Generation Meh

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  • Forget The Cat, Who Killed Curiosity?

    Yesterday afternoon, a friend and I were lamenting the announced closing of a prominent think tank. She remarked that the general public probably wouldn’t even notice its disappearance from the intellectual landscape. True. Social sciences research for its own sake ain’t exactly the stuff of sexy headlines and well, duh, it’s a recession y’all. Organizations are going under. People are losing their jobs. And those of who are still employed are probably going to come down with H1N1. C’est la vie, kiddos.

    979496_fafa6d8dd1Photo by Ishtiaque Zico

    But still, I couldn’t help but see the shuttering of this one institution as emblematic of a larger-scale devaluing of acquiring knowledge for its own sake. Forget about justifying policy options, determining ROI, indulging our collective fetish for pithy statistics, what happened to edification alone being a sufficient reason to explore an issue, an idea, a social phenomenon? Figuring stuff out just because it was neat or interesting or crossed your mind while idling in traffic on your morning commute. When did curiosity become purely teleological?

    There’s no time. Identify the problem. “Source” a solution or hire someone to do it on your behalf. Monetize the hell out of said solution. Lather, rinse, repeat. Knowledge is only good if it’s “productive.” Will it make us faster, stronger, richer? If yes, bring it on. If no, well, who has time for that sort of high-minded self indulgence? Thinkers aren’t doers. And the world loves a doer. Go-getters don’t sit around pondering, they go and they get. Ya dig? It’s a return to a Wall Street era mentality, but information is the new junk bond. Buy low, sell high.

    And instead of the internet substantively broadening our curiosity horizons (so many tangential rabbit holes to tumble down!), it has actually created some sort of social hive mind. News stories, viral YouTube videos, chain emails, memes up the wazoo. It’s as if we all adopted the digital delphi method – we just keep winnowing the breadth of content down until we can all agree that a clip of a bridal party dancing down the aisle to a Chris Brown song should definitely win an Oscar. Retweet the same Mashable link as if it were your job. And if Wikipedia says it’s true, it must be so. No need to click further. They’ll aggregate, we’ll assimilate. Q.E.D, my peeps.

    Maybe I just take it all too personally. After all, one of the most expedient ways into my esteem/affection/heart/pants is to share a genuine curiosity about the world. Be into esoterica, trivia, technical and factual minutiae and we’re almost guaranteed to hit it off. But it seems stumbling across these simpatico-minded people is getting ever rarer. Pragmatism and the weight of quotidian concerns (hello mortgage, health insurance, etc.,) doesn’t just take top priority, it takes sole priority. Teach the test and shelve the rest. And it feels more and more as if I’m out of sync with the prevailing corporate and social culture that views learning as a means to an end, with that end being a better standard of material living. Maybe I’m romanticizing a state of inquisitiveness that hasn’t been in vogue for two or three hundred years. Maybe I’m a curmudgeonly intellectual snob. Think Andy Rooney with better eyebrows.

    But man, it’s hard out here for a dilettante. I could use a little commiseration, ya know?

  • There Is A Light That Never Goes Out: On The Asymptotic Nature of Goodbye

    Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

    You can tell a lot about a person by how they act at the end. I’m not talking about death (although, I’m sure that’s illuminating as well), but the end of any big stage or circumstance – school, a relationship, a job. Or more precisely, you can tell a lot about a person by how they act when they know the end is coming. Do they put their feet up and coast? Mentally check out? Bury their head in the sand and refuse to acknowledge what’s happening? Come down with a case of maudlin nostalgia? The temptation is to start rewriting the hindsight history, being a little more charitable or a little more mercenary, whatever serves to the soften the inevitable blow. It wasn’t so bad. God, am I glad that’s over. You do what you have to.
    526895126_22a055cd60Photo by drinksmachine
    But on the whole, aside from death, we very rarely treat goodbyes as permanent. We move, leave jobs, graduate, but we promise (sincerely or otherwise) to keep in touch, to hang out, to see each other around. We deny that we’ll likely never associate with the ones we’re au revoiring again. Even in the case of break-ups, unless one party relocates to eastern Siberia, there’s still the specter of running into the one you used to love in the supermarket check-out line or tagged in a mutual friend’s facebook photo album. There’s always the door and human nature dictates that we’re loathe to ever close it all the way, for better or worse.


