What Made 2009 Suck So Badly? We Did.
Did you have fun in 2009?
Yeah. Neither did I. There were high points, to be sure.
But come on. The year was pretty dreary and you know it.
It was almost as if 2009 was simply destined to suck— like everyone knew going into it not to expect much, lest you face colossal disappointment when 2009’s inevitable complete and total shittiness finally surfaced.
And said shittiness did surface, many times, before the year was up. And while 2009 wasn’t such a bad year by some benchmarks (certainly it could have been worse?) everyone I know (myself included) hated being there.
The popular take on this year, I guess, is that a miserable economy makes for a bummer of a time. But if you, like I, am part of the loose confederation of narcissists they’re calling “Generation Y”, then let’s face it: We’re still too young for a recession to fuck up our year entirely. It dampened the mood, to be sure. But we’re supposed to be out laughing it off over beers, falling in love, making mistakes. A diminishing 401k balance can’t be to blame for an entire year’s worth of rainy days.
And, hey: Last year, we got our president! So it wasn’t politics. We’ve been at war for seven+ years, so I doubt the reality of an perpetual war against a world-old culture had much to do with this pervasive, thick cloud of ennui we all traipsed through for twelve months straight. And culturally, 2009 gave us some excellent literature, music, film, journalism, art and science— so I’m not convinced the year’s goodwill drought was drawn from a dry humanities well.
I am convinced, however, that most of us spending more than 1/4th of our waking hours on the Internet, did, in fact, have a lot to do with why we spent the other 3/4ths of our time kvetching about what a bad time we were having in good ol’ AD 2009. (That’s the statistic, by the way: Our generation spent one fourth of 2009 online. Sort of a bitter pill, no?)
So, snark this: If you want a happier 2010, wrap yourself free of the Web. No more “hipster” blogs. No more Facebook. No trend-chasing and anxiety about possibly “missing” the next cultural tidal wave.
Please, Gen-Y: Chill the fuck out.
We’re all in this thing together. Let’s start acting like it.
Our generation, us nebulous “Y-ers”, as it has been noted by pretty much everyone who seriously studies things like “generations”, feels a safety in numbers that no previous generation ever felt. In the same breath, however, we have a very serious, insatiable urge to “stand out from the crowd.” It’s a weird stasis, to say the least: We Are Individuals, Dammit (But! Look How Many Facebook Friends We Have!)
The success of “social networking” in the ‘00s can only really mean a small number of things. To me, it means we’re a generation of people to whom appearances matter. A lot. We seem to be constantly jockeying for a position that allows us to be seen in better light— whether it’s the dim light of a smartphone screen or the big blue glow of the TV. This “look at me!” impulse is nothing new, I guess. What’s new is the sad lengths we watch others go to be seen. And then we go and make fun of them for it.
We’ll trample anyone who we perceive to be smarter, better, more talented than us— we’ll comment on their YouTube video with unfiltered vitriol; we’ll blog about how their latest record is overrated, contrived, and How Dare They for even trying.
Lest they succeed. Lest their dreams are realized. Lest someone else is Happy before you, personally, are Happy.
Give me a fucking break.
You most likely don’t need me to tell you this, but here it goes: Blogs have a vested interest in telling you, every day, how much everything sucks. Seriously. That’s how it works. The attitude is, simply: “It’s shitty out there. Stick with us and we’ll help you through it.” That’s, in a nutshell, how people make money from information. It’s how advertising has worked for the past eighty years. It’s how TV news has been functioning for decades, which is certainly one reason, I imagine, why nobody’s reading newspapers. Newspapers are objective— there’s nobody to tell you why you need to know the information they’re providing. Nobody’s “spinning” anything at you— nobody’s pandering or “summing up.” There’s no constant, weird, existential panic about the intellectually-absurd notion of perhaps “missing” something. Just the facts. Yawn.
Here’s another thing you might already know: Nobody makes a Facebook photo album of themselves sitting alone in their room on a Saturday night listening to Morrissey records. Nobody tweets, “Wow. Another pregnancy scare!” or “Just lost my job again!” The point being that Facebook and the rest of them are there for you to sell yourself to others who are doing the same thing to you. It’s not real. Believe in it hard enough— worship it, even, as I suspect some do— and your own little life looks pretty sad by comparison, no matter who you are.
So there are just two off-the-top-of-my-head examples of how logging on equals bumming out. Sorry to be a killjoy, but here it comes: The Internet is The New Television And They’re Both Pretty Bad For Your Psyche When You Get Right Down To It.
(A quick word about “bad”— “bad” like, Taco Bell, not “bad” like murder. This isn’t about shaming anyone into abandoning something that they like. My contention is just that, if you, like me, feel just the tiniest bit squeamish or nervous about spending 1/4th of your very limited time in a macabre digital simulacrum— if you, like me, get bummed out easily by what amounts to a vast, cultural lobster bucket— then you can do something about it. Entertainment, like junk food, seems so benign on its surface— “it’s fun!”, etc. But what TV did first— and what the Internet is doing now— isn’t so much augmenting social interaction as it is replacing it. What I’m sort of suggesting here is that maybe we ought to be smarter about the degree to which we allow the Internet to corrode the bond between us and each other.)
So. What made 2009 suck so badly? I submit that We Did. Which, really, is great news. Because it means 2010 can be different. And we can do something about it.
I’m begging you here, Gen-Y: Let’s do this together. Let’s kill the Industry of Cool, once and for all. We can make it hip to give a shit about something bigger than ourselves again. Let’s stop preening for Cobrasnake cameras at parties; let’s stop texting during drinks. Let’s start saying “yes” again— knowing damn well it’s so much harder than simply saying “no.”
Let’s quit doing the whole irony-pose: If you like something, like it!— no more “It’s so bad it’s good”, “guilty pleasure” relativism. Let’s collectively embrace the idea that there are more important things in this short life than how we appear to strangers— things more important than being famous on MySpace or making sure it appears as if you had a better time last weekend than your contemporaries. Things like kindness, love, family, community— things for which we used to live but have now become “cliches.”
Let’s use the old tools for social networking: Smiles, waves, eye contact— encouragement, support, laughter.
Let’s quit shoving each other around, pulling each other down, making fun of each other, hunting for differences when we share so many similarities. Let’s not give ultimate critical credence to feckless, niggardly music bloggers. Let’s stop turning everything into one big parody of something else.
Let’s quit turning nearly every real-life experience into just another digital anecdote.
Let’s quit twittering.
(I promise you: An experience is still an experience even if you don’t share it.)
It’s the paradox of the decade, really: That the most exciting cultural and technological innovation of our time, designed to connect us with our world, in fact wound up isolating us from it and from one another.
So. 20/20 hindsight. Lesson learned.
Let’s not do it again tho, k?
;)
2 months ago