The Niche That Won't Shtick

Over at The American Scene, Matt Frost is undoubtedly right to question and even ridicule supposed experts about ‘Millennials’ — that latest incarnation of the Pepsi generation who are supposed to be, individually and in the aggregate, both so much more enlightened than their ancestors and so much more trenchantly aware of the emotional and practical limitations of that enlightenment (and, like, enlightenment per se) that they will affably, endearingly orchestrate the feel-good large-scale social recalibration of the year.

While I think that this is sort of true, insofar as there are a fair number of people I know or know of who seem to be living out lives that play into this narrative, I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from dubbing the Youth Shtick the world’s next great generational beta release. On the one hand, the recent development and explosion of niche affinity groupings makes generational self-selection for earnest young social pragmatists easier than ever. But at the same time, that dynamic, combined with others that pop generational psychology inevitably and deliberately obscures, seems to me to militate pretty firmly against a shared ‘Millennial’ experience.

Leading me to hope that we won’t end up with self-appointed or self-styled ‘Millennials’ running around as some kind of anti-Zakarian Vanguard dedicated to unifying their generation across the globe under the banner of improvised resource collectivism and intellectually rich cuddle parties, with Juneau as their capital and Juno as their god. And with a lameo core of social scientists trying to figure out how to incorporate these post-tragic freaks into their dubious social science models and engineer their curious forms of interchange into a force multiplier for the planetary restructuring of efficient labor.