My good buddy and I were sitting on his porch chatting last night as the evening got deep. He’s heading back west next week, ending roughly a year of nearly constant back and forth visits. We got on the topic of millennials, and trying to figure out what went so wrong with their (our) culture. We’re both elder millennials who spent most of our late teens hanging out with Gen X, doing lots of drugs and approaching life from an existentialist perspective. In sum, it was a life philosophy that valued objective truth on the one hand, and on the other hand, in the shadow of that, the subjective experience of living within that objective truth.
It’s like looking at a photograph of a willow tree taken from the window of a train. The grass blades blur around it- both a real scientific phenomenon of motion, and the vague dreamy mysticism of the sensory experience of it- all at once. The dreaminess is dependent on the truth, partially known though mostly unknown, behind it. Just knowing that it’s there and accepted without thought or even choice.
On paper Millennials were everything I wanted and was missing in a culture- an appreciation for Nerddom, an appreciation for nostalgia and bold works of art- like star wars, lord of the rings, bob ross, etc. They mainstreamed awkward and endearing dorkiness. They took the mechanism for social climbing that Gen-X had, which was awful- making fun of others in a funny or “sarcastic” way- and inverted it. Displays of kindness and empathy and compassion kind of became the new way to climb the social ladder. They were tech savvy, modernist, liberal, and educated. They were my people, up to that point.
But something else came along with that. The shadow of it, I didn’t see coming. An inversion of Truth and subjectivity that ran cross grain to what I had adopted from Gen-X. Instead of a subjective experience within objective truth, the epistemological orientation flipped- it began exploring an understanding of the world through an objective uniform experience rooted in a weird quicksand of subjective truth.
It was like the ability to think and build and progress as an intelligent species was tossed out in favor of a slow cannibalistic suicide of de-progression and unlearning. Suddenly everyone was “speaking and living their own truth” rather than trying to discover the single truth that is always just there. And rather than have Truth as an anchor, and Experience as the swirling pool of diversity, Truth became the swirling pool of diversity, which thus mandated that Experience become the anchor.
And so was born the petty totalitarianism of Millennial culture.
The preservation of subjective truth required a forced collective experience, as an anchor, to exist- an objective experience, across the board. This was taken incredibly seriously by suddenly indignant and murderously imposing millennials, writing think pieces about how “Freedom” is a fascist dog whistle, and how anyone who doesn’t line up like good little boys and girls and do everything authority tells you to do is Bad- not because authority is competent or correct, but because maintaining a uniform objective experience is paramount for supporting the quicksand of subjective truth.
In Nethack, if you have a blank spellbook and a magic marker, you can try to write a spellbook you haven’t found or don’t know yet. If playing as a Wizard, you have a 2/3 chance of nothing happening with the following message: “You don’t know how to write that, so you write ‘My Diary’ instead,” which uses up some of the magic marker’s charges. But, if you’re lucky, and you persist, you get this message instead: “The spellbook warps strangely, and turns purple” and suddenly you’re holding whatever spell you wanted.
Millennials, which were almost entirely liberal, took the “Liberty” that was inherent in the name too far, by extending it to Truth itself, and “warped strangely, turning purple” as a consequence. Tampering with that erased the possibility of subjective experience that was at last half of what Liberalism was about prior to that point.
With the death of diversity of experience art began to collapse in on itself like a dying star. Hollywood fell into a “remakes and sequels only” factory. Existing art and culture that predated the Millennials artistic collapse was consumed and re-consumed and deconstructed, until nothing but dust remained. Who wants to watch some more Star Wars and Harry Potter for the ten billionth time? Anyone?
The Covid experience allowed them to take their need for a uniform objective experience and tie it directly to matters of life and death. I see you didn’t wear your cloth mask from the door to your table- why do you want Grandma to die? Never mind that there’s zero actual Truth or science behind it, just the need to force subservience of others to maintain that uniform experience- that’s really the important part, according to Millennials. Not that they realize it.
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