As I get older, the search for integrity becomes all the more urgent. Especially when I find myself in the presence of a generation of twenty-somethings who seem less motivated by wholesome pursuits than any other age of twenty-somethings in the history of the world.
Yep, I guess I am just another 40 year old on a bender, who can’t figure out 20 year olds.
Just another.
My time as a curmudgeon has come.
I realize that it’s important to take people on a case by case basis. There is no typical 20 year old, any more than there is a typical 40 year old. None of us, when examined close up, are really typical of anything, are we, except perhaps, in our learned group habits?
I guess then, what’s irritating to me is the habits that seem to be found in way too many twenty-something’s I meet lately (not all, but way too many); habits so distasteful (a judgmental word for sure) that I have to ask, am I just getting old or are these kids really and truly more soul-less than any previous herd of insouciant youth? And there’s that word ‘insouciant’ again, that I use so much. I love a word that conveys the desire to want to bust someone in the chops.
My younger friends argue that the world has changed. Everyone is living on the internet. Get with it!! Privacy is OUT! People don’t read anymore. They don’t have time for long emails. Don’t waste their time with long thoughts or snail mail. Everyone texts. Everyone’s reachable. The way to meet cool people is through the internet. The way to network is on the internet. Everyone worth knowing is on MySpace. Online dating is the only way to date in the big city. Young people are fine with their open sexuality.
I see the world changing before me in ways that I don’t fully understand. Like the way kids leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. They’re used to posting explicit photos of themselves on the internet – their sexuality is literally, an open book to a stranger. Young women have gleefully thrown away the art of flirting. Everything’s up front now. And instant gratification leaves no room for building slowly or questing.
Impatient is how I would describe twenty-somethings. Impatient and insensitive. Not to people’s feelings (although they clearly are) but to the world. Insensitive to violence. Insensitive to elegance. Insensitive to the notion that anything worth having is worth earning. Were we Gen-Xer’s the last ones who knew this secret?
I always get into controversial territory when debating this troubling subject of open sexuality…and open sexuality on the internet…
Believe me, I don’t have a problem with morality. I celebrate the pursuit of pleasure and hope everyone else does too. But I also celebrate the sacred. My privacy is sacred. My sexuality is sacred. My lifestyle is sacred. I’m not sure if anything is sacred to twenty-somethings who live sexual lives in public as if they never planned to make it to age 30 or 40.
If the NEW COOL means posting a picture of yourself spread eagled with pierced genitals, wrapped around another club girl in a public toilet, on an internet site that you know is being visited by people seeking porn, then celebrate it but just be clear about why you’re posting your own porn. If this kind of display can be considered a sacred act of liberation, not wholly motivated by a drunken narcisstic need to have fifteen minutes of internet fame then I have no criticism of your character or your judgment. And I’m being totally serious. I believe in freedom of speech and artistic expression. But if I am meeting you for the first time and exploring the possibilities of getting to know you better, searching for your personal truth, your character, your motivations, finding out what makes you tick, etc, you can hardly blame me for finding it a little jarring to Google you and be introduced to your bedroom, your nakedness and a display wall of your sexual history so soon.
Is this any different than me exposing myself in writing here on my “witch” blog? Not really – perhaps the answer lies in the motivations.
We should all be entirely accepting of any self expression posted in a public forum IF the person posting explicit sexual media really intended it to be provocative in an artistic context. If you were just exercising your need to be self indulgent, I find this as jarring as watching you defecate. This is not a judgment of character. Or even really a judgment of art, although it sounds like it. I just think we all know that most people who post sexual photos of themselves are clearly not artists.
Oh you cheeky twenty-somethings. You are free to do all this and more. Hallelujah.
But let me remind you that no matter how free you think you are, there will always be consequences for your actions. I try as hard as I can not to be judgmental, but here I’ve already used that word, “distasteful” to describe the acceptance of extreme exhibitionism.
I wish every twenty-something, as progressive as they are, with all due respect to their rights and freedoms in the public forum, would give serious thought to the motivations that lie behind the need for public exhibitionism. Most of the time, it’s a red flag to people that you are fucked up. And if you’re not, you’re going to have to work twice as hard to prove to lesser evolved souls that you are not. This is usually the case when you are a minority amongst a majority that haven’t progressed to your way of thinking.
