- Our generational works of art, those monuments—many of them share this sensibility. It’s a kind of enough-already detachment, an exhaustion, an opting for comedy over morals, lessons, rules. And look how they stand up! How much newer and better those movies and books can seem than works made five or three years ago. Everyone can make their own list. Mine includes: Exile in Guyville, by Liz Phair; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace (‘62). Everything by Quentin Tarantino (‘63). Ditto Wes Anderson (‘69), Richard Linklater (‘60), and Tina Fey (‘70). The key lyric—it can serve as a coda—opens the Nirvana song “Breed”: “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care . . .”
I was having trouble with that too. What point is he trying to make? That we're not idealistic and won't colour outside the lines, so.... That's good? Is he implying we'll soberly keep the train on the rails like our granddad? (But not, I notice, our grandma, who clearly had nothing to say and no influence on her culture and society). Although I say "we" but some time in the last five years Gen X apparently kicked me out, so I'm a millennial, just an OLD millennial who didn't grow up with computers.
I might try to seem as though I want to be a snowflake but I'm not doing that. The writer just made a few assumptions that caused me to switch tabs and maybe offer real time commentary. I was born in 1983. Generations are ill defined in general but I was born in a year that doesn't seem to neatly fit into any idea of where one generation ends and the next begins. So that makes me feel like I want to be recognized for a unique experience. Unique to everyone born in that year or in a year near it... I remember rotary phones. I know what a modem dialing into AOL sounds like. I know what exactly a modem is which is maybe not so common knowledge when it seems to have become the internet thing you get from the cable company. And I even remember when it used to be something like that and that building a 56k into a machine and that that became expected was a big deal. I imagine I've made my point. Well that's just arrogant in a way I can't help but notice basically because I've talked to old people who helped stem fascism and I notice the level of humility they seem to have about an abject act of heroism. The article is more careful in its consideration than I expected so Imma shut up on the commentary. But when you try to compare anything personal it can create a pissing match that helps no one. I'm pretty sure I hate my girlfriend's ex husband. For legitimate reasons. But I shouldn't discount his opinion and it's a thing I take into account no matter the difficulty on my end. If I seek a specific reaction to what is maybe an uncommon distinction about why I hate a douche bag and why I'm entitled to do so and why he is objectively a bad guy, then I will have to defend that feeling using a lot of anecdotes and things that are not worth explaining even if I feel passionate about my position. It's not worth it. Subjectivity is fucking frightening to people but it's accostemed to me. Even the shittiest generation of Germans was not without redeeming qualities that are lost when you try to rank life by a rubric that may not even seem harsh. No one is better than anyone else. Everyone is just different in ways that can be hard to se . I'm about to quit this but trying to compare any human experience and it's relative importance to different people is a bad fucking idea. If I don't know where I'm going to sleep one night that is personally important and may seem obviously so, but it could be the equivalent of a stubbed toe to a person with wildly different life experience and priorities. And that's OKit’s Generation X that will be called the greatest.
Step one to looking like a dumbass: Failing to even offhandedly define where you're drawing your line in the sand for the birth years constituting millienial vs. Gen X, etc. before making sweeping numerical comparisons. Step two: Considering yourself a member of the only generation not 100% detrimental to society. There are plenty more steps, but I'm done, because I suspect that exactly no one around here needs any convincing. edit: hahahahha, you should click on Rich Cohen's name and see his collection of previous "work"It’s not those who stormed the beaches and won the war, nor the hula-hooped millions who followed, nor what we have coming out of the colleges now—it’s Generation X that will be called the greatest.
I totally did. I've been meaning to read the Marlon Brando one. In fairness, "generations" are pretty wiggly. It isn't so much when you were born, it's who your parents were - if you were part of the Baby Boom after WWII, you grew up during the Long Boom and are a Baby Boomer. If you are a Baby Boomer, your kids are Millennials. If you were born before the end of WWII, as in, you were born anywhere from the Roaring 20s to 1945, you are the "Silent Generation" and your kids are Generation X. But even that gets nice and preposterous as I am squarely Generation X but most of the kids in my high school were Millennials while my wife counts as half GenX, half Millennial because her dad was born in '45 and her mom in '46.