Okay, but we can at least agree that Sarah Sherman is a god-damn godsend, right? Like, even if you wanted to call her an insider's version of an outsider artist, or whatever, she is just a very funny person who has seemingly been able to steer the reins of SNL ever-so-slightly toward her sensibility.
Chronicling decline is always dangerous because our sensitivity to criticism is usually rooted in some childhood dismay. But chronicling decline as this piece does wonderfully is part of being authentic, of being true to some sense of continuing to develop ourselves. Thank you.
It's not like we're taking down fences, even. Just rolling around on the ground, occasionally knocking one over, not caring. All the narcissism of the Me generation, but without even the vision or structure.
Don't watch SNL so didn't read thru your oped. But it would be nice to here counters to your opeds on many of the stuff you oped about. A dialogue of what your want to discuss juxtaposed what your guest thinks. It would add another dimention to an otherwise soliloquy.
"The parents will attempt to feed them and they won’t even look up. You can watch them, failing to develop essential social and communication skills as their family talks and engages and they fall deeper into the black mirror. And, you know, I think that’s bad, and I don’t care if people think I’m self-righteous, and I don’t think parenting without a tablet should be assumed to be that hard considering parents got it done for 300,000 years."
That reminds me of the time I had to do a pest removal job at this house, Momsie had been off her tits since noon on pills and wine, the two kids glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, killing baddies on the big screen.
They were going to have Cocoa Puffs for dinner. No lie. I offered to make them dinner. Dad told me not to bother, the kids would never eat it. Hamburgers? "They won't eat it it, not if it didn't come from a fast food joint." Spaghetti? "We're not eating that shit!" One of the kids mumbled. What kind of jacked up human kitten doesn't like spaghetti?
These people were not poor, BTW. Far from it. Tomcats, as a rule, are not know for family values, but I could not wait to get out of that house.
That's as bad as the college students who wind up with scurvy or other disorders because they can't or won't eat anything outside their garbage diet unless forced.
As a parent of teens, I just find it amusing that this age group unironically wears pajamas, sweats, and slippers to school almost every day. My kids know how to dress when the occasion calls for it; otherwise it might be more distressing. But adults trying to act like high school kids is annoying, and the schtick of adult babies like John Fetterman is pathetic.
I noticed that this was approximately true (at least in nice suburbs in NY/CT/NJ) when my kids were in high school 7-8 years ago, with the exception that there were still jocks and unathletic kids. I mean, there were stoners, but they weren't a publicly identifiable group with particular styles of dress and haircuts. There were kids that skated, but they were just kids that skated, there were no obvious (to me) dress or other identifiers. I think I don't hate that? That aspect of 1980s/90s clique culture always struck me as such an affectation. And maybe in particular kids walking around looking like whored-up vampires or Sid Vicious when they lived in a 5br colonial and were on their way to trig class possibly seemed to be the sort of affectation everyone involved would be embarrassed about later. So here's to my children's generation: at least you won't feel like idiots when you show your children your old photo albums someday. You'll still have been idiots, but you'll have done it your own way.
In my kids' high school there is a large "emo" crowd that overlaps almost entirely with the LGBTQ+ crew, made up of students, mostly girls, who have adopted names that are typically nature nouns or single letters. The reality is this alternative cohort has much more rigid rules and norms than the normies who they are defining themselves against.
My post sounds kind of bitchy but I'm glad those kids have their thing going on, since high school is hard enough and kids need friends. But having maximum conformity within the alternative crowd is a perfect trigger for me to feel really old.
As someone who hated "church clothes" growing up, I have no problem living in blue jeans and sweatpants. Do people still shit on each other for wearing the "wrong" clothes?
I mean, for some reason I decided to like jazz, so I gave up on having relatable artistic tastes a long time ago.
Not “free” jazz* - let’s be real, here - but, you know, music with sharp 11ths and flat 13ths and shit. I wonder how that sort of thing goes down in poptimism land?
* Though I suppose it depends what you call free jazz; I mean, Mingus was basically doing free jazz in 1956 with “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” and that’s pretty hip if you ask me.
Free jazz does not go down in poptimism land one tiny little bit. I like it, personally, and have for many years, but the way it pushes your ears is too much for those who only like less challenging music.
It went along with my Gen X attitude and my love for the difficult and harsh. But when I played it, I was always looking for something to soften it up.
Music is all about growth, really, which is not what poptimism is about. It is a stunted world, celebrating children. Not that there's anything wrong with celebrating childhood, but it has to mingle with the adult world, not the other way around.
It's not just that free jazz doesn't go down in poptimism land; I doubt *any* jazz does. Or, if it does, they're just sort of like, "yeah, I know jazz - Kind of Blue!" Yeah, okay, poptimist dude - name all of the personnel on the album, including both piano players.
(I'm not, by the way, knocking Kind of Blue - it's one of the best-known jazz albums of all time for a reason. Even there, I'm a weirdo and my favorite track is "Freddie Freeloader," and my favorite part of it is Cannonball's solo, which I'm sorry but he plays absolute rings around Coltrane and Miles).
I always thought it was funny in ca. 2020-2021 when everyone was being bullied into professing their love of Black art (or art that can be said to be "Black" by the transitive property, see the poptimist narrative), and basically no one remembered that jazz exists. If that's not Black music, I have no idea what is.
Pitchfork regularly reviews new jazz records and there are burgeoning jazz scenes, particularly in LA and London (I assume the NY jazz scene will survive any cultural climate, like the proverbial cockroach). In many ways it’s a good time for jazz music. It’s not like the early 20th century when jazz was culturally dominant, but it’s still a cultural force.
That’s good to hear - having said what I said, I don’t really follow the scene as such. Probably the contemporary jazz musician I listen to most these days is Aaron Parks, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. Well, him and Ben Allison, though he’s way less well known (unfortunately!).
Two of my favorite moments in live jazz viewing were both in New York - seeing Ben Allison in 2004, and seeing the Mingus Big Band in 2007. For the latter, there weren’t a ton of people that night, so I was able to sit basically at the stage, and when Sue Mingus dropped in, she more or less sat next to me, which for me was a big deal.
