflective of hipster cultural elitism. Which is pretty odd because those two phenomena ought to be diametrically opposed, but often seem to go hand-in-hand. I wonder if it’s because the people who make/promote this stuff are once-marginalized nerds who now want to vindictively assert and impose their identity on the wider culture?
When I was younger I guess I took some pleasure in being into more obscure/cool stuff than the normies around me but I no longer really care about that. Instead, I’m fine that more people enjoy things I’d previously characterized as nerd culture products, but more natural/authentic manifestations than the mass-market megacorp versions of MCU, Disney Star Wars, etc.
as an Xer I never got into that particular nostalgia trap, but that doesn’t lessen the feeling of loss one bit.
I find this Gen Y nostalgia documented here horrifyingly fascinating.
I’m Gen X myself, but grew up in South Africa. I left in the late 90s, originally just to travel, but I met a nice Irish girl in London, and never went back.
I can appreciate a lot of the sense of loss for the late 90s/early 00s, but all this time, I thought it was because the place I’d grown up in was now governed by an unaccountable, fabulously corrupt, kleptocratic elite with established Communist Party membership.
To find that something similar happened in America, around the same time, is beyond creepy. You didn’t have a third-world government takeover. It’s like you can’t escape it anywhere. I wonder if Australasia had the same experience?
I wonder if this is the experience of the Judgement, or the warning signs of a Visitation. As usual, the answer will only come on our knees.