Alex Tarnava on Millennial irony, Gen Z absurdity, and the quiet rebellion of building meaning from nothing.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In a reading from StressHacked, where you read the whole of your chapter “What I Am Is The Silence,” you reflect on how to find one’s purpose. In particular, you muse about how individuals within our generation (Millennials) were told (in different words; and to simplify) that we could do anything we put our mind to and that the world was our oyster. At the same time, we as Millennials were more or less ushered into one career path (at least most of us) which didn’t allow us to explore our dreams and desires in service of our purpose. So, we were ultimately let down, and you quote Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame, who captured this sentiment through his character Tyler Durden:
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
When we wake up each morning and we’re not movie gods and rock stars, we’re pissed off. Maybe some of us shared your view, described in “What I Am Is The Silence,” that we felt we were destined for greatness (certainly we were promised something like this!). But the system, or something else, got in the way of our destiny. You talk about the education system in your upcoming work Manufacturing Minds.
To sidestep the “how” we got to this way, which you cover in your upcoming book, I’d like to talk about coping mechanisms we use today to come to terms with our reality, namely humor. I think Millennials, of which you and I are a part, adopted ironic distance as the ontological posture one takes when confronted with both the sufferings of the world and one’s place in it as a cog in the failure-system. “The world’s gone to shit, but at least we can laugh about it,” may be the common Millennial mantra, even if it’s not stated explicitly like that.
With my limited interaction with the younger generation, such as the sound engineer who worked on one of my creative projects, it seems to me that their humor is not ironic but absurd. The humor of Generation Z (Zoomers) seems predicated on the world being so bad that one must be in a perpetual state of laughing about it. It’s for this reason that some Zoomer memes are purposefully unfunny, lacking the necessary context for the meme to be a joke. When you spread your humor out so thin, nothing is ultimately funny. Absurdity isn’t that funny as much as it’s (in the long term) scary. And, as Arthur Schopenhauer and others have posited, humor is born from trauma, or at least the disconnect between what you experience and what you expected to experience. Uncertainty, perpetually experienced, can be a form of trauma.
There’s another explanation for the absurd humor of the younger generation. Nick Land describes ‘hyperstition’ as the concept wherein fictional narratives, repeated often enough, eventually generate the conditions for our reality. Fictions about human rights (from a Nietzschean perspective, let’s say) have created the world liberal order we live in today. (Conversely, fictions about how ‘nothing matters’ will create a world where nothing indeed matters). What do you think Zoomers and those younger are doing with their humor, as a coping mechanism for a lack of purpose? Have they given up even trying to resist—withdrawing to absurdity? Or do you think they’re trying to engineer a new world through hyperstition, one where, because of the institutional failures against them, and their weaponized ressentiment, a purpose-driven ontology will become impossible? I do not blame the younger generation: if you were given only gasoline, and no other means to make a proverbial spark, then it’s no surprise you’d light the world on fire.
AT: Of course, I discuss this in detail in the conclusion and closing pages of The Stone Wall. I also describe what I am observing, regarding Millennial irony and humor slowing transforming into rage against the systems, with many Millennials angry at the institutions, private and governmental, representing both artificial sides of the political spectrum. Gen Z, in contrast, seems to be developing rage against groups, but at a much lower rate. Their generation has accepted defeat to a much greater extent than any before them. Gen X, at least the younger Gen Xrs in their 40s and early 50s, seem to have had their anger reignited, likewise often directed across systems representing both sides of the false duality in our politics.
This building trend amongst millennials and Gen Xrs is a unique opportunity. When someone is angry at everything, they are in a unique position where they can be convinced to accept nothing as a foundational ideological fact. The new religions we have been taught to worship, such as democracy, institutional schooling, and centralized authority are all up for debate for the first time in a very long time. The prevailing false binaries in our system, namely free market capitalism or Marxism, absolute racial equality in all areas or unbridled racism, cultural relativism or xenophobia, and many more, are now increasingly becoming open for debate. Many of us are rejecting absolutes, accepting nuance, and breaking from these false, divisive and artificially manufactured extremes. Of course, many others are being driven further down the extremes than ever before. But, as I again write about in The Stone Wall, the further individuals are pushed into an unnatural extreme, the greater the chance they will face a reckoning with reality—and the greater the opportunity the growing group of disenfranchised “middle” will have to convert said former extremists back to reason and sanity.
We were abandoned, lied to, betrayed, and then told it was our fault. We are slowly waking up to this, and, as we wake, we are growing angrier and angrier. The angrier we grow, the harder the architects of this betrayal, or, in most instances, the benefactors of previous betrayals are trying to drive us towards the extremes, to force our anger’s direction back at each other. It is an effort that is failing, and will ultimately fail. When the realization of the futility of these actions finally sets in, a new reality will emerge, one born of fear, leading to unpredictability and chaos. Again, I write about this in The Stone Wall.
For the Gen Zrs, and perhaps those younger, we must only hope they are not so defeated that when this chaos emerges, when the constructs begin to fall and the illusions fade, that they will snap out of their trance and realize they finally have a chance to pursue something that matters. Directing the civilization we have inherited back towards one that strives to create, not extract.
