Me, turned all the way up to 11

As someone who routinely has to interact with 18-22 year olds as a part of my job, I am keenly aware that there is an opinion that the current crop of semi-employable assholes are perceived as being so tuned out to the point of rudeness.  I disagree.  I believe the current generation of college students and young professionals are entirely tuned in, but they are tuned in to themselves, almost exclusively.  They have the capability to pay attention to others, but they would rather be focused on their own personal experiences.

I won’t dime store psychology the hell out of you, but we can point to the usual suspects – parents who make their children believe they are the most important and special little people ever, who make them feel that eighth place is just as good as first place, and telling their children “you can do anything you want” without adding that the child will need to work hard at it.  Every generation believes the one after it is entitled, lazy, and self-centered.  The boomers in the 1960s were countercultural because they didn’t want what their parents wanted, and were more interested in free love.  Generation X is defined by a rejection of collective societal norms, and a fierce expression of individuality.  Generation Y or the millennial generation is the “I wanted it yesterday” generation.  Why shouldn’t they?  I’m typing this on a macbook that, in another window, I could look up just about anything I ever wanted to know, and I’d know it in ten to thirty seconds, depending on my WiFi signal.

Not wanting to wait your turn, and not wanting to follow the path predetermined by the generation before you is just not wanting to conform to societal norms, except now individualism is collectivized by the culture as a marketing tagline.  Now, instead of showing off your deviation from the norm through your clothing and music choices, you do so by blasting to everyone who sees it your opinion on anything.

In perusing the twitter feeds and instagram accounts of people who are solidly the generation after me (age-wise, I fall into the millennial or Generation Y category, behaviorally, I fall mostly into the Generation X category) I realize that everyone is very interested in expressing themselves through their experiences and the belief that their life is truly the epitome of what they’d hoped for.  It’s as though everyone feels the irrepressible need to convince everyone else that their life is worthy of others’ envy.

The unstated part that goes with the outward expression of superiority in lifestyle and experiences is the greater need for crowd-sourced affirmation of their choices and the experiences they are broadcasting to the world. No one takes a selfie when they are hungover, or a selfie of their tear-streaked face when they are home alone and it feels like the entire world is out having fun without them.  It’s always the scene of a club, or at a ballgame, or some party.  They don’t take non-sarcastic pictures of the hot pocket they will regret eating in three minutes and hashtag it “#meatPopTart #FoodGasm.”

If you aren’t having the most amazing existence ever, then you’re not having an existence at all. The problem with all of this is that it hits the zeitgeist of your personal circle of friends like the well-crafted witticism you prepared on your walk to class in your freshman cultural history Gen Ed: everyone else has a zinger, too, and they are too focused on correctly annunciating and accenting the proper syllables for maximum effort to care about your Oedipus Rex/Crazy Texan with a shotgun road rage joke that you meticulously worded.

Twitter, Facebook, and instagram have been spoken of as though they provide access for everyone, and treat every tweet, from a Confucian proverb that enlightens the masses, to a picture of a porn star’s bleached asshole as the same.  Aside from the obvious disparity in significance to the greater culture, Twitter, Facebook, and instagram are only megaphones.  People who read tweets more than they tweet are the audience, only most people tweet to be retweeted by famous people, troll celebrities, and truly believe they are a string of tweets away from being the next @DadBoner with a book deal waiting in the wings.  If Twitter was truly the e-symposia that it claims to be, it would be a place where ideas were shared, not ignored in favor of the quest for followers and retweets by famous people. Twitter is the equivalent of a trade convention, at which the majority of people are sales representatives.  They aren’t buying; they are only selling and their audience is people who are only interested in selling.

That gets back to this current generation; they are not tuned out.  In fact, this generation comes prepackaged with cultural references and the dry, cool wit Bart Simpson needs to be an action hero.  They are tuned in to what they can use to advance themselves, grow their megaphone, and create a greater understanding of the phenomenon that is their own life.  They are tuned in, and they have the radio station of self turned all the way up, trying to drown out others.  The best metaphor is that of doing donuts in a parking lot.  The people in the car are Generation Y, having the time of their lives, centered solely on themselves and how what they are currently doing is the most amazing thing anyone could ever be doing in that exact instance. In the morning, there will be a black circle they left that won’t wash away for months, or even years.

The people in the parking lot, walking back from the Costco are previous generations.  To us, they people in the car are just a bunch of colossal pricks, wasting their tires and gas, filling the parking lot with thick, acrid white smoke, laying down rubber that ruins the parking lot, and causing an unbearable ruckus.  Not to mention, doing donuts is so unbelievably stupid, we can’t even understand why they’d want to waste their Saturday night bothering others, forgetting that we only know that doing donuts is stupid is because we grew out of doing donuts years ago, only our donuts were telling our parents it was okay that we were taking the long way around, eschewing from the easy path, and rejecting the notion of authority for authority’s sake.  Our parents’ perception of our behavior was wrong, and so too, our perception of the next generation’s behavior is equally incorrect, it’s just that the book hasn’t been written on how to harness the power of me to the max.