The Consequence of Malaise

There is nothing more rewarding than responding to well-reasoned criticism (especially since I take no offense at being disagreed with by some one as dashing as G-Money). I know I sounded defeatist with the remark about waiting around and leaving for lunch and so on... that was not a sentiment particularly directed at the generation as a whole. Rather, I was trying to tie the whole business back in to the original point about age culture. I literally meant that those of us who are working just need to hang on until there are more of us out there to work with, not that we should just wait for something to happen in a sort of unclear, undefined way.

Once again, I strongly agree with what G-Money is saying about the defining voice of this American generation either coming too late to have any meaningful effect (if this voice emerges when we're all in our fifties, then we won't need it anymore and the whole point will be lost), or, even more likely, coming from abroad. And precisely because of the path this nation has chosen to take, we will never hear that voice. I mean, I do my part: I read Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje... but of course, none of these writers are from this generation. I'm sure the State is allowing at least some brilliant writing to flourish in China, but, as G-Money rightly points out, that will never reach us.

So, yes indeed we must be more proactive. I refer obliquely to my novel (or perhaps not so obliquely, since this blog is named after its protagonist), which, since I can't afford to give back to the college which minted me or to give meaningfully to any other charitable cause, is my main channel of proactive bildung. Besides that -- and we cannot all be novelists, after all -- what can be done to combat this scattered-ness?

I could restate G-Money's concise understanding of the situation, but why bother when his words do it so well:

"...this ambitionless entitlement malaise is a psychological disease that we must work hard to fight off. And it is precisely that work that our generation is loath to do."

If we can do this, then we will indeed be looking at a new world. I wonder, though, if we can actually make this collectively happen. Many of us can, will, and perhaps already have done this individually; the two of us carrying on this dialogue, for example, are both doing their best to transcend the malaise. But collectively, I wonder if that can be accomplished.

My case in point: I have an associate to whom I will not even assign an oblique codename who, given all the advantages our system can pump out, is nonetheless consciously moving backward through the class structures of this society. His parents are medical professionals, he has earned a difficult degree from a prestigious four-year liberal arts college, and he is intelligent almost to a fault. He had planned to attend graduate school and become a professor. However, two years on, he is in low-income sales, and has made several choices which are currently actively working to move both him and his new family backwards from upper-middle-class through middle-class, and eventually down to lower-middle-class.

American class struggle is fascinating to me, since we do our best as a society to ignore it. But it can't be completely swept under the rug, because class is a reality of the human condition. Before anybody accuses me of being a Marxist (which I most certainly am not), let me just make my point: my associate's children will most likely not attend college. My associate himself will probably never attend graduate school. While his moderately ambitious friends move forward through careers, his will stagnate, and his lack of will to distinguish himself at a younger age will have set him on a very different path than the one he had intended for himself. And all of this is due to G-Money's Ambitionless Entitlement Malaise. People like my associate are far more common in our generation than people like G-Money and myself.

Perhaps all these ideas are also defeatist; that may be so. I think our generational stagnation -- this extended adolescence -- is a function of nobody wanting to make conscious decisions about the paths our lives will take. I'm not calling for some sort of neo-Sixities, consciousness-raising flowerfest (although perhaps I have been listening to too much Polyphonic Spree), but we do need to realize that this choice to wander is not a consequence-free one.