    And to a large degree, social media has provided us with the perfect cop out to avoid doing this. No one is ever truly gone in a Googleable world. Forget about Paris, we’ll always have Twitter. Technology means that we can check in, keep tabs, lurk in a dark corner, observe from afar. It both prevents us from making a clean break and convinces us that we’re holding up our end of the “stay in touch”  bargain 140 characters or a single status update at a time. It’s cold comfort, but we’ll take it anyway, whatever keeps us from having to watch the closing credits scroll by. The End, after all, is just a little too uncomfortably black and white for most of us to embrace.

  • Lyrics To Live By

    In true Gen Y fashion,  I stumble across most of my new musical finds on the internet and/or through word of mouth. The no tv thing lessens the possibility of being exposed to the latest top 40 music news and I don't have cause to listen to the radio unless I happen to be in someone's  car or  in a restaurant or store where it's playing. And aside from dragging my baby sis to concerts (jingle shoes!), I'm not really one for foisting my tastes off on others. To each his/her own.

    But from a life advice perspective, I would be utterly negligent if I didn't tell you, nay insist, that there are only two songs that hold the key to happiness. Two songs that should encapsulate the entirety your approach to life and love. Two and no arguments. Ready?

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    Photo by Thrift Store Addict

    If You Want to Sing Out – Cat Stevens

    This gem is from the Harold and Maude soundtrack. I'm not a fan of the movie (which I only saw for the first time about a year ago) for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that Harold looks weirdly like Clay Aiken and Maude is some sort of octogenarian harbinger of the modern manic pixie dream girl. But this song? Man, it just sums it all up. Forget about expectations. Have the guts to live the life you want. There's no one set path to “success” or happiness. You can make it all true and you can make it undo. Yeah, you, dude. You. What I soapbox about endlessly, Mr Stevens sums up in under three minutes. Well played.

    Shower the People – James Taylor

    This might just be the single most astute song about love ever written. Not even kidding. How much relationship ambiguity and needless angst would be resolved if we collectively had the courage to sack up and tell the people in our lives exactly what they mean to us, consequences be damned? And the relief that this brings? What do you plan to do with your foolish pride when you're all by yourself, alone? Screw Oprah and Dr. Phil, does it get more prescient (and melodic) than that? It doesn't, people. It does not.

    Honorable Mentions go to:

    Flashdance (What a Feeling) -Irena Cara

    Take your passion and make it happen. Enough said.

    The Gambler – Kenny Rogers

    Do you know how many people don't have a sweet clue when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away and when to run? It's called intuition, folks. If you don't have it, develop it. And if you do, start learning how to trust it.

  • Stop Worshipping At The Altar Of The Status Quo

    It will probably comes as no great shock that I have a mental list of character traits and behaviors that set my (usually very low) blood pressure skyrocketing*. Don’t we all? Okay, so maybe not everyone archives theirs in bullet list form, but still. I was reminded of one of the big-ticket annoyances recently while reading this article. Is that not the most unsatisfying ending EVER? They decided that missing each other would suck, so breaking up was a better option? I don’t even know these people and I’m vicariously angry at their passivity and limp acceptance that this is the way things had to be. God, people. These are your lives. This is your future. Start brainstorming! Don’t force me to go all Tim Gunn with the “Make it work!” exhortations.

    524844534_ecf408f869Photo by taberandrew

    And then, just this week, I got another reminder of how much unquestioning acquiescence frustrates me while scanning the comments in reply to a Warp and Weft interview I did. More than one commenter suggested that the interviewee should just resign herself to the status quo. Things are what they are in her field of work and they aren’t gonna change for a damn long time. Better get used to it, sweetheart.

    The idea that change is entirely exogenous, that things as they are now are how they’ll stay  (at least until the unnamed powers that be decide otherwise) maddens me. Resignation. A shrug of the shoulders. C’est la vie. What are you gonna do? Can’t fight city hall. Like hell you can’t. The people who change things, who make it happen, whose blood, sweat and tears make the world go around aren’t a rarefied breed. They aren’t “visionary change agents” (gag me). They don’t have grand game-changing plans.  They’re us. Let that sink in. You and me. They’re stubborn. They’re impatient. They’re not calculating the odds, the ROI, the failure rate, they simple want something and by virtue of wanting it know it be attainable/achievable and then set about the profoundly unsexy work of putting in the effort to get it. It isn’t glamorous, but the job gets done.