"It used to be considered kind of trashy and embarrassing to read US Weekly, but celebrity obsession got laundered in under extremely dubious third wave feminism logic, and here we are in a cultural place where questioning a fixation on celebrity logic will get you called an elitist and a misogynist. The easy way, the way of comfort and self-soothing, was once again laundered into public morals."
What happened was the feminists had to come up with a theoretical justification for reading People and liking the music and schtick of Madonna but at the same time, remain Good Feminists.
Or: maybe is that an "easy" way to explain something that is hard to explain––namely why certain cultural styles and genres (like melodrama, opera, early cinema, pop music, disco) have historically attracted mass audiences of largely women and gay men?
This goes back at least two centuries. It's a real thing and there are straight man counterparts: gaming, fantasy narratives, super-hero universes. If we don't just write it off as symptoms of the psychic weakness of women or the narcissism of men, then it is actually a hard thing to try to account for.
People have tried to provide those accounts and it wasn't just to generate permission to read and consume trashy stuff.
Just because it's women and gay men doesn't make it better.
Although I could not care less about superheroes and the like, either, yeah, humans try to come up with theoretical justifications for liking that as well.
I wasn't contesting whether it was bad or not so bad. I was saying that "humans suck" is not a sufficient explanation for how fantasy and virtuality have come to matter so much.
I consider myself a feminist, but I get lost when people go beyond wanting women to be full, strong, and character-driven and living the lives they choose to the best of their ability. I've never understood why that was such a hateful position, though I have been hated for it. Maybe I'll make a meme and post it everywhere.
Back when I was a fundie, we had to justify everything we read/listened to as to whether it was Christian and acceptable or Unchristian and sinful. No idea why liberals decided to adopt that line of thought. Consumption does not equal morality.
I don't quite know how to explain it, but something that's struck me a lot over the last few years is just how helpless we all are to resist a critical mass of _want_.
Like, you get enough people who want something to be true, and enough other people who think they can exploit that for monetary/political gain, and... welcome to your new reality.
I think that's always been true. It's just that society was more segmented and organized; wants got channeled through social groups, religion, clubs. Mass media changed that; first radio, then TV, now internet.
Right, I almost made that same caveat. I think the thing that mostly gets me isn’t so much that change happens (people have always wanted things, etc) but more so the fact that we can sit here and watch it in real time and articulate all the reasons it’s wrong and dissect every ounce of bullshit at play and challenge the base desires behind it and yet… it’s just going to happen anyway. And obviously, you know, you could say the same thing about a lot of historical cultural changes that I probably support, this is just sort of how change happens, for better or worse, the moral component is subjective, etc etc.
While I agree with this mostly, it's important to recognize that whether or not you want something does not determine its truth value. This means that the truth can either be something you don't want at all or it can be everything you ever wanted but didn't think you could have.
Desire can be exploited, sure, but not by necessity.
You raise some good points, but I have to admit the time I tried watching Reality Bites I could only think of how poorly it had aged and how unbelievably narcissistic the characters were. I wanted to like it too, but to my mind it had aged like milk. I guess I was pretty cranky at that point in my life, but it's like "What does being true to yourself even mean in this movie? Childish, self-destructive acts of rebellion and producing self indulgent art that no one wants but you?"
I'll hate on poptimism with the best of them, but the best music has generally been underground anyways. At times peace has been made with mainstream success for a short while, but there's no way to square the circle of pandering to the lowest common denominator for dollars with producing interesting art. The artistic cream doesn't rise to the top in the free market, the things which sell the most do and they are seldom the same. To bring it back to Gen X I always admired how the hardcore kids of the early 80s basically built a scene up out of nothing, DIY. That part is the same as it ever was and the musical mainstream never wanted anything to do with them either.
To be fair, Reality Bites is a highly caricaturized rendition of Gen X slacker YA's. It's a bit of an eye-roll to watch it now, but I still like it...if only because of the feels and I like all of the actors in it.
You might try the movie Slackers by Linklater. It's 1990 but still very Gen X, and much better at their portrayal than Reality Bites was.
"Relatedly, consider crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types. This whole genre of young man, who emerged largely from the Rogan-sphere but whose presence has grown and grown, may partially be defined by stuff like resistance to vaccines or a rejection of woke niceties or the pursuit of abstracted masculinity. But the most operative way their values play out in real life lies in the absolute rejection of the legitimacy of going to college, getting a good job, working hard, and slowly building wealth for retirement. Of living a normal 9 to 5 life. That notion has become poisonous to generations of men; it’s synonymous with being a chump, with falling for the ruse, for surrendering to the machine."
Here, I'd disagree somewhat.
Once you recognize that the system is rigged, and not in your favor, that unless you have luminous and undeniable talent in finance math, ahtletics, or something comparable, that the people who do get ahead in life are basically successful grifters (eveer ask yourself why so many of the "30 Under 30" list are now cooling off in prison?), the only thing that working hard and playing by the rules will get you is old.
So you might as well promote yourself as shamelessly as possible, and if everything is a scam, look with your eyes always peeled for the main chance and when you see it, you gamble big.
"You gotta swing like a man, because getting walks will never get you off the island!" - Tony Pena
That narrative is the problem. The game is stacked against you, but it's not *rigged*. You can still enjoy a good life relative to the vast majority of humanity past and present in the US and other Western countries. There's many modern indignities to modern life that can make us feel like the game is rigged and the fight against them is noble and worthy, but we can't lose sight of the fact that we live an era of incredible material abundance in which the vast majority of people can achieve their basic needs of shelter, food, etc,. We can have discussions about the quality of the shelter, food, etc. and they way those resources are distributed, but to deBoer's point, we shouldn't loose sight of the fact that this is not a uniquely difficult time in material terms
You're right, we need to be wise to the specific ways that we get screwed out of things that people of older generations had better and figure out how to fight that power. But that doesn't mean that we're back to the textile mills and coal mines. People of the last generation lived in incredible material abundance, as we do now. The great shame is that in recent times of great economic growth, it is those without means who realize the smallest share of these gains, while those at the top realize the highest.
If you've already conceded that life in the middle class is just chumpdom, you cave to the narrative that the system is unworkable and can't be reformed. Which is ridiculous because we have extraordinarily low levels of material privation in historic terms. We need to tweak the system so that we reduce wealth inequality the same we did in the US at the beginning of the last century. This is not an insurmountable hurdle.
