The Shittiest Generation
The other day a friend and I went to see the movie 1917. It’s an Oscar favourite, this film, a unique technical achievement, and straight forward exposition of virtue amidst the chaos of war. Uniquely though, it’s one devoid of politics, and the engine that drives the story is not the unhappy necessity of war, but of one human’s commitment to another.
Commitment to people– and I suppose I mean the physical, practical presence in the lives of others– seems harder to recognize now than it did in the movie. I think of my generation, Gen X (1965-1980, roughly). In the west, we were the first generation to not surpass our parents in terms of opportunity and economic reward. Born into an already fallen world, our strategy seemed to be to opt-out, to create an ironic distance between ourselves and the primary institutions and culture that governed us.
Everything was a scam, everything was insincere. The truth veiled and remote. We bonded more over the things we hated than loved, and whatever “shared values” we had were inherited rather than earned, accidentally reduced to rights rather than privileges. But most important, was that the self was centre of all, and that our unique, individual “cool” must be cast into the world. We hoped, I think, that it seemed as if we had intentionally positioned ourselves out of reach of the institutions that we knew would never admit us, attempting to create a moral victory from what we intuited would be certain defeat. This act of curation was deemed punk, and so we floated, suspended between the juvenile and the adult, never quite letting go of the myth of our own potential.
And now, older, we text one another about what we’re watching on Netflix. We blog. We post favourite book covers from our youth. Photograph our meals. Share charts that depict the certainty of our politics. Each of these gestures a ghost, a messenger from outside of time suggesting what sort of person we could be, rather than evidence of the person we actually became.
As much as we’d like to, we don’t get to define ourselves.
Our identities are collaborative efforts, requiring the give and take–and the wild, unpredictable stresses of a near infinite variety of encounters– before a shared understanding of who we are begins to emerge.
We need to engage with people, not just the thought bubbles they post above their heads, and we need to learn to live with, and understand, not just their horrible flaws and complexities, but our own, too.
As they say, no person is an island.