    We tell ourselves that they’re special because it lets us off the hook. If we call them innovators, entrepreneurs, the exception to the rule, a fluke, etc., it allows us to keep ignoring  that what they have or have done is within our own grasp if only we’re prepared to make the same sacrifices or put in the same effort. It absolves of us holding ourselves to the same standard of accomplishment if we paint a 50-year marriage or a business model for electronic journalism as utterly far-fetched. We spin apocryphal tales of their unique talents, their lucky breaks, their charmed path, because it’s less painful than admitting that they aren’t any more extraordinary than us, except that they hit the gas when we hit the brakes (or talked ourselves out of getting behind the wheel in the first place).

    It’s okay not to possess the things you sigh over others having or not to undertake the feats they’ve achieved, to skip the effort, write off the end result. That’s your choice.  What’s not okay is lying to yourself and buying into the fiction that whatever it was that you desperately need/want was out of reach in the first place and that even with all of your commitment, all of your hard work, your belief, your will, it still wouldn’t have happened, so why waste the energy? Stop kidding yourself and stop romanticizing the path to change, to happiness, to a new and better way. It’s just paved with the diligence of regular joes. And just like the road to hell, good intentions alone aren’t worth a damn in the grand scheme of things.

    *Someday, maybe I’ll share this list with you and just to even the playing field, also mention  a few of traits for which I have a wealth of appreciation and affection. But really, after I tell you those things, what would be left to know about me?

  • Your Poker Face Won't Save You

    If you’re not familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich (hasn’t everyone heard of Nickel and Dimed?), you should be. I heart her enormously. Her latest book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, was released this week and she recently did an interview about the cult of feel-good positivity with Elle magazine. In a previous post, I  briefly touched on my objection to conjuring things from the air and thinking your way to success, so of course I found myself nodding along with her words.

    3558655812_61ee8af9c5Photo by Samat Jain

    What isn’t covered in the interview and what I find interesting is the social imperative to appear outwardly happy and how much of it is driven not by prosperity gurus, religion or corporate culture, but our personal fear of expressing our own unhappiness and/or witnessing the pain or sorrow of others. There’s something unseemly about being publicly unhappy. We’re supposed to put on a brave face, soldier on, get back in the saddle, etc. or at least make all the appropriate noises about doing so when asked for the current 411 on our emotional state by well-meaning acquaintances. God forbid that you admit  that even though it’s been six months, your father’s death still feels like it happened last week or that no, you haven’t gone on a date since December when your girlfriend left you for one of her coworkers, or that you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with the tightest feeling in your chest but you know you’re much too young for it to be a heart attack.  Successful people cope!  Everyone loves a coper! They brush off life’s slings and arrows and dare fate to hit them, baby, one more time. Being anything less than a ray of sunshine or a stoic is weakness, it’s distasteful and it leaves people at a loss for how to react in the face of such naked vulnerability.

    But sometimes things aren’t all right and they aren’t okay. Pretending that they are just isolates us further. You smiling through the pain sets up a false (and guilt-inducing) example for someone else to aspire to. If you’re able to hold it together in the face of such trying circumstances, well surely they should be able to buck the hell up and do likewise, yes?  Except it’s not a contest. There’s no prize at the end of the day for keeping up the most realistically impassive facade in the face of misfortune. What’s the pay-off to stuffing the hurt down inside and papering over any cracks in your happy-as-a-clam veneer? An ulcer? A drinking problem? The respect of your peers? The comforting knowledge that no matter how much things suck at least you’re the only one who knows how bad they really are? Forgive my skepticism, but none of those things keep you warm at night.

    Faking that you’re happy when you’re not isn’t a sign of strength and it isn’t a sign of moral superiority. It’s driven by the fear that presenting anything less than your best face is just asking to be rejected and shunned. It’s the gnawing belief that you are only likeable or loveable when you’re on top of the world. And you know what?  That soul-deep insecurity is every bit as sad as whatever pain or unhappiness you refuse to acknowledge.

  • The Limits of Multi-tasking

    Okay, y’all, so I’ve realized that attempting to crank out six in-depth pieces a week between Warp and Weft and GenMeh, plus do research for future pieces, hold down a full-time job (while hunting for another one to stave off impending unemployment) and make a gallant effort at pretending to have a buzzing social life might be stretching myself a little thin.