You have a point and it’s sad. Whatever declines Freddy dB is accurately chronicling, the problem isn’t so much the dress code as the evident truth that our wealthy overlords consider white collar office workers to be disposable commodities, paid as little as possible and subject to frequent layoffs or as quickly as possible replaced by AI. And the jobs are Steven Graber “bullshit jobs” so there’s that sense of dissatisfaction as well with the “straight” career.
Of course, suits are necessary in court, finance etc. but those are more well paid so wearing an expensive uniform makes sense there.
No problem. Don’t mind the correction. My bad. I’ve taken to checking every doubtful source on wiki or google but sometimes it’s too much a pain. Yeah, RIP David Garber z”l.
And godammit I can't help myself. It's David Graeber. He wrote so much great stuff that people need the right search terms. Thank you for even mentioning him!!
There is inherent dignity and goodness in doing work that is materially helpful for other humans, even if it is less remunerative than pathetic get-rich-quick schemes. That truth is lost on the types Freddie is referring to here.
Yeah, but how many jobs are there that materially help people? And how many of them also pay zilch because either there's an endless supply of bright-eyed youngsters looking to join, or no one wants to do it, so it's dumped on those with no other choice.
This all kind of manifests in people like Taylor Swift or Donald Trump. A musician and politician for the subset of the population with little intellectual curiosity and satisfaction with being sheeple. They see the corporate influences and massive amount of money to lead you to think and feel a certain way about them and have no problem being influenced in the exact way the monied interests desire.
Perhaps the only way this is sustainable is through the manufactured outrage against these personalities. The best way to keep people from seeing the lack of authenticity, the selling out, the naked celebrity worship is to feed them stories of them being wronged. To this end, they tap into the stock victim narrative that exists for both left- and right-coded public figures to generate sympathy that can blind them from thinking critically about why they have so much sympathy for such flawed and often morally bankrupt people.
I would add Kamala Harris to your list. She was a nobody, a laughingstock, until orders went out that she was God's gift to the country and a million smartphones lit up and the gray people talking in unison meme came to life. Add to that her parade of paid celebrity endorsements and you have another example of how manipulable people who have Instagram where their personality and tastes belong really are.
The forces that be couldn't break out of this new mold for how to sell a political candidate: relentlessly selling her to the ingroup that was already going to vote for her.
A plurality (at least) of Trump voters just want to watch the world burn out of spite because they perceive everything as broken. They don't actually like or respect him.
It's often shocking to me how many college educated people who think of themselves as fairly sophisticated media consumers and/or critics are legitimately dumbfounded at the idea that somebody might read War and Peace or Moby Dick.
Or that a grown-ass adult might be uninterested in Disney/Harry Potter/Marvel/Taylor Swift/social media/Star Wars/Wicked/Barbie/whatever crass garbage has been extruded in our direction this week.
There are cultural heroes who proudly declare that there is no reason for people to either write of read books: anything worth absorbing should be able to be conveyed in a 6 paragraph post online.
There are Silicon Valley demi-gods who opine about how (based on human population numbers) Shakespeare can't possibly be a great writer.
So in some spheres, it is a sign of intelligence that you haven't been snookered into believing the non-verifiable judgments or claims of useless intellectual luddites.
`There are cultural heroes who proudly declare that there is no reason for people to either write of read books'
Was rather startled to learn that until quite recently the streamer Destiny was someone who didn't see the value in reading books (interview on The Adam Friedland Show). He's being held up by his fans, who watch him everyday, as an intellectual/thinker/debater and he's just now seeing the value in books?
Didn't realize how right Norman Finkelstein was about him.
I share some of DeBoer's dismay in this piece. It's distressing to me the way celebrity culture (female coded), and the more male-coded cultures of gaming, fantasy, and super-hero universes, seem to be virtual worlds that more and more people use to indulge their more infantile impulses. As a lit prof I keep trying to do my little part to try to drag people into reading stuff that doesn't go down easy. It feels like I'm losing the fight.
But unless we just default to a glib story about decline (kids these days), I have to think there are sociocultural reasons for these trends. People with education and jobs that mostly keep them out of debt are not living in the Worst Time Ever. But I have to think something is prompted so many to feel a need or at a desire for the self-soothing.
My guess is that some of the big foundational things that provided existential security for middle-class people have been unveiled as mythic or precarious. It's hard to find solid ground to stand on, and folks are a lot more susceptible to feeling powerless––regardless of their relative security they actually have.
Boomers and Xers grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation from the Ruskies, yet the apparent dread from a rogue state or terrorist nuking an American city is marginal at best these days...despite living in a post 9/11 world.
What does seem to elicit real dread is never being able to retire, owning your own home, or a hospital bill. Maybe people think having a good life really is more important than just having life. Carville is quite dated these days, but perhaps he's right about "It's the economy, stupid."
Yeah. My pet theory is that the young people who were headed to the professional-managerial class are sensing that the super rich intend to wage war on them.
People like Musk and finance titans are fed up with both democratic politics and with ordinary professionals. They have contempt for all the annoying college-degree types who believe in government regulation, blather on about history, are soft-headed about "racial realism," and can't grasp the truth of the math-based domains of AI and crypto. They want to make the PMC class more or less extinct, with no more ability to put any checks on the brilliant entrepreneurs than the working class can.
If you are in your 20s or early 30s right now, you might have headed to college thinking you'd be able to secure a pretty good middle-class life if you could get a job as a manager or a lawyer. But now you sensing you are despised and seen as useless from groups both below (non-college folks who hate your supposed know-it-all pretensions) and above (the masters of the universe who are sick of busy-bodies with small bank accounts trying to restrict them with environmental studies and social justice nonsense). If you didn't jump on the AI train or attach yourself to their tech kingdoms, you might feel––not irrationally––that the security and social status you thought you'd be likely to acquire might be nothing but a mirage.
I've been touting future shock, a la Alvin Toffler, as the explanation for about fifteen years now, but it's from the late Sixties and everyone wants to think they have discovered a whole new answer.
It's decadence. We lack any kind of meaning, any kind of purpose, except what our therapists help us extract from our novels or what capitalism sells us. Without some kind of struggle, there's nothing but waiting for death.
