Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation

The one where so many speak of broken promises, swearing that they have been lied to. Where college has become a pay-to-play entry ticket into high society, yet that same society is sealed off, bricked up, and outside it are eager and befuddled ticket holders, inundated with debt, knowing next to nothing, waiting at the walled-off façade, holding an empty bag. Where everything feels either a big scam or a little one, the generation where we must constantly prove to the computer that we are, indeed, human. The one where a daily routine is a series of broken links, password reset prompts, endless, intercalating systems intertwined so deeply that nobody knows who does what, what does what, or who is in charge.

These systems that are connected for your convenience are suddenly found to be sheared at the hips at the drop of a glitch. To experience a problem in healthcare, insurance, the law is to be so mired in paperwork that one gets the feeling they should just forget about it––but you can’t forget about it, the only way out is through. These systems we speak of contain many features masquerading as bugs–one can hardly go a day without hearing that phrase.

The generation where everything is mired in pornography, and while I am no angel, no prude, the signals are running through every image, every ad, every pop song. It feels less like everyone is watching it, but more like they are producing it. They say there is nothing new under the sun, but there is; the true new kink is exhibitionism, and it is as easy as switching on a camera phone. It is less that performers have run away with the circus, but the circus has set up shop in the town square; its aim is to remain there forever.

A generation whose senses have been so blasted away by an infinite supply of colliding bodies that men and women seem at their most suspicious of one another. The sexes blame each other for circumstances that are born from the most basic desires of each; desires that are well known, snuffed out, and exploited in high definition.

The generation where food isn’t food anymore; a generation raised and comforted by edible food-like products. Much of it made in a lab, and injected, infused, or steeped in any chemical that may maximize its addiction, its overconsumption to an unflinching, ignorant public. Everything, from potato chips to chewing gum, is advertised like an extreme sport; our food must pop, burst, explode, or ooze their gooey centers, because we are bored, one might suppose.

The generation where children have ceased learning to read, because the generation before them couldn’t either. They can read, but are unable to sit still long enough to absorb an author’s words. To a generation of scrollers of flashing images, a world of constant narration, reading is painful, is torturous.

College students are handing in drafts written by robots, not because they like to cheat. Not because they are lazy, but because over and over again they have been shown that knowledge and thinking were never as important as regurgitation and the obedience of task completion. Who will be the poets of the future, when the poets are mostly mocked by the public? Artists are, too.

Artificial Intelligence. I don’t know much about it, and I don’t want to. I won’t touch the stuff on principle, but I have no doubt that soon my hand will be forced–as our collective hand has with the internet, the cell phone, QR codes, etc. I will resist as long as possible, which feels like the slogan of my generation. To resist as long as possible. Because to live in this generation is to catch up or keep up, or get left behind. But nobody knows where our humanity is headed, and we are racing in the dark as fast as we can to get there.

To resist as long as possible is to keep alive some kind of dream; to know there is a part of myself that is unreachable to the pressures, the temptations of our generation. To know that though I am made out of the same waters, I can resist the flooding of my own soul. And I am not a flat idiot–there are pieces of me that I cannot protect from this world, and many things are beyond my control.

I can’t win every battle nor even participate in every fight. But I can do one or two things in this life; I can snuff out beauty like an expert archer; I am an arrow smith, and it is art and poetry that sharpen my arrowheads. I refuse to live in an ugly world without the transcendent, without love, without real, physical sex. I refuse to believe first that strangers are an enemy and that my neighbors are double agents.

I hate this generation at times, but I won’t let it bring me all the way down. I cannot afford to. I refuse to live my one and only life that way because I refuse to live in this world alone.

JSV

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.