‘the suffering and solution of the modern tech generations.’

the new kids, gen y commonly referred to as are, don’t get me wrong, an astounding generation. very intelligent and clever in their ways, but i venture a few warning lights or points for their coming of age process. a few clues give me worries at night about how they are going to fit in or actualize their power in the society of the world. the aspects of worry are : the creativity or originality issue, authority issues and recklessness issues. the last thing i want to accomplish is to preach and bore these three sensitive topics. so i’m going to make this article as entertaining to read as possible. lets start with the originality issue. i come from gen x, so labeled by many a academic voice, we arguably had the most successful identity crisis struggle so far in modern history. our own little generational unofficial renaissance. 

originality happened very easily in the cold war falling, apartheid falling, global segregation falling planet atmosphere which was happening at the time, so creative inspiration was rich and all around. the gen y kids have in my opinion the same value of challenges and struggles, but what has happened in the aftermath of the nineties revolution in rock & roll as well as media, is that the bar has been set as high as it possibly can be with modern tech society already. gen x, as the first generation to experience using the internet, cell phones and digital film media, proved to be quite original with it. delivering quality in quantity for fifteen odd years from 1990 to lets say 2005, when w. bush got his second term. those fifteen years belong to gen x in history i believe. i never thought i’d be able to call an end to that snowball’s success down the hill, but the tree has been hit at the bottom since w. bush went on to ruin the planet psyche and terrain for another term. rock & roll also effectively died around then, with audioslaves appearance which is like a band saying good bye to rock as we know it. we also remember lenny kravitz’s famous song, ‘rock & roll is dead’. there is truth to it but i’m not afraid nor ashamed of it mainly because it will revive itself, greater than before and find consistent permanent feet in our entertainment lives as well.

take the band mumford & sons for example, in comparison with the new coined insult phrase, ‘the hipster’. many have hastily labeled them a hipster band due to their young ages and folk rock throwback music. i find the entire hipster label incredibly sad. what’s wrong with finding inspiration from the most successful cultural revolution of the modern era to form new original ideas, like their music is for the new generation. why is the expectation to beat or better the gen x cultural achievements so high that gen y feels that they have to come up with something completely original otherwise they haven’t proven their worth. the truth of the contemporary times are harsh, an actual compliment, if the size and difficulty nature of your obstacles can be seen as a compliment, to the gen y kids in terms of what they face.

with a recession on since 2008, it’s a very financially dry time to invest in the arts, so the creative pool in the world is experiencing a sincere severe drought currently. the death of imagination which the post modernists correctly spoke of. this death isn’t permanent in my opinion as we are constantly moving and movement is always, consistently original. few generations have been moving at the learning pace of gen y. their actually growing up too fast. i find myself wanting to tell them to slow down, smell the flowers growing out of the dumpster for a second. they are overshooting their maturity level with too much information and in my opinion, not spending enough on digesting the knowledge they have now. i think its like missing important bits along the way which makes the whole make sense eventually.

gen y is, similarly to gen x, very apathetic commonly. this is rooted in gen x as the lack of answers and solutions in the wake of the cultural rebellions against traditional world views vs new age world views with the hippy’s and the beatles gen. the eighties also clearly identified itself apart from the other gens before and after. the eighties was like making fun of culture whilst having fun doing it. the hairstyles and clothing was ridiculously outlandish.

whereas in the nineties, even though ‘anything goes’ applied and is to be accepted as inherited from the hippies, there was a common return to simpler forms of self decoration and creative expression. now, with gen y, its as if life and media is becoming more categorized, ordered and streamlined to fit into genre’s, basically of favoritism options. which is probably the key driving flaw of the organically developed shades of media entertainment products. the obsessed nature of picking favorites, the band you’re listening to never mattered before as much as to which group you belonged to. the collective one cool group of the gen x cultural phenomenon has disappeared and has been replaced by the standard of its cool to be in a group, and the groups have become many and separate at some level. even though a collective generational identity and signature still exists, the groups become very clicky and quick to choose its kind of members whom fit and don’t.

the effect on the traditionally ‘outcasted’ by society, is that they are either absorbed by one of the many groups and they find themselves successfully conforming, or they become severely outcasted to the point of certain suicide or other act of regret. the tragic void which the answerless existence of modernity brings seems larger in gen y as in gen x, as their drug abuse level and complacency in it, is immense. they’re trying to find something in the ether of all the hallucinations and emotional rushes experienced on the vast amount of drugs available to them on the black market.

instead of hipsters being the cultural embarrassment of their generation, i believe it is actually the solution to all their problems. the hipster represents attempts within the culture of the generation to reinvent itself. looking at the nearest past in the nineties, where grunge music dominated styles of torn old jeans, old jerseys and hooded tops inspired by the hip hop explosion of the nineties. if people want to go buy their wardrobes at hospice, i have no objection to it. stranger things have happened to social generational subcultures.

its like ‘the hipster’ is the group which all the other gen y groups reject. the same issue which gen x had and is still battling. the accept or reject ‘habit’ which we all criticize in deep discussion, but which we all still do daily. as a humanity, we still haven’t, connected our inner, quite passionate, opposition to judgment with our inner habit of judging. i think we don’t know how to stop judging yet. once a habit, it’s a very powerful and convincing one. to think that one can analyze life, without finding certain things offensive and therefore judging it, hasn’t culminated into a societal practical, logical and applicable solution yet. i do think we’re close though and gen y is going to stumble upon it. don’t believe me, just watch.