Except Western societies have had the same problem (no inherent meaning to life that is shared by everyone) for a very long time. When Durkheim develops his theory of "anomie" in the 1890s, he was addressing a perceived problem people had been fretting about for decades.
So it's hard to use the decadence idea to account for the shift DeBoer describes as happening in the last 10 or so years.
Does Durkheim try to explain the origins of his position? Glancing at wikipedia I see some excerpts about 19thC industrialization being a major culprit for this, but is there more to it than that?
Durkheim and other thinkers were trying to figure out how modern conditions were changing not just external reality (production and labor, cities, etc) but internal human subjectivities. Industrialized capitalism did a lot to speed up these changes but the transformation to "modernity" starts earlier.
The progress of so-called civilization was producing greater wealth and scientific knowledge but was also eroding traditional cultural/religious beliefs and relations, leaving many people feeling disoriented and ungrounded about the purpose of living.
His theory is derived from both empirical and theoretical origins. One of Durkheim's observations was that data showed rates of suicide were far, far higher in "developed" European and Euro-American societies than in pre-modern societies. People who lived in more traditional societies were a lot poorer and died sooner but did not seem to suffer from the despair of purposelessness common among European people.
I think the millenial sense of humor developed a really atrocious habit of using self-deprecation to insulate itself from genuine reflection. By making a self-deprecating joke about our shitty habits as we're indulging them, it's like we make ourselves immune from criticism--I already acknowledged I'm a garbage human and wasn't it so funny, so what's the sense in dwelling on it? (Yes, I'm a millenial.)
Think pieces like what you've described that shill for obviously bad things give pseudo-intellectual depth to the habit of humorous personal unaccountability. If, on an especially dark night of the soul, you find yourself really questioning something clearly bad about yourself and contemplating whether you shouldn't maybe be a less bad person, never fear--the ostensibly respectable, published excuse is out there.
The watercarrying for social media and overuse of the internet generally is especially shameful. Find a single nice story of a professor from a marginalized demographic who got a tenure-track job due to their Twitter activity, gesture generally in the direction of the Arab Spring without dwelling too much on it, make much of unavoidable gaps in the research, and then conclude with a disarming (and now dated) reference to cat memes. Voila, degeneracy defended.
All that said, I do think there's one aspect of modern life that is "harder" specifically with respect to kids' screen time: screens are exponentially more common, they're cheaper, they're portable, and because of the nature of the programming available, they're more or less constantly a source of amusement. TV was much less interesting to kids when, at least for some parts of the day, their only choices were local news and reruns of old peoples' shows. The inescapability of screen-based entertainment is new and a different kind of "hard."
This last point can be broadened out to life more generally--it's much, much easier to be the overindulgent version of a garbage human because the means to indulge your garbage tendencies are relatively cheap and basically endless. This life is still warfare, and the enemy is firehosing any attempt at self-discipline.
I'm not saying that justifies people in not striving to be less gross, but I do think it's one particular challenge that's harder. Rich people in history with access to material plenty, wracked with gout, don't seem to have been much better when it came to the stuff they had in abundance.
I can't even take my kids to the dentist without blaring screens in their faces. They literally put giant TVs on the ceiling. I ask for them to be turned off and the staff look at me like I have three heads. It is definitely hard to raise screen-lite kids but the difficulty just makes me more determined.
Awhile back I was in a discussion about childhood with one of my Millennial colleagues, we were talking about when the internet and home computers started to become common. I mentioned I didn't even have the internet until college, and he kind gave me a sad look. He said he was at least glad he had the internet growing up, that he wouldn't have liked childhood/teens without it. Perplexed, I said I was really glad we didn't have it at all, and wouldn't have it any other way.
The confused and pitying look he had on his face was priceless, like he couldn't imagine anyone NOT wanting the internet around as a kid. Says a lot about the world kids grow up in these days I think.
I hate dressing up, but I pulled on stockings and a dress and stepped into heels for the symphony last weekend. I told my young daughters - also in dresses and tights - that we dress up to show respect, through our efforts to look our best, for the musicians and their efforts to present us with their very best to create an excellent performance. And because part of our family values are that we do what is right, not what is easy or comfy.
We encountered people in tees and shorts and flip flops and, memorably, fleece pajama pants and a ratty t-shirt paired with slippers. At the symphony.
I remember there was a classmate who used to go to early afternoon classes in college dressed like that and you could feel everyone lose respect for her. It's one thing if you're at an 8 AM class hungover, but if it's 1 PM, put on some actual pants and shoes. I wouldn't imagine going somewhere like that for anything that required tickets.
Screentime is a tool like any other. Would you hand a child a knife and let them run around with it?
Dopamine addiction is a real thing and it is nasty, nasty stuff. Don't give your child a potentially incurable illness and argue poorly about the responsibility of vaccines while you yourself try to accumulate a following just to prove your worth. It's a helluva life.
Okay, but we can at least agree that Sarah Sherman is a god-damn godsend, right? Like, even if you wanted to call her an insider's version of an outsider artist, or whatever, she is just a very funny person who has seemingly been able to steer the reins of SNL ever-so-slightly toward her sensibility.
Shes just a theatre brat, really
Chronicling decline is always dangerous because our sensitivity to criticism is usually rooted in some childhood dismay. But chronicling decline as this piece does wonderfully is part of being authentic, of being true to some sense of continuing to develop ourselves. Thank you.
It's not like we're taking down fences, even. Just rolling around on the ground, occasionally knocking one over, not caring. All the narcissism of the Me generation, but without even the vision or structure.
Don't watch SNL so didn't read thru your oped. But it would be nice to here counters to your opeds on many of the stuff you oped about. A dialogue of what your want to discuss juxtaposed what your guest thinks. It would add another dimention to an otherwise soliloquy.
Cheers
🎅Happy Xmas and NYs🎅
"The parents will attempt to feed them and they won’t even look up. You can watch them, failing to develop essential social and communication skills as their family talks and engages and they fall deeper into the black mirror. And, you know, I think that’s bad, and I don’t care if people think I’m self-righteous, and I don’t think parenting without a tablet should be assumed to be that hard considering parents got it done for 300,000 years."
That reminds me of the time I had to do a pest removal job at this house, Momsie had been off her tits since noon on pills and wine, the two kids glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, killing baddies on the big screen.
