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.