if i can humbly venture a start to this very needed discovery. it must have to do with forgetting criminality as an explanation for the wrong in the world. hear me out, if we are all, perpetrator and victim of crime alike, in some form or way always a victim of being a product of a very long time of indoctrination, which was in the first place created to kill the originality in our souls and then build up and create similar patterned individuals whom would conform and obey the power hungry system of control manipulating all societies. our schools aimed to create soldiers of men and warfare supporting women through splitting tasks like knitting and home education for girls with woodwork and metal work for boys. defining gender roles to easier control the two genders, not even considering leaving room or option for homosexual, bisexual or transgender individuals.

so in this militant schooling perspective, where math was king and art or creative endeavors were seen as the alien or useless, the originally and classically outcasted i can bet you, are the naturally alternative thinking minds which society actually needs to make sense of the boundary between the original and the unknown of reality. those two elements share a relationship which has been broken and raped in our psychological civil commitment to each other. over time, desperation and state caused trauma drove more and more otherwise good people to criminal acts against each other and against the authority of the global states as well, but what all the outcasted have in common, are that they all have a history or significant experience of trauma inflicted upon them in their now, or what i would include to consider, former lives.

being a reincarnationist but not otherwise religious, i find the element of reincarnations elusive factual contribution to the worlds problems needs mention at least every now and then to fulfill the argument. a person whom comes from a seemingly well raised background with a well adjusted life, whom suddenly commits a severe crime, must in my opinion, have been exposed to severe trauma in a former life. 

authoritative testing and challenging is very healthy and highly needed in modern society as state corruption is very high currently. this needs to be opposed and successfully not only criticized, but brought to the engines of justice. being too ready to despise all that is authority also throws away powerful potential allies on and in the laws side. good authority figures whom try to do the good and correct thing in life desperately also want to see marijuana legalized everywhere, also want to see a solution for the suffering of the sex working industry. 

i guarantee you there are many cops, angry every time they have to waste time policing marijuana traffic when they could be teaming together to focus on tic, cocaine, cat and all the other severely life ruining hard drugs. the amount of clean or good cops are so few and far between and conspired against by the corrupt cops, that they are constantly fighting a retreating line of defense against the gangs, drugs and internal institution corruption covering up for and informing all those gangsters.

this brings me to the culminative effect of whatever’s wrong in gen y. its definitely the result or closing sign of gen y’s mystery trauma, but its intense recklessness on all levels. speed and drunk driving, drugs and heavy jealousy games during a severe morally ambiguous promiscuity trend. social culture cash spending is also a major reckless factor of gen y. they’re not saving money and making debt young. which is practically and factually the worst thing you could be doing during a economic recession with so far no end in sight.

this recklessness is from the same trauma source, of having been lied to by the states of our times since school level, than gen x’s. it’s greater in intensity as well. as if gen y is trying to beat gen x at all its bad ideas. the music, media, entertainment and art of the nineties wasn’t because of the drugs, it was probably in hindsight in spite of it.

it was the recovery out of drug abuse which inspired johnny cash’s late life comeback with his beautiful cover of the nine inch nails song ‘hurt’. the thirty to older generations of the world are failing effectively, gen y’s coming of age revolution, and they are left to fend for themselves on the books, tv and internet sources scattered out there for them. free information and self education is awesome, but we’re living in a very vulnerable time between primitive traditions and high tech equipment which isn’t harmonizing successfully. so hipsters are the least of our problems aren’t they. 

just a generational reach out to bridge with the generation after them. listen to nirvana, pearl jam, stone temple pilots, soundgarden, presidents of the usa, red hot chilli peppers early albums and do what you’re intuition is trying to get out of you. reinvention inspired by the past. rooting a place for your generational identity to ‘come from’ so to speak.

as positive note, inspiration and compliment to gen y so far, are elements like being very quick to learn information which was very scary and difficult to come to terms with a very short twenty to forty years ago. gender and racial oppression has disappeared from most of gen y’s psyche and i believe that the two extremes of right and left wing are collectively the strong minority in the entire generation. the most are ‘the hoped for moderates’ whom are likeliest in my opinion to figure out how to run and fix the world at the same time. the left and right wing irreconcilably fight over everything about every topic. they simply waste time and sabotage progress itself blindly to their own long term detriment if they’re distracting fighting succeeds in dominating the world much longer. gen y is very open to original, abstract and alternative ideas like continuing space exploration, holistic healing recognition and a spiritual and/or philosophical revolution of break away from the traditional on earth. renewable energy seems popular as well.

i believe the potential for a spiritual fire in gen y is itching to explode, but hasn’t lit yet. and its overdue. gen y is steadily reaching the thirties and as all over thirties at least know, everything changes after thirty. your still young enough to athletically enjoy your body but you can pick up clearly on the effects of times wear and tear on your body. so reality is literally forced closer in your daily world than in the twenties irrelevant of how close you’ve been to reality all your life. after thirty it starts to slot in to physical effects.

this easy attitude about learning and kind of strange enthusiasm which gen y has for knowledge is something different to gen x whose enthusiasm was more based on escapism through things like music, media and drugs. gen y seems to love the information access of the internet at their fingertips which is very good and very appropriately useful to all the current problems facing our world.

maybe gen x’s escapism need was its reason for being significantly original for its time frame. still gen y doesn’t have a weaker creativity, just one that seems to be waiting for the right manner of being utilized or tapped for solutions. mumford & sons are one of the few gen y bands to make waves enough to be historically noted for a contribution to rock & roll which i still hold true as being the backbone of every successfully healthy society, good band and hand played instrument driven music.

music which becomes too processed removes originality from it. one must remember at all times, originality is what we’re starving for because it’s the one thing which promotes individual thought and concepts like individual liberation from collective binds. a free mind is an original mind. the powers still manipulating the world events don’t want you to think independently for yourself, so they are not going to invest in your creative expression of your individuality.