They were going to have Cocoa Puffs for dinner. No lie. I offered to make them dinner. Dad told me not to bother, the kids would never eat it. Hamburgers? "They won't eat it it, not if it didn't come from a fast food joint." Spaghetti? "We're not eating that shit!" One of the kids mumbled. What kind of jacked up human kitten doesn't like spaghetti?
These people were not poor, BTW. Far from it. Tomcats, as a rule, are not know for family values, but I could not wait to get out of that house.
Jesus, that’s terrifying.
I didn't even want to stick around to get rid of the pests, this home was that dysfunctional. And I've been known to eat rodents out of dumpsters!
> And I've been known to eat rodents out of dumpsters!
Talk about burying the lede. 😂
Yeah, that’s sobering.
I've never heard of a kid who doesn't like Pasghetti. wtf.
Next you'll be saying they don't like toast. Who doesn't like toast! I mean, I still eat buttered toast for a meal sometimes.
I was kind of baffled myself. That's why I mentioned spaghetti. I mean, what kind of monster won't eat spaghetti?
That's as bad as the college students who wind up with scurvy or other disorders because they can't or won't eat anything outside their garbage diet unless forced.
As a parent of teens, I just find it amusing that this age group unironically wears pajamas, sweats, and slippers to school almost every day. My kids know how to dress when the occasion calls for it; otherwise it might be more distressing. But adults trying to act like high school kids is annoying, and the schtick of adult babies like John Fetterman is pathetic.
There aren't any alternative kids in high school anymore, no skaters or stoners or goths:(
When everything is ephemeral and also physical places don't exist, why go through the effort of actually creating and/or committing to a "scene?"
I noticed that this was approximately true (at least in nice suburbs in NY/CT/NJ) when my kids were in high school 7-8 years ago, with the exception that there were still jocks and unathletic kids. I mean, there were stoners, but they weren't a publicly identifiable group with particular styles of dress and haircuts. There were kids that skated, but they were just kids that skated, there were no obvious (to me) dress or other identifiers. I think I don't hate that? That aspect of 1980s/90s clique culture always struck me as such an affectation. And maybe in particular kids walking around looking like whored-up vampires or Sid Vicious when they lived in a 5br colonial and were on their way to trig class possibly seemed to be the sort of affectation everyone involved would be embarrassed about later. So here's to my children's generation: at least you won't feel like idiots when you show your children your old photo albums someday. You'll still have been idiots, but you'll have done it your own way.
In my kids' high school there is a large "emo" crowd that overlaps almost entirely with the LGBTQ+ crew, made up of students, mostly girls, who have adopted names that are typically nature nouns or single letters. The reality is this alternative cohort has much more rigid rules and norms than the normies who they are defining themselves against.
Conforming to the non-conformist norm. At least they have standards, albeit reactionary.
My post sounds kind of bitchy but I'm glad those kids have their thing going on, since high school is hard enough and kids need friends. But having maximum conformity within the alternative crowd is a perfect trigger for me to feel really old.
As someone who hated "church clothes" growing up, I have no problem living in blue jeans and sweatpants. Do people still shit on each other for wearing the "wrong" clothes?
I mean, for some reason I decided to like jazz, so I gave up on having relatable artistic tastes a long time ago.
Not “free” jazz* - let’s be real, here - but, you know, music with sharp 11ths and flat 13ths and shit. I wonder how that sort of thing goes down in poptimism land?
* Though I suppose it depends what you call free jazz; I mean, Mingus was basically doing free jazz in 1956 with “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” and that’s pretty hip if you ask me.
Free jazz does not go down in poptimism land one tiny little bit. I like it, personally, and have for many years, but the way it pushes your ears is too much for those who only like less challenging music.
It went along with my Gen X attitude and my love for the difficult and harsh. But when I played it, I was always looking for something to soften it up.
Music is all about growth, really, which is not what poptimism is about. It is a stunted world, celebrating children. Not that there's anything wrong with celebrating childhood, but it has to mingle with the adult world, not the other way around.
It's not just that free jazz doesn't go down in poptimism land; I doubt *any* jazz does. Or, if it does, they're just sort of like, "yeah, I know jazz - Kind of Blue!" Yeah, okay, poptimist dude - name all of the personnel on the album, including both piano players.
(I'm not, by the way, knocking Kind of Blue - it's one of the best-known jazz albums of all time for a reason. Even there, I'm a weirdo and my favorite track is "Freddie Freeloader," and my favorite part of it is Cannonball's solo, which I'm sorry but he plays absolute rings around Coltrane and Miles).
I always thought it was funny in ca. 2020-2021 when everyone was being bullied into professing their love of Black art (or art that can be said to be "Black" by the transitive property, see the poptimist narrative), and basically no one remembered that jazz exists. If that's not Black music, I have no idea what is.
I'm not sure how often I've even listened to Kind of Blue. I am familiar with Cannonball Adderly though. Bullfrog Bounce, in particular.
Jazz was a very generous gift, if you ask me. We didn't deserve it.
Stop. Go now, and listen.
As C-man says, it is a classic and incredibly well known for a reason. It might actually be closest thing to a perfect record you can find.
I'm sure I'll get to it eventually. There are so many!
Pitchfork regularly reviews new jazz records and there are burgeoning jazz scenes, particularly in LA and London (I assume the NY jazz scene will survive any cultural climate, like the proverbial cockroach). In many ways it’s a good time for jazz music. It’s not like the early 20th century when jazz was culturally dominant, but it’s still a cultural force.
That’s good to hear - having said what I said, I don’t really follow the scene as such. Probably the contemporary jazz musician I listen to most these days is Aaron Parks, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. Well, him and Ben Allison, though he’s way less well known (unfortunately!).
Two of my favorite moments in live jazz viewing were both in New York - seeing Ben Allison in 2004, and seeing the Mingus Big Band in 2007. For the latter, there weren’t a ton of people that night, so I was able to sit basically at the stage, and when Sue Mingus dropped in, she more or less sat next to me, which for me was a big deal.
I love Ben Allison’s music. I bet that was amazing live.
"It used to be considered kind of trashy and embarrassing to read US Weekly, but celebrity obsession got laundered in under extremely dubious third wave feminism logic, and here we are in a cultural place where questioning a fixation on celebrity logic will get you called an elitist and a misogynist. The easy way, the way of comfort and self-soothing, was once again laundered into public morals."
