On a recent trip to a local used video game store, a fellow Gen Y friend puzzled over the religious devotion lavished on 80s and 90s IPs by Ys.
As our generation enters middle age, many of us increasingly turn our natural religious impulse to Pop Cult relics. More and more, a whole generation makes idols of action figures, comic books, and video games. Corporations are selling our childhoods back to us, and we manically shop the nostalgia sale.
One common aspect of undue attachment is seeking an unhealthy substitute due to the absence or deficiency of some good. The beta male clings to his wife to make up for an absent or aloof mother. The paraphiliac indulges in perversion because he was deprived of rightly ordered sexuality by abuse. The drug addict chases the sense of wellbeing denied him by isolation and poverty.
The flip side of this false coin is that if you want to understand Gen Y’s attachment to the past, ask which genuine goods their nostalgia substitutes for.
In short, Ys make idols of their childhood IPs as a way to once again make manifest the goods robbed from them by the passing of their childhood.
And that childhood took place in a supermajority white, Christian country with intact families.
Generation Y is especially vulnerable to the Pop Cult’s siren song due to their upbringing in consumerist, materialistic households defined by transactional relationships. They may have gone to parochial schools Monday-Friday and church on Sunday. But their parents’ self-absorption, too often ending in divorce, scandalized them away from the one God who made them and who can make them happy.
As a result, many Ys are spiritual vagabonds, left to roam the strange landscape that replaced the world they were raised to survive in. They were never taught the self-mastery or courage needed to withstand Clown World, so they cling to scraps of driftwood from the shipwreck of Cultural Ground Zero.
That’s not to mock or belittle Gen Y. Remember that they are the Mugged by Reality generation, raised in gilded pleasure domes only to be cast out of paradise into Purgatory without the tools to adapt.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider that more than two close Gen Y friends recently gave me almost identical accounts of their rude coming-of-age. In both cases, their transaction-minded Boomer parents kicked them out of the house at 18. Both lived in vermin-infested flophouses which required them to walk for miles to dead-end fast food jobs to pay rent. They endured that loathsome existence for years.
Today, both are successful, with families of their own. Their parents pat themselves on the back and say, “See? The school of hard knocks did you good!”
Both of my friends disagree. What the school of hard knocks did was nearly destroy their ability to trust anyone–including God. In reality, they credit the friends who banded together to lend them a hand when their own flesh and blood turned their backs.
Not all Ys found their way back to healthy relationships and a place in society. Not all found their way back to God.
Helping them find their way again is up to us.
The Bible is the best place to start. To apply its universal wisdom to our generation’s particular challenges, consider my own humble offering.
