Despair at the dullness of Young People Today now seems so omnipresent and dispiriting that it’s come out the other side and become almost entertaining. Or maybe that’s because I’m one of them, resigned to the impossibility of changing or creating anything, and so sniggering in the back row instead. Latest example thanks to steerpikelet in Comment is Free
my peers are driven not to create, nor to rebel, but to stabilise. We want jobs, a foot on the housing ladder, and to protect the planet….My generation may not be turning up at a church, temple or synagogue every weekend, but nor are we running through the streets strewing flowers and reinventing rock music. On the contrary: the millennial generation is replacing the cultural and spiritual orthodoxy of its parents and grandparents with orthodoxies of its own.
It’s even worse when filtered through the movies. The New Yorker on mumblecore, the bold new world of low-budget indie filmmaking and the lacklustre world it depicts:
Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. Neither rebels nor bohemians, they remain stuck in a limbo of semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty, though some of the films end with a lurch into the working world.
Anybody have the antidote? What’s exciting or terrifying or enticingly incomprehensible about teenagers and twenty-somethings today?