Millennial.jpg

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Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

i feel like a lot of millenial hate is misdirected hate that should be at smartphones, which are a force of evil and a virus that has invaded all living generations at this point.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2015 22:30

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:09

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Ork of Fiction posted:

It's really funny to me how they discovered back in the 80s how computer use became more and more addictive the more responsive the computer became, so companies tried as hard as possible to make their devices more addictive and then more accessible for addicts, and no one bothered to say, "hey.. wait a minute. maybe we shouldn't let kids get addicted to stuff." Sort of like how they found out that refined sugar is more addictive than cocaine and every food company on the planet was like, "drat! how do I get more sugar in my food?"

a beautiful world awaits

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 02:04

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Pudding Huxtable posted:

I await the day years from now when the word 'selfie' is synonymous with 'masturbation'

lol im gonna do this

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 15:25

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

If a millennial "came of age" around the year 2000, as google suggests, then millenials are becoming 30 somethings about now, yes? Look at every rear end in a top hat you see wearing a denim shirt, wearing expensive basketball shoes, sporting a balding head-full of "artisan" pomade in 110 degree heat, and masturbating to fantasies of their very own "startup venture capital firm" while "swiping right". Millennials are now Contemporary Conformists.

Source: http://carles.buzz/the-contemporary-conformist/

If you can get used to the loving insufferable writing, I think this guy has us all beat for identifying what's wrong with millennials.

i read this and it seems to be saying contemporary conformists are people who wear clothes and go in buildings, which i have to agree with

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 15:27

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Two monks were making a pilgrimage to venerate the relics of a great Saint. During the course of their journey, they came to a river where they met a beautiful young woman -- an apparently worldly creature, dressed in expensive finery and with her hair done up in the latest fashion. She was afraid of the current and afraid of ruining her lovely clothing, so asked the brothers if they might carry her across the river.

The younger and more exacting of the brothers was offended at the very idea and turned away with an attitude of disgust. The older brother didn't hesitate, and quickly picked the woman up on his shoulders, carried her across the river, and set her down on the other side. She thanked him and went on her way, and the brother waded back through the waters.

The monks resumed their walk, the older one in perfect equanimity and enjoying the beautiful countryside, while the younger one grew more and more brooding and distracted, so much so that he could keep his silence no longer and suddenly burst out, "Brother, we are taught to avoid contact with women, and there you were, not just touching a woman, but carrying her on your shoulders!"

The older monk looked at the younger with a loving, pitiful smile and said, "Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river; you are still carrying her."

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 08:20

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

They are people who can't get over how cool it is to go into a building designed to make them feel special and not like just more slaves under the weight of dying capitalism.

heaven forbid someone enjoy something

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 00:41

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

I think that's what people are on about but maybe not articulating well when they say it's "not art". Not to speak for others, but there is something entirely commercial and false-feeling about the work, especially the "vintage sales signs" fonts. Jesus, it's 2015, not 1945, you aren't buying a coke for nickle at the neighborhood corner store. Unless your cafe is some kind of ethically sourced local family owned business (if that's what gets you off; it's been true for a long time that advertising is linked to exploitation), it seems glaringly disingenuous to offer guests the feeling that you're like them--like what they like, are inspired by what they are--when, really, the majority of these institutions are completely alienating and exploitative in their practices.

Submitting that the problem with millennials is that they can't or won't see that they're being pandered to.

yes, millenials are unaware that businesses do things to attract customers and increase sales, cutting insight

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 00:45

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Man Whore posted:

A lot of millennials are embarrassing like the ones on tumblr but I and my millennial friends laugh at them so I feel millennials are a mixed bag imo.

having a passionate investment of any kind is much better than an air of detached superiority owing to the tremendous achievement of not caring about anything

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 00:50

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Man Whore posted:

being invested in Arcade Gannon being trans is probably worse than not being invested in anything at all actually because there are much better things to care about and spend energy on.

not caring is better than caring because there are things worth caring about? good point.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 01:52

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

'Fraid you missed the point, or maybe you genuinely feel a warm feeling in your heart when you see the "hand written" chalk signs outside a Starbucks full of people gazing into their phones, gigantic pictures of "natives" roasting beans on the wall. poo poo's false. It's money making propaganda that disguises its own emptiness.

really piercing the veil again with scathing insight

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 07:33

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

I'm genuinely not sure if you're trolling me or not, but what we are asking is, "do millennials suck, and why?", and I'm answering that question in a way that's relevant to what's been in the thread recently, ie, this dude and his art project.