And don’t kid yourself about who is viewing your photos. Every employer I’ve ever had since the inception of MySpace has taken a resume, Googled the individual and, upon finding a page or personal universe motivated by partying instead of networking, has trashed the resume. You’re young, you’re wild and you’re free. I support that. But to an employer, you reek of poor judgment and lack of self-respect. The consequence of these freedoms is: you will not get hired. So live with that. And go out and make a million dollars as a stripper/pornstar. That’s revolutionary. Entrepreneurs always have the most freedoms anyway.
I know of a woman who was fired from a job because her bosses saw her stripping after hours. Yes, she had every right to her second job, her personal life, her freedom from labels, etc. And I’m sure she could have sued her bosses, had she known about the cause of her dismissal. But she didn’t know – they set her up and fired her on a technicality. They set her up to fail based on what they knew about her public exhibitionism outside of work. That isn’t fair you say? But what can you do when you’re trying to make a living in a world full of people who still very much believe public exhibitionism is a sign of poor judgment.
To add some humor to this subject, here is Chris Rock’s take on the stripper myth; you know that myth – that most exhibitionists are really just good girls with high self-esteem working their way through college…(3:28.)
Yes, I look at twenty-somethings today and their insensitivity to sacred, sexual mystery and wonder if I’m just getting older and possibly colder. Or if there really is a grain of truth to my criticisms of youth culture. Are these the same criticisms that have been hanging around since the beginning of time? Is this the signal that I am unconsciously swapping “cool” for “curmudgeon”?
Let’s look at all sides. I know many twenty-somethings who could be considered wholesome, hard-working, well-adjusted and balanced, effective in the workplace and community minded. These are the twenty-somethings I love. But believe me, I don’t meet too many of them here in LA.
So what of the twenty-somethings who have modesty, propriety, ambition; who keep their privates off the internet and strive to make the world a better place? Here is the group that suffers the most from impatience.
Recently, a forty-something woman whom I very much admire, not just for her character, education and career choices, but because she is an extremely hard working and reliable individual, told me something that I still chuckle at: that the younger generation of women coming into the workplace are just as hard working and ambitious, yes, but they all seem to have one character flaw that’s fatal to their growth as human beings: they don’t know how to lose. Their expectations of this world and what they can do in it, in one year’s time, seem a bit, uh, unrealistic.
Last time I checked you got wise from experience and experience was something you earned from, what, ladies and gentlemen? Aha! Experiences!
You can’t have had many wisdom-making experiences going from sorority girl straight to top banana. Intelligence and ambition aren’t in question here. It’s about experience. Which doesn’t seem to interest twenty-somethings. This is why so many youth-culture worshipping entities have the most dreadful people running their organizations.
Here, I quote a friend of mine who completed his education only after he’d had more than his share of life affirming experiences. These are his observations of twenty-somethings in the university setting.
“The world can be a wonderful place but this current generation of twenty-somethings has rarely done anything… They travel because someone told them it was important to do so and because it makes them feel wealthy and cosmopolitan. They listen to current music with little or no understanding of its origins. And few of them have any concern for the effects of their actions on the planet or the people around them. They are just clueless children. There are always the original souls and the diamonds in the rough but they are as rare as always.”
Hey. Sometimes you gotta call it like you see it. I know some of those diamonds in the rough and I admire them and their achievements. I count them as role models not just for my daughter, but me as well. But they are seemingly rare indeed.
I think I can deal with the impatience and insensitivities of the twenty-somethings if I wasn’t so afraid of what the future is going to be like for my daughter. What will she be like as a result of the habits of her generation? What kind of human beings will she encounter? Will there be any humans left who remember organic reality or will they all be humanoid machines, living a media motivated life that eschews old fashioned values like patience, integrity and personal mystery?
I sequeway here into footage of Werner Herzog in 2006, discussing the exploration of truth in a world that is created by false realities i.e. reality TV. This is relevant because I consider the notion of making any media universe more important than organic life a false reality. How do you find ecstatic truths and make distinctions? Are the forty-somethings the last generation to note the differences?
I guess my only antidote to the hubris of twenty-somethings are the musings of all the “old”, cool people, like Henry Rollins and Werner Herzog, who are so cool that they’ve gone past curmudgeon and back to cool again. What a cheeky old bitch I’ve become!
“There has to be a major shift in dealing with reality…it’s as simple as that.” – Werner Herzog 2006
