White by Bret Easton Ellis

Author:Bret Easton Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

…

I’d forgotten about the Vice interview until the “Generation Wuss” component caused a minor explosion in the press. I was immediately asked to appear on talk shows and podcasts and radio programs to discuss “this phenomenon.” Though, as noted above, those who agreed with my tossed-off assessments skewed older, I was surprised by the number of young people who followed along as well, chiefly millennials with complaints about their peers. The older fringe wanted to share examples, which ran along the lines of a father watching in frustration as his son participated in a tug-of-war game with his classmates on the field of his elementary school, only to be stopped after a minute or two by the kindly coach, who announced the game was officially a tie, told the kids they all did a great job, and gave everyone a ribbon. But occasionally guilt-ridden parents told darker stories, chastising themselves for coddling kids who, when finally faced with middle- or high-school traumas, drifted into drugs as an escape…into actual trauma. Parents kept begging me to understand how tormented they were by the oppressive insistence to reward their kids constantly, no matter what, and that in doing so they effectively debilitated them from coping with the failures we all confront as we get older, leaving their children unequipped to deal with inevitable pain.

I didn’t accept any of the TV, radio or online invitations in the spring of 2014 because I hadn’t actually studied millennials or any other “generations” that seemed to be arriving behind them: Generation Z, the Founders, whoever. I never wanted to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring who were supplanting his own, though certain people definitely thought that’s exactly who I was. As someone who’d satirized my generation for their materialism, and shallowness, and passivity that Less Than Zero bordered on, and then crossed over into, amorality, I didn’t think pointing out aspects that I’d noticed in millennials was a big deal. But because of how our 24/7 news cycle runs itself dry and elevates certain voices who shouldn’t necessarily be heard, I was briefly considered an “expert” and bombarded with emails and tweets. What the Vice interviewer didn’t allow was that as someone who was living with a millennial I’d be sympathetic or, at most, harmlessly critical.

I never forgot the hellish year when my college-educated boyfriend looked for a job and could find only nonpaying internships, while also having to contend with a demeaning sexual atmosphere that places such a relentlessly superficial emphasis on looks (Tinder being, as of 2018, the most prevalent example) that it made the way my generation hooked up seem positively chaste and innocent by comparison. So I was sympathetic to their neurosis, narcissism and foolishness, to their having been raised in the aftermath of 9/11, born into two wars, a brutal recession, endless school shootings and the election of a president they couldn’t tolerate. It wasn’t hard to be sympathetic. But maybe I was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.