Are you trying to defend him? Because his work isn't even really what I'm honing in on, its the way in which it is in itself emblematic of the problem with millennials--they're easily duped and they like to be duped.

To break it down further, some would argue that a lack of critical insight and ability to be easily pandered to are two criteria for being poo poo people.

Let me argue for you though and go a step further to assert, as I bet you are, that "nothing matters" , so it's dumb to get upset about anything, culture included, OR perhaps you're one of those quasi-nihilists who's actually a closet positivist and is excited by anything you see, as long as you don't have to be critical of it.

I really hope you have more to say than that, but I'm also pretty sure you'll just shitpost again.

Sorry for this late reply.

I have really strong values I hold dearly, and a distaste for the commercialization of the world is one of them. I agree with your points about how corporations use a veneer of affability to hide an alienating production process.

However I think that you thinking that millenials are somehow unaware that corporations manipulate them is extremely funny. There isn't a person in america over the age of 14 who isn't aware of the truthbombs you are dropping

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 13:57

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

plain blue jacket posted:

I'm glad you can decipher what toad is saying because to me it seemed like incoherent nonsense.

he's saying that businesses pretend to buy into cultural or subcultural identity markers to promote sales among targeted demographics. Also he seems to think this is something that is happening uniquely to millennials, who are completely oblivious to it :confused:

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 17:08

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:09

Ocean Book: Sep 27, 2010; - hi

Toadstrieb posted:

Thanks for getting back to me. Anyway man, here's the thing, millennials appear to like the constant corporate rim jobs they're being offered. I don't think you could say that a generation before or since has been so ready to have their lives engineered around consumption. They're totally credulous and dissent is viewed as abnormal, where, for gen X and before, dissent, even if it was also often commercialized, was valued.

In this day and age, you're considered hosed up if you can't enjoy these pre-formatted stories about your life and how great things are. It's like a big wave of possible dissention was coming, promising to wash away some of the bullshit, and then these idiots were born and just started making GBS threads more.

I get this but it seems to me that the problem isnt located in the millenials themselves but instead its the culture they exist in lacking any alternative value systems to consumption. Consuption-as-achievement has become the only widely recognized value system, so identity and social positioning is determined by the sign value of commodites you consume. seen literally anywhere on the internet but close to home in any "If you like (consumable product) you are a (negative/positive identity marker)" gbs thread.

what seems different to me of this view from your view is that this bundling of consumption with identity doesnt come from the self, but comes from policing by the Other. this is what i think fuels the small-scale conspicuous consumption you see in people taking photographs of meals or posting statuses about listening to song X. the narcissism of these displays is not driven by an internal sense of self-exceptionalism but from having your hand forced into playing the only game in town. no individual can elect to not have their identity and social positioning determined by the Other based on the sign value of their consumption, so what reason does a contemporary individual have to not leverage this sign value to positively influence social position?

the obvious answer is an intrinsic set of strongly held internal values that are otherwise oriented, which i think is something worth developing but i cant blame a social mammal for following the pull of reinforcement, status gain, and herd instincts.

Maybe this is what you are getting at but what I'm getting from your posts is more of a 'there is something wrong with millenials' vs 'there is something wrong with the cultural framework/ value system millenials exist in', which is a distinction i think is worth making but maybe you dont/ maybe thats what you were saying all along.

herer read this for the long better version of what i was saying

The resentment machine posted:

For all the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected human species, one of the most important aspects of internet culture has gone largely unnoticed. The internet has provided tremendous functionality, for facilitating commerce, communication, research, entertainment, and more. Yet for a comparatively small but influential group of its most dedicated users, its most important feature, the killer app, is its power as an all-purpose sorting mechanism, one that separates the worthy from the unworthy�and in doing so, gives some meager semblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposelessness. For the postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers who exert such disproportionate influence over online experience, the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.

The modern American �meritocracy,� the education/employment vehicle, prepares thousands of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actually encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American �success� indoctrinates young people with a competitive vision that most of them never escape. The numbing and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the brightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels from puberty to adulthood. School elections, high school and college athletics, honors societies, finals clubs, dining clubs, the subtler (but no less real) social competitions�all make competition the natural habitus of American youth. Every aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, athletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced to fodder for college applications.