What happened was the feminists had to come up with a theoretical justification for reading People and liking the music and schtick of Madonna but at the same time, remain Good Feminists.
Or: maybe is that an "easy" way to explain something that is hard to explain––namely why certain cultural styles and genres (like melodrama, opera, early cinema, pop music, disco) have historically attracted mass audiences of largely women and gay men?
This goes back at least two centuries. It's a real thing and there are straight man counterparts: gaming, fantasy narratives, super-hero universes. If we don't just write it off as symptoms of the psychic weakness of women or the narcissism of men, then it is actually a hard thing to try to account for.
People have tried to provide those accounts and it wasn't just to generate permission to read and consume trashy stuff.
Just because it's women and gay men doesn't make it better.
Although I could not care less about superheroes and the like, either, yeah, humans try to come up with theoretical justifications for liking that as well.
I wasn't contesting whether it was bad or not so bad. I was saying that "humans suck" is not a sufficient explanation for how fantasy and virtuality have come to matter so much.
I wasn't saying that humans suck, just that they concoct elaborate rationalizations for doing what they do.
Agree.
What is a "Good Feminist" anymore? I haven't kept up. I'm sure it's complicated, but I'll take the Cliff Notes Version.
One who conforms to the latest tribal orthodoxy, or, at any rate, is no more thn 15 minutes ahead of the times.
I consider myself a feminist, but I get lost when people go beyond wanting women to be full, strong, and character-driven and living the lives they choose to the best of their ability. I've never understood why that was such a hateful position, though I have been hated for it. Maybe I'll make a meme and post it everywhere.
Back when I was a fundie, we had to justify everything we read/listened to as to whether it was Christian and acceptable or Unchristian and sinful. No idea why liberals decided to adopt that line of thought. Consumption does not equal morality.
I don't quite know how to explain it, but something that's struck me a lot over the last few years is just how helpless we all are to resist a critical mass of _want_.
Like, you get enough people who want something to be true, and enough other people who think they can exploit that for monetary/political gain, and... welcome to your new reality.
I think that's always been true. It's just that society was more segmented and organized; wants got channeled through social groups, religion, clubs. Mass media changed that; first radio, then TV, now internet.
Right, I almost made that same caveat. I think the thing that mostly gets me isn’t so much that change happens (people have always wanted things, etc) but more so the fact that we can sit here and watch it in real time and articulate all the reasons it’s wrong and dissect every ounce of bullshit at play and challenge the base desires behind it and yet… it’s just going to happen anyway. And obviously, you know, you could say the same thing about a lot of historical cultural changes that I probably support, this is just sort of how change happens, for better or worse, the moral component is subjective, etc etc.
While I agree with this mostly, it's important to recognize that whether or not you want something does not determine its truth value. This means that the truth can either be something you don't want at all or it can be everything you ever wanted but didn't think you could have.
Desire can be exploited, sure, but not by necessity.
Reminds me of a new concept I learned about from Scott Alexander when that run happened on that Bay Area bank. Hyperstition
You raise some good points, but I have to admit the time I tried watching Reality Bites I could only think of how poorly it had aged and how unbelievably narcissistic the characters were. I wanted to like it too, but to my mind it had aged like milk. I guess I was pretty cranky at that point in my life, but it's like "What does being true to yourself even mean in this movie? Childish, self-destructive acts of rebellion and producing self indulgent art that no one wants but you?"
I'll hate on poptimism with the best of them, but the best music has generally been underground anyways. At times peace has been made with mainstream success for a short while, but there's no way to square the circle of pandering to the lowest common denominator for dollars with producing interesting art. The artistic cream doesn't rise to the top in the free market, the things which sell the most do and they are seldom the same. To bring it back to Gen X I always admired how the hardcore kids of the early 80s basically built a scene up out of nothing, DIY. That part is the same as it ever was and the musical mainstream never wanted anything to do with them either.
This is kind of the thing, though - those values can be performed badly like any other.
Hey...what is your glitch, huh?
To be fair, Reality Bites is a highly caricaturized rendition of Gen X slacker YA's. It's a bit of an eye-roll to watch it now, but I still like it...if only because of the feels and I like all of the actors in it.
You might try the movie Slackers by Linklater. It's 1990 but still very Gen X, and much better at their portrayal than Reality Bites was.
You know what has aged well? PCU.
"Relatedly, consider crypto bros or hustle bros or WallStreetBets types. This whole genre of young man, who emerged largely from the Rogan-sphere but whose presence has grown and grown, may partially be defined by stuff like resistance to vaccines or a rejection of woke niceties or the pursuit of abstracted masculinity. But the most operative way their values play out in real life lies in the absolute rejection of the legitimacy of going to college, getting a good job, working hard, and slowly building wealth for retirement. Of living a normal 9 to 5 life. That notion has become poisonous to generations of men; it’s synonymous with being a chump, with falling for the ruse, for surrendering to the machine."
Here, I'd disagree somewhat.
Once you recognize that the system is rigged, and not in your favor, that unless you have luminous and undeniable talent in finance math, ahtletics, or something comparable, that the people who do get ahead in life are basically successful grifters (eveer ask yourself why so many of the "30 Under 30" list are now cooling off in prison?), the only thing that working hard and playing by the rules will get you is old.
So you might as well promote yourself as shamelessly as possible, and if everything is a scam, look with your eyes always peeled for the main chance and when you see it, you gamble big.
"You gotta swing like a man, because getting walks will never get you off the island!" - Tony Pena
That narrative is the problem. The game is stacked against you, but it's not *rigged*. You can still enjoy a good life relative to the vast majority of humanity past and present in the US and other Western countries. There's many modern indignities to modern life that can make us feel like the game is rigged and the fight against them is noble and worthy, but we can't lose sight of the fact that we live an era of incredible material abundance in which the vast majority of people can achieve their basic needs of shelter, food, etc,. We can have discussions about the quality of the shelter, food, etc. and they way those resources are distributed, but to deBoer's point, we shouldn't loose sight of the fact that this is not a uniquely difficult time in material terms
Perhaps, but these will be the firstAmerican generations not to live better than their parents did.