    To that end, I’ve decided to occasionally cross-post W&W items to GenMeh as appropriate, primarily via a once-a-week wrap-up of what I’ve been up to over there vs. linking to individual stories as they go up. Of course, you’re invited to read W&W at the source, but you’ll also have the opportunity to check in here on Fridays to get a summary of recent posts.  Other than that, GenMeh’s content will remain as original, scintillating and regular as ever.

    This week on Warp and Weft:

    Estee Lauder, Meghan McCain And Why Image Is Everything

    Starting today (Oct 16), Estee Lauder will be running a promotion offering women free social media makeovers at its cosmetics counters in Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks. Yes, complimentary make-up and photo sessions (complete with “minor retouching”) to ensure that one’s social networking  profile image is  picture perfect. Really? Seriously? F’reals? Has it come to this? Please do not make me long for the only recently bygone days of media consternation over high schoolerssexting risque snapshots and Captain Obvious career expert articles about the fact that a pictorial Facebook chronicle of your spring break escapades might come back to haunt you on a future job search. Read more…

    Social Media Stats Are Sexy, But Lack Substance

    It’s always a good day when you can break out a Mark Twain quote. In this case, his words (as borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli or another coiner) about lies, damned lies and statistics came to mind when a tweet from a well-known Gen Y career expert happened to catch my eye yesterday – 39% of people under age 35 check Twitter 10 times a day, it (and the ensuing retweeting frenzy) declared. That’s quite a statement, yes?  I’ve never been one to take grandiose declarations at face value, so I decided to do a little digging (and a little quick and dirty debunking if it came to that). Read more…

    Free Career Advice for Katie and Kristy Barry

    This weekend, I read a feature in the New York Times about Katie and Kristy Barry, twin sisters from Ohio who had moved to NYC to conquer the journalism world.  A year and half out of college and they’re working odd jobs, living in a two-bedroom apartment with their brother and another roommate and dreaming of scattering their CVs over Manhattan from a plane, inventing a lipstick case microphone and sighing over their need for a “life coach” to help them figure out what they should do with said lives. Their story is painfully typical and I suppose it speaks to a certain pervasive pop cultural ethos that as I was reading it, I was thinking about the potential for a new NBC dramedy. Let’s say an update on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where there are two Marys, NYC replaces Minneapolis and making it after all isn’t a hat-tossing given but a painful (and often hilarious) weekly work-in-progress. Screenplay to come, of course. Read more…

  • As The World Turns: Realizing That The Universe Doesn't Have A Center

    Today’s subject has been on my radar for a while, but I was reminded of it the other day while burdening JW with my coffee-fueled theories about the myopia of those who believe that social media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are completely commonplace, when, in fact, the average 22 year-old on the street is texting, not Twittering, downloading their music for “free” vs. using iTunes and has likely never even heard of Google Wave.

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    Photo by ToastyKen

    All of this is a roundabout way of mourning the big picture perspective so many of us seem to lack. We’re so convinced that what absorbs our attention, gets us all hot and bothered and takes up our time and mental real estate must matter as much to everyone else because it’s naturally just that important. We fall down the rabbit hole, miss the forest for the trees, crank our camera’s zoom up as high as it will go and glorify the details at the expense of the panoramic shot. We lose our ability to put events in context. Our highs are stratospheric, ours lows crushing. The sun rises and sets on monthly sales figures, speaking points for the CEO by 3:00 PM, a thesis on a Marxist deconstruction of the Millennium Development Goals, free-range child rearing or the local hardcore scene.

    It’s a big ol’ scary world out there and it’s only natural that we try to break its enormity and complexity down into manageable pieces instead of attempting to think about all of the nuts and bolts at once and risk ending up cowering under the bed clutching a sock monkey and wrapped in a Snuggie. Becoming all about one thing gives us an opportunity to exert the control we might not have over other aspects of our lives. Sure, you might feel like a crappy girlfriend, a distant brother, an apathetic employee, but your website got 75 000 hits this month, you have a nose for wine that any top-flight sommelier would kill for or you can conjugate Latin like no one’s business. It’s self-identity in life raft form and by God, you’re gonna hang onto it like an extra in Titanic. It’s called putting all of your validation eggs in one basket and it’s a strategy that will eventually come back to haunt you.