This instrumentalizing of all of the best things in life teaches teenagers the unmistakable lesson that nothing is to be enjoyed, nothing experienced purely, but rather that each and every part of human life is ultimately subservient to what is less human. Competition exists as a vehicle to provide the goods, material or immaterial, that make life enjoyable. The context of endless competition makes that means into an end itself. The eventual eats the immediate. No achievement, no effort, no relationship can exist as an end in itself. Each must be ground into chum to attract those who confer status and success�elite colleges and their representatives, employers.

As has been documented endlessly, this process starts earlier and earlier in life, with elite preschools now requiring that students pass tests and get references, before they can read or write. Many have lamented the rise of competition and gatekeeping in young children. Little attention has been paid to what comes after the competitions end.

...

The competitive urge still pulses. It has to; the culture in which students have been raised has denied them any other framework with which to draw meaning. The world has assimilated the rejection of religion, tradition, and other determinants of virtue that attended the 1960s and wedded it to a vicious contempt for the political commitments that replaced them in that context. Culture preempts the kind of conscious understanding that attends to conviction, that all traditional designations of meaning are uncool.

If straightforward discussion of virtue and righteousness is socially unpalatable, straightforward political engagement appears worse still. Pushed by an advertising industry that embraces tropes of meaning just long enough to render them meaningless (Budweiser Clydesdales saluting fallen towers) and buffeted by arbiters of hipness that declare any unapologetic embrace of political ideology horribly clich�, a fussy specificity envelops every definition of the self. Conventional accounts of the kids these days tend to revert to tired tropes about disaffection and irony. The reality is sadder: They are not passionless, but many have invested their passion in a shared cultural knowledge that denies the value of any other endeavor worthy of personal investment.

Contemporary strivers lack the tools with which people in the past have differentiated themselves from their peers: They live in a post-virtue, post-religion, post-aristocracy age. They lack the skills or inspiration to create something of genuine worth. They have been conditioned to find all but the most conventional and compromised politics worthy of contempt. They are denied even the cold comfort of identification with career, as they cope with the deadening tedium and meaninglessness of work by calling attention to it over and over again, as if acknowledging it somehow elevates them above it.

Into this vacuum comes a relief that is profoundly rational in context�the self as consumer and critic. Given the emptiness of the material conditions of their lives, the formerly manic competitors must come to invest the cultural goods they consume with great meaning. Meaning must be made somewhere; no one will countenance standing for nothing. So the poor proxy of media and cultural consumption comes to define the individual. In many ways, cultural products such as movies, music, clothes, and media are the perfect vehicle for the endless division of people into strata of knowingness, savvy, and cultural value.

These cultural products have no quantifiable value, yet their relative value is fiercely debated as if some such quantifiable understanding could be reached. They are easily mined for ancillary content, the TV recaps and record reviews and endless fulminating in comments and forums that spread like weeds. (Does anyone who watches Mad Men not blog about it?) They are bound up with celebrity, both real and petty. They can inspire and so trick us into believing that our reactions are similarly worthy of inspiration. And they are complex and varied enough that there is always more to know and more rarefied territory to reach, the better to climb the ladder one rung higher than the person the next desk over.

There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, The Wire, says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything.

Likewise, the internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, of Android or Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or The Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. Yet this emptiness doesn�t compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it draws them further and further in. Faced with the failure of their cultural affinities to define an authentic and fulfilling self, postcollegiate middle-class upwardly-oriented-if-not-upwardly-mobile Americans double down on the importance of these affinities and confront the continued failure with a formless resentment. The bitterness that surrounds these distinctions is a product of their inability to actually make us distinct.

The savviest of the media and culture websites tap into this resentment as directly as they dare. They write endlessly about what is overrated. They assign specific and damning personality traits to the fan bases of unworthy cultural objects. They invite comments that tediously parse microscopic distinctions in cultural consumption. They engage in criticism as a kind of preemptive strike against those who actually create. They glamorize pettiness in aesthetic taste. The few artistic works they lionize are praised to the point of absurdity, as various acolytes try to outdo each other in hyperbole. They relentlessly push the central narrative that their readers crave, that consumption is achievement and that creators are to be distrusted and �put in their place.� They deny the frequently sad but inescapable reality that consumption is not creation and that only the genuinely creative act can reveal the self.

This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the internet�the bloggers, the trendsetters, the �ber-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms�online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.

http://thenewinquiry.com/?essays=the-resentment-machine

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 07:09

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Millennial.jpg