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Notes -
After a few paragraphs I sort of zoned out and let it wash over me. I think that makes it a good post.
I really need to put together that post about sincerity, irony, and postmodernism in media, because I think it’s the piece you’re missing. Teenage rebellion has been integrated. We made it a stock character, and with our technology-assisted recall, have thoroughly spoiled it for the next generation.
Do you think 90s punks were self-aware? Did they know their parents acted out the same story in different costumes? What about 70s stoners or 50s greasers? I’d guess they knew it, but didn’t feel it as strongly as their equivalents do today. The Zoomers have a curated index of the best and most savvy art of decades. That means their own little rebellions have to go further, one way or another.
This is a microcosm of the general cultural lust for novelty. You can’t just do a thesis anymore; that wouldn’t be any fun. Antithesis has been done, too. Even synthesis gets mined out as the previous generation comes to the same realization about the first two categories. Good art makes people feel something, but great art has to make them feel something different. You can’t get that by recreating Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That spot is taken.
So what’s left? Fortunately, synthesis is unending. Just as Gump took (antithetical) irony and played it painfully straight, you can take the synthesis and turn it around again. Look at the fools who thought you were going to give them genuine emotion! Or don’t. Make something completely sincere, a timeless story, and laugh all the way to the bank when people find your art “refreshing.” Bonus points if you’re enough of an auteur to get funding for outrageous new tech, Mr. Cameron. It’s signaling all the way down. Timing the market is all but impossible, but keeping the audience guessing gives you your best shot.
Thus our teenage rebellions are left with post-irony. Or post-post-irony. Or deep-fried memes, shouted into the uncaring void. Their parents, fresh from their own synthetic rebellions, only mellowed out to one or another of those higher layers.
Perhaps you’re right, and parents can espouse first-level theses. That’d give their kids a salient ideology on which to sharpen their claws. Assuming they focus on that, rather than the words of the prophets, written on the subway walls:
Don't have much to add, except this is accurate and sad. Most of my younger friends are in the ironic post nihilism trap, and it hurts to see people go down that hole. Their lives hollow out, they seem to lose the ability to take anything seriously.
Truly a tragedy for young minds to disengage from the world in this way.
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