    And when we get the Galileo wake-up call that the whole world doesn’t revolve around what we think it does, well, let’s just say the feeling isn’t pleasant. I speak from experience, of course. Once upon a time, I lived and breathed freedom of the press. Eventually figuring out that my passion wasn’t exactly a college-wide sentiment and that I had perhaps thrown myself head-long into a one-woman unwinnable war of attrition all but broke my cold little heart. But it also humbled me and made me a much more pragmatic person in the years since. I’ve learned that everyone has their hobby horses and their white whales, that what seems as if it is a matter of life and death to me wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar to the barista brewing up my coffee or the elderly man sitting next to me on the bus. I no longer allow myself the luxury of believing that I’m one of the universe’s VIPs and that there is any sort of special significance or game-changing status attached to the ideas, fields, pursuits and interests that absorb me. And I encourage you to start doing likewise.

    Step backward and keep stepping (watch out for trees, though) until the molehills start appearing less mountainous. Keep stepping until your personal landscape starts looking less like you’re viewing it through a distorted fun house mirror and more to a scale that reflects the social, economic, cultural and political realities of one tiny little planet inhabited by 6.8 billion people who all believe steadfastly in the universality of their own particular priorities, loves and losses.

    It’s scary, it’s humbling as hell (and it might take you a while to deal with  how insignificant and empty it feels to no longer believe in linchpins), but it’s also a relief. You’re not Atlas; you’re just a regular old single-minded narcissist like the rest of us.

    P.S. Social media is not the Second Coming. F’reals.

  • Bonnie Tyler Be Damned: We're Not Holding Out For A Hero

    My mother and I were recently discussing religion (can’t remember if this was before or after I threatened to become a Quaker). When she mentioned having been brought up to respect and revere members of the priesthood, I realized that I simply could not relate. Not even a little bit.

    3447538612_f5d6f00020Photo by bobster855

    And it’s hardly limited to clergy; I don’t have pro forma  respect for anyone in authority and I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone among Gen Y. A straw poll of coworkers, friends and acquaintances confirms this absence of reverence. Not that a questioning of the powers that be and mourning their feet of clay is a new phenomenon. After all, Simon and Garfunkel were bemoaning the dearth of heroes in American  popular culture all the way back in 1968 with Mrs. Robinson. But theirs was a different loss of respect. They still believed in the idea of heroes and held out hope for the return of upstanding public figures to serve as role models. But I’d argue that today’s twenty and thirtysomethings don’t. We’re civic atheists, while the previous generation were merely agnostics.  Instead of the mythic Joe DiMaggio, we got Barry Bonds.  Talk about the short end of the stick. We’ve grown up with touchstones ranging  from the break-up of the Soviet Union to O.J. Simpson’s media circus murder trial to our own parents’ divorces.  We came of age knowing firsthand the fallibility and the impermanence of leaders and institutions and having ample evidence of their weaknesses served up in a 24/7 multimedia news cycle. Whether you’re the public figure or the potential audience, there’s nowhere to hide. Is it any wonder that we refuse to pay our due deference to those who don’t deserve it?

    This lack of faith directly feeds our collective apathy. We’ve turned ironic detachment into an art form. We know we’re going to get burned, so why invest fully? Be it in a job, a relationship, a president, a suburban all-American future. Better to keep one eye on the clock, the door, the horizon than to go all in and risk feeling like a fool when the bottom drops out yet again. It’s commitment phobia writ larger than life and we’re all guilty of it. And it shows in the way we interact with each other and with the rest of the world. Man, does it show.

    So, the million dollar question is what exactly is left to believe in when it seems as if nothing and no one truly stands the test of time? Talk about looking for the rock of ages in the midst of an avalanche. I wish I had the answer, kids. I’d be more than happy to share the enlightenment or at least parlay it into an appearance on Oprah.

  • Stepping On The Punchline

    Something to tide you over until Monday’s musings, which will most probably be about the death of pro forma respect for authority figures among our generation, FYI.

    Also, if  you cannot tell that the above-linked list is meant in jest, I would request you to stop reading this site and never return again. KTHXBAI.

    Edited to add: Two more morsels to fill the weekend gap.

  • Social Media Soothes The Savage Beast

    I’m using my lunch break to tell you about my recent brush with online musical kismet.

    Unless you’re coming here from W&W, in which case, welcome! This is GenMeh and here are a few samples of what I’m about.