The conquest of existence

How we killed our chances to leave

I recently went on a bike trip with my old literature teacher. We did 100 km over two days at a good calm pace which, in addition to extended beer breaks, gave us plenty of time to chat. 

Conversations were quite enjoyable. We found interesting similarities and different perspectives that surely came in relation to our times and lived experiences. It was all going well until he threw a slight jab towards the younger generations. “Oh boy, here we go again”, I thought. Here came the usual complaints: Oh this fragile generation, oh these woke crybabies, etc. You know how it goes.. The typical angst of the grown man who masks his tantrum as critique. 

But it wasn’t that. It didn’t go that way at all. 

It went kind of the opposite way, actually, which caught me by surprise. “They don’t stand for anything”, he said. Wait, what? I thought this was the generation that complained too much. “They don’t challenge enough. They’re too ok with cruising along.” I was not expecting that. I mean, I had heard all that stuff about “they have it too easy”, but this was not like that. It was a concern, from his perspective, for a lack of movement. 

He must not be online a lot, I thought. Which he isn’t. Must be nice. As it seems everyone online is politically involved. But how much really goes on in reality? How much of it is leaving the internet bubble? 

I was definitely not expecting the commentary on the current university-level generation to be that they don’t complain enough. I respected it, coming from him. Kudos for continuing to support youth movements even when he stopped agreeing with them. But the issue for him this time was that there was nothing to support. 

Yes, there are a couple movements here and there and the encampments last year got us all excited for a few minutes. But is it the history of oppression and the terror surrounding university uprisings, especially in our Mexican context, that is driving college-students away from rebellion or is it something else entirely? 

And then it hit me. 

I ran into Professor Ricardo Dominguez Virtual Timelines work from 1997.

Four columns indicating four different stages of capitalism. The piece is headlined “>>>>>” suggesting the order in which the timeline runs, with a fifth arrow, but no fifth column, offering an open ending, an ellipsis. 

In my opinion, the timeline isn’t exactly linear. Even though the arrows point one way, I think we can find a little bit from every column in our current environment, which I assume falls under virtual capitalism. 

I had been reflecting on this chart for some weeks now. I was especially stricken by the “conquest of existence” cell. 

What does it mean to be conquered, to acknowledge we lost, to live under a boot and have no option but to adapt? 

Or is the true conquest to adapt? To let the system root. To let it ingrain in our psyche and make us active promoters of it whether we realize it or not. Because that is what I think we are doing. 

We are too close to forgetting that all these rules we just made ourselves, and that none of it has ever “always been this way”. As David Graeber said it best: 

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”

Every aspect of our existence is permeated by a system of our own creation. And it was when my teacher brought up his concern that I realized: We’re leaning so far into this system, that we’re killing any possibilities to choose another. 

Even more, when we think we are not. Let me explain.

Originally published on Substack. Get every post on TheEndNote delivered to your email by subscribing here.

The death of contrarianism

We complain about shortened attention spans but we keep making videos shorter and louder. Any long form piece should be turned into a script for video because “no one’s gonna read that bible”. 

But they won’t, you argue. The data is there. And these “strategies” are following the trends that are just already there. 

And I have to make a brief pause here and go on a tangent, but as a copywriter there is nothing I hate more than this. And it will probably come back to bite me—but: “data-driven copy”… Data-driven anything for that matter. Oof. I flinch. The death of creativity. Please go ahead and murder originality. See something new? That’s nice, let’s copy it! Try something new? Oh god no. Let’s go with what works! On the other hand, go ahead and complain about the way of the world, but do it in this format because that’s what’s working now. No, I don’t see the irony in that. Why would you wanna swim against the stream? Anyway…

But you also have the rise of the dumbphone, the revival of film and digital cameras, the increased numbers of performative coffee shop readers. Sure, these might all be masked as aesthetics. As a niche or a trend. But really I think we are not reading between the lines here. The generation that is “bringing them back” wasn’t even there when this tech was pumping. These are not signs of nostalgia, these are cries for help. 

From a generation that grew up being filmed into perpetuity by none other than their “morally superior” parents. Who’s infancy was stripped of its ephemerality and instead replaced with a cloud-based network of archives fed like sacrifice to a cyber-deity whose whip has governed their entire existence. 

But they didn’t choose to be filmed just as much as they didn’t choose to be children of the first generation in human history who is outnumbered by their elders. 

No wonder they cannot stand up for something, when everytime they do find something they like, it gets stepped on by a more populated, more powerful, and wealthier swarm of Peter Pan vampires who suck the youth out of the youth. 

The actual nostalgia seekers, who spend half their time flooding the media and pop culture with reboots and throwbacks, and the other half trying to stay hip with the new. 

So the young retreats and the forward thinking millennial just can’t understand why. If they’re doing everything in their power to be “in the know”, to integrate the cool, and remain relevant to the trend. 

Only thing they haven’t tried, maybe, is to let them be. 

The anatomy of the Peter Pan vampire

The Peter Pan adult has never been more present than today. Us millennials grew up watching our parents fall out of the cool, and somewhere in our early teens, started keeping a big archive on how it was happening to us. We cringed as we saw ourselves fall out of fashion, so we rebranded.

