There is a line in the movie Beginners which goes like this, in reference to children of the last 30 years or so:
We are fortunate to feel a great sadness our parents could never afford.
I cannot truly disagree. I have toiled over this idea in my head for a few weeks, and I find that it resonates within me as our defining quality. In our contemporary emphasis on the pursuit and expectation of continual happiness, we have made sadness our true friend, as if the ability to willfully surrender to extreme oscillations between “true happiness” and “true sadness” is some kind of noble fortune. Our parents were too busy working hard and having children to truly know it as we do. They arrived upon it later in their lives, if at all, while those of us in the “digital” generation are afforded it wholesale immediately.
We are a generation adrift in a sea of context. Read carefully: we are not a “lost” generation. We are never lost. In fact, we are so hyperaware of our selves and our surroundings, that the idea of being lost is as foreign to us as the Internet truly is to our parents. We’ve seen that Generation X, the one preceding ours, has the precursors of our hyperawareness, as expressed by their constant contextualization of marriage. The questioning of a generation typically hinges, as that article suggests, on a collective answer. What is ours? You’d think — as I once did — that our generation would be defined by the answer to “where were you on 9/11/2001?” or “what did you do as America’s exceptionalism failed?” as if the answers are somehow relevant to our future world. Those questions are about symptoms, not the root causes of our problems.
America is too broad a concept, though, and we no longer truly wish to engage with it (see: the new Republican party). The self is our main arena now, within our cultural identity and our social lives. Individualism and its discontents. The first-world human in the 21st century moves swiftly from abstracting the self, to admiring the self, to destroying their own self.