Even basic stuff like "owning a home" will be for many as realistic as "buying the Raiders and force-marching them back to Oakland".
Point is - there is either stratopheric success for an increasingly few number of humans, or chumpdom. Very little in the middle.
You're right, we need to be wise to the specific ways that we get screwed out of things that people of older generations had better and figure out how to fight that power. But that doesn't mean that we're back to the textile mills and coal mines. People of the last generation lived in incredible material abundance, as we do now. The great shame is that in recent times of great economic growth, it is those without means who realize the smallest share of these gains, while those at the top realize the highest.
If you've already conceded that life in the middle class is just chumpdom, you cave to the narrative that the system is unworkable and can't be reformed. Which is ridiculous because we have extraordinarily low levels of material privation in historic terms. We need to tweak the system so that we reduce wealth inequality the same we did in the US at the beginning of the last century. This is not an insurmountable hurdle.
It not that the middle class is inherently chumpdom, it's disappearing and harder and harder to maintain.
You have a point and it’s sad. Whatever declines Freddy dB is accurately chronicling, the problem isn’t so much the dress code as the evident truth that our wealthy overlords consider white collar office workers to be disposable commodities, paid as little as possible and subject to frequent layoffs or as quickly as possible replaced by AI. And the jobs are Steven Graber “bullshit jobs” so there’s that sense of dissatisfaction as well with the “straight” career.
Of course, suits are necessary in court, finance etc. but those are more well paid so wearing an expensive uniform makes sense there.
David, not Steven. And yes I apologize in advance on how pedantic that sounds.
No problem. Don’t mind the correction. My bad. I’ve taken to checking every doubtful source on wiki or google but sometimes it’s too much a pain. Yeah, RIP David Garber z”l.
And godammit I can't help myself. It's David Graeber. He wrote so much great stuff that people need the right search terms. Thank you for even mentioning him!!
There is inherent dignity and goodness in doing work that is materially helpful for other humans, even if it is less remunerative than pathetic get-rich-quick schemes. That truth is lost on the types Freddie is referring to here.
Yeah, but how many jobs are there that materially help people? And how many of them also pay zilch because either there's an endless supply of bright-eyed youngsters looking to join, or no one wants to do it, so it's dumped on those with no other choice.
This all kind of manifests in people like Taylor Swift or Donald Trump. A musician and politician for the subset of the population with little intellectual curiosity and satisfaction with being sheeple. They see the corporate influences and massive amount of money to lead you to think and feel a certain way about them and have no problem being influenced in the exact way the monied interests desire.
Perhaps the only way this is sustainable is through the manufactured outrage against these personalities. The best way to keep people from seeing the lack of authenticity, the selling out, the naked celebrity worship is to feed them stories of them being wronged. To this end, they tap into the stock victim narrative that exists for both left- and right-coded public figures to generate sympathy that can blind them from thinking critically about why they have so much sympathy for such flawed and often morally bankrupt people.
I would add Kamala Harris to your list. She was a nobody, a laughingstock, until orders went out that she was God's gift to the country and a million smartphones lit up and the gray people talking in unison meme came to life. Add to that her parade of paid celebrity endorsements and you have another example of how manipulable people who have Instagram where their personality and tastes belong really are.
The forces that be couldn't break out of this new mold for how to sell a political candidate: relentlessly selling her to the ingroup that was already going to vote for her.
A plurality (at least) of Trump voters just want to watch the world burn out of spite because they perceive everything as broken. They don't actually like or respect him.
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
It's often shocking to me how many college educated people who think of themselves as fairly sophisticated media consumers and/or critics are legitimately dumbfounded at the idea that somebody might read War and Peace or Moby Dick.
Or that a grown-ass adult might be uninterested in Disney/Harry Potter/Marvel/Taylor Swift/social media/Star Wars/Wicked/Barbie/whatever crass garbage has been extruded in our direction this week.
I'm really enjoying the mental image of the media being actually "extruded" haha. Thanks for that!
There are cultural heroes who proudly declare that there is no reason for people to either write of read books: anything worth absorbing should be able to be conveyed in a 6 paragraph post online.
There are Silicon Valley demi-gods who opine about how (based on human population numbers) Shakespeare can't possibly be a great writer.
So in some spheres, it is a sign of intelligence that you haven't been snookered into believing the non-verifiable judgments or claims of useless intellectual luddites.
`There are cultural heroes who proudly declare that there is no reason for people to either write of read books'
Was rather startled to learn that until quite recently the streamer Destiny was someone who didn't see the value in reading books (interview on The Adam Friedland Show). He's being held up by his fans, who watch him everyday, as an intellectual/thinker/debater and he's just now seeing the value in books?
Didn't realize how right Norman Finkelstein was about him.
I share some of DeBoer's dismay in this piece. It's distressing to me the way celebrity culture (female coded), and the more male-coded cultures of gaming, fantasy, and super-hero universes, seem to be virtual worlds that more and more people use to indulge their more infantile impulses. As a lit prof I keep trying to do my little part to try to drag people into reading stuff that doesn't go down easy. It feels like I'm losing the fight.
But unless we just default to a glib story about decline (kids these days), I have to think there are sociocultural reasons for these trends. People with education and jobs that mostly keep them out of debt are not living in the Worst Time Ever. But I have to think something is prompted so many to feel a need or at a desire for the self-soothing.
My guess is that some of the big foundational things that provided existential security for middle-class people have been unveiled as mythic or precarious. It's hard to find solid ground to stand on, and folks are a lot more susceptible to feeling powerless––regardless of their relative security they actually have.
I think it has to do with the economy, it has to.
Boomers and Xers grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation from the Ruskies, yet the apparent dread from a rogue state or terrorist nuking an American city is marginal at best these days...despite living in a post 9/11 world.
What does seem to elicit real dread is never being able to retire, owning your own home, or a hospital bill. Maybe people think having a good life really is more important than just having life. Carville is quite dated these days, but perhaps he's right about "It's the economy, stupid."
Yeah. My pet theory is that the young people who were headed to the professional-managerial class are sensing that the super rich intend to wage war on them.
