Column is first in a series of three.
 
An essay in October’s Playboy – a magazine I assure you (and my mom) I read only for the articles – brought into focus a broad question I had been thinking of for some time: what exactly is wrong with our generation?
The piece by Richard Martin, “Earnest goes to college,” brings into focus what seems to be the collapse of fun and games on campuses around the nation. The causes, fraternal twins of gloom, are university administrators quaking in their boots for fear of lawsuits and a generation raised on an unholy trinity of television, computers and pills. We live in a culture which seems terrified of losing status in a supposedly classless, color-blind society.
The question of what happened to the vibrant spirit of young adulthood, the joys of youthful irresponsibility along with the thrill of self-discovery, will be the focus of the next three columns I write, starting with today.
Generation Y – those born between 1980 and 1995 – has spent its early time in relative national tranquility. A booming economy, a few foreign wars with minor despots that only rarely interrupted prime-time television, and a bright future where the hard blue-collar jobs of the past 100 years would be replaced by a well-paying, computer-based economy of our future.
This was followed by the collapse of the market, the exportation of those high-end technology jobs to all points cheaper than the U.S., and the beginning of another endless war, an international compliment to our futile battles against drugs, porn and violence.
So, where does that bring us now? We live in a world where comfort can be found in pills, temporary cures for one’s impotence to one’s mental anguish, an era dominated by an administration that rules with an unbecoming arrogance, and in a time when the stable center has become an even greater achievement than actual excellence.
Well, that’s the background. What’s going on with our generation? I think it’s a relatively simple answer: we have, as in Martin’s article, lost our ability to have unconstricted fun. More importantly, we’ve lost any real perspective on the world. From early youth we are taught that everything we do has little purpose outside of our attempts to get into a good school, and later, move relentlessly to the top.
We seem to fear most not living an unexamined life or being devoured by wolves but becoming one who lives “off the grid” socially – the lady at the diner with the menthol cigarettes on her breath or the man with the mullet that we inch away from at the gas station. God forbid we should end up like “them.”
Perhaps it’s the way we were raised. One of the great novels and films of our predecessors, Generation X, “Fight Club,” gave us the line that the men in the film were “a generation of men raised by women.” It seems our generation, Generation Y, was raised less by either of their biological parents and more in the day care centers and by their peers. The only two paths they grew up with was either career-driven success or soul-draining apathy. Either way, the kids aren’t all right, and all points seem to be leading toward an empty sense of longing.
Believe me when I say that I am not attacking success or those who are attempting to establish better lives for themselves. My only argument is with those who have insulated themselves from “failure,” which Martin calls one of the worst things anyone can be called, above any type of error or the possibility of one. They live their lives polishing their resumes and praying that they’ve joined the right clubs. How one lives this way, I don’t know.
My guess is that most people of this stripe are simply afraid, unable to deal with the usual curve balls of life. Indeed, I’d wager that is why the past protests and rallies, which used to be a hallmark of Free Speech Alley, have disappeared. After all, no one really wants word that they were members of the “Marijuana Liberation Army” leaking out when they are trying to make partner at their law firm.
I will be spending this week talking to students about what they think of their generation, where we are and what we can do about it. I wonder how many of them feel like I do and worry that we have become too obsessed with our place in life, becoming mere cogs instead of living, breathing men and women. We shall see next week with a focus on the campus.