Normal Dissonance

The best way to describe my generation is angst-ridden. We feel as though we are at the precipice of a cultural revolution, but can’t pinpoint the method for instigating such a change.  

Many of us spent our college days studying the depth of institutional corruption, impunity, and the general sustainability-crisis. By day, we sat in desks, Macs at attention, saluting grassroots campaigns, fair-trade, ‘glocal’ movements, and cursing the corporatocracy. By night, we argued about ethics over micro-craft brews, all in consensus that change was in order, feeling fulfilled that we were contributing to that shift in our status as students producing work.

In an ever-capitalistic flair, our culture equates production with worthiness; the more you produce, the more worthy a member of society you are. In college you exist in a in a verbal matrix where written and spoken word carry the weight of ‘progress.’ When you get an ‘A’ for your sustainability proposal or extra credit for your reproductive rights campaign, this is positive feedback that you are ‘okay,’ you are worthy, you have produced something in line with your values. As students, our production beast is fed with the institutional stamps of approval.

The thing is, once you leave college, lip-service no longer pays. And we are tasked with carving a unique niche in which we can provide for ourselves while also (ideally) contributing to the type of society we so vehemently advocated for in the classroom. Sadly, our education system arms us abundantly with an abstract knowledge of the current problems at hand, but leaves us high and dry when it comes to actualizing a life that counteracts those issues. Our generation has been given the precious gift of awareness and the curse of bushwacking new routes for change.  

The feeling I get is that we are all overwhelmed. Psychologically, it makes sense that we would throw up our hands, get a job serving or a 9-5 in a corporation, while continuing to pay homage to our ideals with literature and newspaper articles. This is comfortable.

In essence, this is what we have been doing our whole lives—talking about the necessity of change without follow-through.

Hey, we all gotta pay the bills and it’s no doubt a relief to have all of your I’s dotted and T’s crossed when it comes to explaining your ‘plans’ to the  people at large. The pressure of expectation builds the mental infrastructure for feverish hamster-wheel spirals—going through the motions to bite the cheddar because it’s just ‘what you do.’

 This cultural script of externally placed worthiness is deeply embedded in us. Even if we don’t agree or recognize the irrationality in it, we can’t help but be influenced by the cognitive grooves of social perception. When we are not on a societally condoned path towards ‘success,’ it takes a conscious effort to not make choices from a place of fear and/or ambivalence. We have a culturally programmed fear of the unknown, of taking risks, of listening to our intuition even when the outcome may not be reasonable.

It seems that cognitive dissonance is as quotidian in adult life as mortgages, infidelity, and psychotropic medications. Such realizations could tempt any aware individual into the spiral of nihilism, but we must have hope, for these ‘normalities’ are the very reasons why we should seek to confront and rewrite the stories undergirding the tide of our time.