People like Musk and finance titans are fed up with both democratic politics and with ordinary professionals. They have contempt for all the annoying college-degree types who believe in government regulation, blather on about history, are soft-headed about "racial realism," and can't grasp the truth of the math-based domains of AI and crypto. They want to make the PMC class more or less extinct, with no more ability to put any checks on the brilliant entrepreneurs than the working class can.
If you are in your 20s or early 30s right now, you might have headed to college thinking you'd be able to secure a pretty good middle-class life if you could get a job as a manager or a lawyer. But now you sensing you are despised and seen as useless from groups both below (non-college folks who hate your supposed know-it-all pretensions) and above (the masters of the universe who are sick of busy-bodies with small bank accounts trying to restrict them with environmental studies and social justice nonsense). If you didn't jump on the AI train or attach yourself to their tech kingdoms, you might feel––not irrationally––that the security and social status you thought you'd be likely to acquire might be nothing but a mirage.
Housing prices.
I've been touting future shock, a la Alvin Toffler, as the explanation for about fifteen years now, but it's from the late Sixties and everyone wants to think they have discovered a whole new answer.
I think we passed the state of shock...now we're at the bargaining phase.
I’m stealing that. That’s mine now.
It's decadence. We lack any kind of meaning, any kind of purpose, except what our therapists help us extract from our novels or what capitalism sells us. Without some kind of struggle, there's nothing but waiting for death.
Except Western societies have had the same problem (no inherent meaning to life that is shared by everyone) for a very long time. When Durkheim develops his theory of "anomie" in the 1890s, he was addressing a perceived problem people had been fretting about for decades.
So it's hard to use the decadence idea to account for the shift DeBoer describes as happening in the last 10 or so years.
Interesting.
Does Durkheim try to explain the origins of his position? Glancing at wikipedia I see some excerpts about 19thC industrialization being a major culprit for this, but is there more to it than that?
Durkheim and other thinkers were trying to figure out how modern conditions were changing not just external reality (production and labor, cities, etc) but internal human subjectivities. Industrialized capitalism did a lot to speed up these changes but the transformation to "modernity" starts earlier.
The progress of so-called civilization was producing greater wealth and scientific knowledge but was also eroding traditional cultural/religious beliefs and relations, leaving many people feeling disoriented and ungrounded about the purpose of living.
His theory is derived from both empirical and theoretical origins. One of Durkheim's observations was that data showed rates of suicide were far, far higher in "developed" European and Euro-American societies than in pre-modern societies. People who lived in more traditional societies were a lot poorer and died sooner but did not seem to suffer from the despair of purposelessness common among European people.
Ah okay. That seems to make sense, I just wasn't aware it went back that far. Thanks for the education!
I think the millenial sense of humor developed a really atrocious habit of using self-deprecation to insulate itself from genuine reflection. By making a self-deprecating joke about our shitty habits as we're indulging them, it's like we make ourselves immune from criticism--I already acknowledged I'm a garbage human and wasn't it so funny, so what's the sense in dwelling on it? (Yes, I'm a millenial.)
Think pieces like what you've described that shill for obviously bad things give pseudo-intellectual depth to the habit of humorous personal unaccountability. If, on an especially dark night of the soul, you find yourself really questioning something clearly bad about yourself and contemplating whether you shouldn't maybe be a less bad person, never fear--the ostensibly respectable, published excuse is out there.
The watercarrying for social media and overuse of the internet generally is especially shameful. Find a single nice story of a professor from a marginalized demographic who got a tenure-track job due to their Twitter activity, gesture generally in the direction of the Arab Spring without dwelling too much on it, make much of unavoidable gaps in the research, and then conclude with a disarming (and now dated) reference to cat memes. Voila, degeneracy defended.
All that said, I do think there's one aspect of modern life that is "harder" specifically with respect to kids' screen time: screens are exponentially more common, they're cheaper, they're portable, and because of the nature of the programming available, they're more or less constantly a source of amusement. TV was much less interesting to kids when, at least for some parts of the day, their only choices were local news and reruns of old peoples' shows. The inescapability of screen-based entertainment is new and a different kind of "hard."
This last point can be broadened out to life more generally--it's much, much easier to be the overindulgent version of a garbage human because the means to indulge your garbage tendencies are relatively cheap and basically endless. This life is still warfare, and the enemy is firehosing any attempt at self-discipline.
I'm not saying that justifies people in not striving to be less gross, but I do think it's one particular challenge that's harder. Rich people in history with access to material plenty, wracked with gout, don't seem to have been much better when it came to the stuff they had in abundance.
I can't even take my kids to the dentist without blaring screens in their faces. They literally put giant TVs on the ceiling. I ask for them to be turned off and the staff look at me like I have three heads. It is definitely hard to raise screen-lite kids but the difficulty just makes me more determined.
Good on you, keep at it man.
Awhile back I was in a discussion about childhood with one of my Millennial colleagues, we were talking about when the internet and home computers started to become common. I mentioned I didn't even have the internet until college, and he kind gave me a sad look. He said he was at least glad he had the internet growing up, that he wouldn't have liked childhood/teens without it. Perplexed, I said I was really glad we didn't have it at all, and wouldn't have it any other way.
The confused and pitying look he had on his face was priceless, like he couldn't imagine anyone NOT wanting the internet around as a kid. Says a lot about the world kids grow up in these days I think.
This is a great piece.
I hate dressing up, but I pulled on stockings and a dress and stepped into heels for the symphony last weekend. I told my young daughters - also in dresses and tights - that we dress up to show respect, through our efforts to look our best, for the musicians and their efforts to present us with their very best to create an excellent performance. And because part of our family values are that we do what is right, not what is easy or comfy.
We encountered people in tees and shorts and flip flops and, memorably, fleece pajama pants and a ratty t-shirt paired with slippers. At the symphony.
I remember there was a classmate who used to go to early afternoon classes in college dressed like that and you could feel everyone lose respect for her. It's one thing if you're at an 8 AM class hungover, but if it's 1 PM, put on some actual pants and shoes. I wouldn't imagine going somewhere like that for anything that required tickets.
Screentime is a tool like any other. Would you hand a child a knife and let them run around with it?
Dopamine addiction is a real thing and it is nasty, nasty stuff. Don't give your child a potentially incurable illness and argue poorly about the responsibility of vaccines while you yourself try to accumulate a following just to prove your worth. It's a helluva life.