Saturday, October 29, 2005

generation 'whatever'

gen x-ers are considered people born between 1961 and 1981, so i guess that would be me..
does being a part of a stereotypic generation of latte-sipping, alienated, overeducated, underachieving slackers reflect who i really am?

In douglas coupland's novel, 'generation x: tales for an accelerated culture' (spawning the term), he comes up with neologisms that i think are fairly descriptive of the culture..

Successophobia:
The fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to.

Cult of Aloneness:
The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

Me-ism:
A search by an individual, in the absence of training or traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.

i look around - and i find us all looking for basically the same things - but we can't quite get there - or it's just not what we thought it would be.. i think we secretly have boomer-envy, but are too successophobic, and we go through life spouting knee-jerk irony, try to make sense out of it with 101-isms, enter relationships with divorce assumption and have terminal wanderlust, and we wonder why life is like qfd (quelle fucking drag)..

god, i'm bleak today.