Keepers: a boiling cauldron
I took my daughter shopping for a new outfit this weekend. This is not unusual, of course, but this outfit will serve a very specific purpose. We’re moving this summer, so it will be worn on the final day of the school year, and will be the final impression left on her fellow students.
I’ve never seen my daughter more at home than while perusing the racks at Forever 21. She’s also given Urban Outfitters a semi-permanent space in her browser’s bookmarks; her new bedroom in her new house will need to be decorated, will need not just to represent her, but to become an extension of her, the same way that her Instagram profile needs to be just so, to signal to the world not just what she’s doing but who she is. That bedroom will very likely end up on YouTube one day, after all.
And so we shop. To find ourselves. To create ourselves. To announce ourselves.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the digital native generation. They’ve never known a world without iPhones and social media and war in Afghanistan.
Less energy has been devoted to how completely American consumerism dominates their lives. Everywhere they turn their attention, they are presented with an opportunity to buy things. They are told that they must be genuine, they must be authentic, they must be unique.
But more than that, they must show the world how unique they are, and this shirt and that phone and these playlists and this hair dye will announce your individuality for you—and (what luck!) they’re all on sale.
I don’t bemoan the entirety of the digital shift. I watch YouTube videos with them, see the worlds they build in Minecraft, laugh at the memes they discovered this week. And the amount of creativity on display is staggering. These kids are making things at an astonishing rate, and while their tastes may not be our tastes, there is no denying the ingenuity, the explosion of artistic output.
As the last generation to grow up in an analog world, we have a particular responsibility to contrast the world they’ve been handed with the alternative, to show them what is worthy, and what is merely new. They are the proverbial frog in boiling water, drowning in a bubbling cauldron of consumerism, and capturing it all with a flattering filter.
My keepers
'What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the “slow cancellation of the future”? By scrolling, swiping, and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign — and failing. When the phone hurts and you cry together, that’s technological sadness. “I miss your voice. Call, don’t text.” ‘
Sadness adapts to the Information Age, and takes on new forms.
“The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value.”
Infinity and meaning are incompatible. It is only when we realize what finite and temporary beings we are that we appreciate the sanctity of each minute of life, the sacredness of life.
I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change. — James Baldwin (via Nitch)