During my recent sojorun into small town America, a family member guided me on a whirlwind tour of the local game stores and arcades.
Yes, they still have arcades, plural.
As it turns out, small towns are not immune to Generation Y’s nigh-religious attachment to pop culture relics of the 1980s and 1990s.
Even out in the sticks, the graying Nintendo Generation idolizes Mario, Luke Skywalker, and Wolverine.
Related: The Nostalgia Jukebox Effect
It’s a truism of both psychology and moral theology that cases of undue attachment to lesser goods bespeak a lack of some higher good. Collectors hoard the games they played with their childhood friends because normalized perversion has destroyed male friendship. Online simps fawn over e-girls as substitutes for their mothers. Millions turn to opioids because they see no way out of poverty and misery.
The point is that Gen Y worships the corporate IPs of their childhood to relive an echo of the love, security, and meaning stripped from them in adulthood.
You might think this behavior odd coming from a generation raised in a majority white, Christian civilization. But Ys make easy prey for the Pop Cult because they were brought up in consumerist households defined by transactional relationships. So maybe they attended private school Monday through Friday and church on Sunday. But their Boomer parents’ egoism, which often ended in divorce, drove them away from the One God and into the cold plastic arms of many gods.
As a result, many Ys have become spiritual nomads wandering the open-air international airport terminal that replaced the nation they grew up in. Their materially rich but spiritually poor upbringing never required them to learn courage or self-control. So they burrow into High 80s and 90s cultural detritus like diggers in the rubble of Cultural Ground Zero.
Related: Nostalgia in Light of Generational Theory
Yet we shouldn’t ridicule Gen Y. Recall that they are Generation Mugged by Reality. The gilded cages of their gated neighborhoods, parochial schools, and suburbs fell, making them strangers in their own home like the rest of us.
Some Ys can be shaken out of their brand addiction. It’s not easy, though. It takes respectful and consistent demonstrations of the Pop Cult’s ultimate emptiness. And even more prayer.
Generation Y’s calling is to become the archivists of Late Modern Christendom’s last days and the teachers of generations to come. They can fulfill that vocation by instructing in word and deed or by serving as bywords and warnings.
If we want it to be the former, we’d better get to work.
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“The gilded cages of their gated neighborhoods, parochial schools, and suburbs fell, making them strangers in their own home like the rest of us.”
Alas, that I abide a stranger in Meshech. –Psalm 119
Amen.
“Some Ys can be shaken out of their brand addiction. It’s not easy, though.”
Ain’t that the truth. Look at how many outrage culture YouTube channels that are “fighting the good fight” in the culture war. You will notice a lot of those channel owners belong to either Gen X or Y specifically.
Yes, Millennials by and large don’t care. For them, Star Wars has always included the prequels, Daniel Craig was always James Bond, and Mario has always been in 3D.