First, we hyper filtered our photos. We edited them with quotes. We posted them proudly. Then that was cringe. So we deleted those and went on to post only the ones that looked professionally shot. The age of influencers and the aspirational good life. Then we saw how messed up that was, and we deleted those to join in on the Instagram dumps. Where we carefully curate albums to appear random, to make them look like we don’t really care. Encrypting messages in blurry photos to let you know we are better than you. 

I truly hate your “instagram dump” and can’t wait until that becomes cringe too.

Anyway what all these “eras” have in common is that, as any trend, they started as an original idea that was slowly adopted by the masses, killing it in the process.

The thing is, for our parents, trends were spotted on the streets. Usually coming from counterculture and spread through youth circles in third spaces. They could decide to hop on or off as per their interests and would eventually fall out of the know as they “aged out” of these places. 

And some very few would never age out. “Forever youngs” they used to call them, and there used to be some shame in being one. As there should be. 

But now it’s pretty much the standard. 

I mean, it used to be a lot easier to spot a 40 year old at a club in the 2000s than it is now with miraculous viral skin care routines and stuff. 

But it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that we don’t need to be physically there to spot a trend. Everything spreads online and we have the unique chance of a generation to delete the evidence and hop on the new trend. 

It’s harder to age out with 24/7 access to our phones, a virtual ageless personality, and a big lack of third spaces for the youth to hang out in and keep us out. 

So we think we’re still relevant. We think we should be. We want to show you we know. We’re not like our parents, no. We are still cool and different and we will never grow up! And so we go on sucking the life out of the youth. 

We are the larger part of the workforce now and, Jesus Christ, it seems every millennial works in marketing—the industry that kills cool by corporatizing it. 

Yes, the millennial corporate minion thinks they are doing the right thing. I do think it mostly comes from good intentions. 

I believe we are the first generation that tries to adapt to the next one rather than bash on it as boomers did on Xs and Xs did on us. 

I do think most of us lean more towards integration, and so we “vouch” for any youth culture trend and massify it, not realizing we are killing it in the process. 

Think about it: a meme is born in the depths of the internet, it’s shared and it grows, and then a corporate millennial suggests it as a part of their brand strategy and the decline of the meme begins until its inevitable death. Same thing happened with the woke rebrand we’ve mentioned in this publication before. And so on. 

We think we are doing the right thing by “providing platforms” for youth culture, but we don’t realize that for culture to grow and ingrain, it must be counter. It must fight the power, not join it, because the power will never be cool and to join it is to sell out. 

Counterculture will always win. Eventually. And it’s important to keep it alive by keeping it counter. Dangerous not to do so. 

Look at the US, where in a crazy turn of events, “liberalism” (or at least their version of it) became mainstream and died, and conservatism became a contrarian force and won.  The people who voted really thought they were standing for something by stepping on others. And THE image of the man child became sidekick to the most powerful man on Earth, who is, in turn, the boomer version of an Ipad kid and the impersonation of an adult tantrum. See how it all ties together?

Do you remember ever being bullied for liking something, loving it so much and making it yours, until eventually the “cool kids” started liking it too, so you suddenly didn’t want it as much anymore? Well we’re doing the same thing. 

We’re taking their things and making them ours, we’re playing with their toys, reducing their appeal or making them too expensive for them to keep on playing. 

Tiktok, for example. We blamed the app for being the dark pit where time and attention went to die, but something happened and now I’ll sit and wait until you find three consecutive adults who are not on the app. 

And I’m not saying we should deny or reject the younger generation and their culture. 

I do think we should continue to provide spaces for it. But maybe it is the clash and critique between the two that makes it flourish and live. 

Maybe its our yearning to remain relevant that is driving youth away from any interest.

Maybe our existence is so conquered by virtuality that we’ve become active soldiers of it, killing any chances of rebellion before they are even born. 

So maybe to provide spaces for youth, counterculture, and contrarian forces today means to simply not make it about yourself. To let them have it. 

Maybe the issue is not a lack of youth culture, but the older generations refusal to act their age. 

Encrypted youth

Up until now, it’s mostly been all about how the old sees the new. How the new generation is outnumbered and so passing by unremarkably. But at the end of the day I’m still an optimist. 

I might be angry, but I’m also hopeful. 

And I do believe that kids will always come through. I think they’re showing themselves somewhere, somehow, and it’s away from our eyes and understanding. I hope.

Gen Alpha slang is an example. How they’ve managed to transgress language in the space of less than a generation. How unintelligible their dialogue appears to the old. How much we hate it. That’s the point. 

And while hundreds of millennials are jumping on tiktok trying to explain where all this is coming from (I guess I’m doing it too now), I do hope the dialogue gets more cyphered as time goes by, until eventually we give up and they can finally have something of their own.

And so I hope youth culture swerves in the same way. Not to bring back anything, but to have some of their own. Make it ugly. Make us not want it. That’s the idea. No punk ever thought their mohawk looked nice, they were not going for an aesthetic. They were misbehaving. They were making a statement. 

And listen. I am a writer. I love words and stuff. And I do hate what they’re doing with language. I will complain. I will not adopt. As far as it concerns me, you kids can have it. 

Give us hell. 

And keep it unappealing. 

Sources:

CULTURE AFTER YOUTH CULTURE – NEMESIS MEMOS

Virtual Timelines – Ricardo Dominguez

Featured image: “The Deadly Sins Dominated by Death” James Ensor (1904)