The recent post on Generation Y drew a lot of comment. One of the most prominent questions pertained to why so many members of generations after X are seemingly unsalvageable. As Bruce Lee taught us, understanding the problem points to the solution. So let’s examine Gen Y’s besetting vice: terminal nostalgia.
As the Nintendo generation drifts through middle age, their innate religiosity—suppressed since adolescence by schools and the media—is finding an outlet in the Pop Cult. More and more, a whole generation now venerates plastic idols, video imagers, and four-color sacred texts. Global megacorps sell Gen Y a repackaged version of their own childhood, and they obsessively gobble it up.
Related: The Nostalgia Jukebox Effect
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.
Related: The Nostalgia Bar
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.
Related: Aughts Nostalgia
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.
Related: The Idea of a Mall
Lest you think that’s hyperbole, consider that two close Gen Y friends gave almost identical accounts of their rude awakenings to the real world. In both cases, their transactional relationship model Boomer parents kicked them out of the house at eighteen. Both lived in pest-ridden dumps where making rent meant they had to walk miles to dead-end service jobs each day. Both had to suffer those squalid conditions for years.
Happy ending: Both are successful now, with families of their own. Their parents pat themselves on the back and say, “What did we tell you? Letting you sink or swim turned out for the best!”
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.
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