VG: There is perhaps a hastiness in my attempt to characterize the humor of a whole generation. You are right though that in both cases of Zoomers and Millennials, the humor is anti-system, and perhaps Zoomers are more willing than Millennials to cast blame on whole groups, while still being largely defeated. However, I wager the vector by which this rage is expressed differs, with Zoomers laughing more because they cannot conceive of fixing anything, and Millennials still, with their detached irony, holding out hope that something can be done through traditional, which is to say, legal, means. I also hope that, when the time comes, Zoomers and those younger than them “are not so defeated that…they will snap out of their trance and realize they finally have a chance to pursue something that matters,” as you put it.
It seems to me that if the normative culture of these generations is avoidance, whether through ironic distance with Millennials and absurdism with Zoomers, then the antithesis to this avoidance is a kind of ‘new sincerity.’ One can see this explicitly in the twee music which bears the name of ‘New Sincerity’ (though this too appears to me somewhat tongue-in-cheek; a prime example is Belle & Sebastian), along with some literature of this movement, the most famous of which is Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But, one can also see the new sincerity in the so-called ‘trad’ lifestyle, where—insofar as it is not wholly performative—eschews social considerations of glitz and glamor in favor of living like our ancestors, or at least trying to approximate it.
So, we are becoming more polarized, as you state. And, the elites do want us in political extremes, because that makes us easier to control, but what happens, when, through hyperstition, the Zoomers and their descendants thought-engineer a kind of world where the non-extreme, “centrist” position is a kind of accelerating nihilism? Where the Zeitgeist of the world, to use Hegel’s term, is part Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and another part Attomwaffen Division? The answer seems to me to rebel quite strongly, to really rage against the dying of the light of Western civilization.
In antinomian Kabbalistic Judaism, which is a kind of Judaism opposed to normative laws granted in the profane world but also willing to transgress laws considered to have passed down from Yahweh, represented (at its worst) by Jacob Frank, it is held that the Jewish messiah (Moshiach) will come either when the world is fully good or fully evil. This is wrong, to me a pro-nomian Kabbalistic Jew, but the insight that the Frankists have is that the poles of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ seem to resemble each other (I am reminded of the quote I shared last week from Schopenhauer stating that, if the world was made perfect, human suffering would increase 100-fold due to humans’ innate boredom and cruel sadism), and in transgressing from one pole to the other (with ‘good’ being interpreted here as order and tradition, and ‘evil’ the opposite of this) the universe, or however you want to put it, tends to snap you back into a kind of equilibrium that is neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ but functional, and somewhere in between, what Heidegger calls Dasein. This is why it is hard to cause harm—real, physical harm; perhaps not words—to another human being if you’re a decent person. You have to be hyped up to do so, whether through emotions or political ideology or legal sanction. Transgressing the natural law, which represents the autonomy of individuals to not be violated arbitrarily, as perhaps Frank found out in his madness, is not easy and the destruction of this more leads to the degradation of the transgressor. Think only of the Portrait of Dorian Gray: this is the consequence of hedonism—spiritual death—and I believe it manifests in ugliness, even physically.
This is all to say that I believe some Zoomers realize this moral deficit in civilization, and that humor as avoidance is not sufficient in dealing with it, and they are “snapping back,” but what happens when the snapback occurs in a normative culture where people are increasingly defending vile and immoral actions as being part of ‘sexual liberation’ (for example)? Wouldn’t the evolution of our society go only one way: forward, always forward, even if just enough of us step out of the herd and become who we are, eschewing a society that more-and-more resembles a monstrosity prophesized in the ancient books as Babylon?
AT: Much comes down to avoidance. We avoid doing what is hard, instead usually choosing what is easy. The problem is, in our society today the actions which some believe are rebellious, and choosing what is hard, such as a pursuing trad-life, are deemed acceptable rebellions. The more that choose to “rebel” in this way, which is avoiding the fight, the easier those seeking total dominion will achieve it. I bring this up, as you clearly see it as I do—avoidance—but those engaging in it have convinced themselves they are resisting.
I also fully believe that we will only achieve victory through legal avenues, however, I see these avenues as substantially different than anything that has been attempted. I write about the ways that work within the law, which weaponize the very structures used against us, back at the oppressors, including using legal avenues in order to attack oppressive legal frameworks. Again, this cannot be done through typical means as that is a war the resistance will lose. Still, it can be done legally, through guerilla lawfare means, as well as other targeted and intentional strikes using the various systems of control currently directed against us, from finance to propaganda and more.
The avoidance, and the ironic humor, are both internalized anger. We need to unlock this anger and direct it, in a controlled manner, in intentional attacks, while simultaneously building new structures in order to avoid chaos and catastrophe during inevitable collapse. The enemy isn’t at our doorstep; we have let them through the gate, and turned our backs on them. They are picking us off one by one, but we still outnumber them—in population, true means, and capacity. We must only turn around, look them in the eye, and stop avoiding.
VG: I agree it makes no sense to avoid. For trivial reasons, which is why I don’t do it anymore. In Washington D.C., I ignored a problem I was having with my window, avoiding telling my landlady about it (who I had a neutral, if slightly off-kilter relationship with) until I was sweeping up exploded glass pieces on our porch. Avoiding telling your partner how you feel about them will lead to resentment, if outright hostility, and will waste time if you were truly meant for other people. And, avoiding doing your taxes (or other obligations) until the very last minute will weigh on you, making these simple tasks all the more exhausting and arduous. Alex talks about this in Chapter 14 of StressHacked: The Mind, on when to “eat the whole frog” and when to build momentum for such a challenge.
