Thinking about generational differences today, the way they can be a strong indicator of society’s direction but can also be overdone because of older people’s nostalgia and the “grouchy old man effect.”
When I was teaching composition, I had my students one year listen to excerpts from John Updike’s 2006 speech to the Book Expo America convention on “The End of Authorship,” where he decried the effect of digital communication on literature and learning. The speech (available in full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25updike.html?ex=1153627200&en=6093995dc0ebc1e3&ei=5070 ) ends this way: “The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.” As an end-of-semester, in-class writing assignment, I proposed as one option that my students identify something in their lifetimes that they sensed was similarly in danger of being lost or degraded and proposing what could be done to avoid this. I called it my “grouchy old man prompt.”
This came to mind today because I have been reading bits of Brett Easton Ellis’ recent memoir/essay collection White. Ellis identifies as a member of Generation X and berates the Millennials who followed his generation as “snowflakes” and “Generation Wuss,” arguing that they are hypersensitive to the point of trying to muzzle anyone whom they might simply disagree with or find distasteful. Ellis should know a thing or two about being ostracized after being accused of misogyny and torture porn for his graphically disturbing novel American Psycho.
He has a point. Generation X, which I am part of, was a term popularized by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. To me it describes the way that people born between the early 60s and the early 1980s had diminished expectations in life compared with the Baby Boomers who preceded them, as well as a more wry and ironic world view. By contrast, Millennials stereotypically are more socially sensitive, literal-minded, and expectant of more from life generally than Gen Xers (my own view is much of this shift has to do with rapid technological advances like the Internet). Ellis argues the generational difference can be as simple as increased pain sensitivity and avoidance: “Pain can be useful because it can motivate you, and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art.”
But we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of nostalgic distortion of both past and present. I’m not a Woody Allen fanatic, but I thought he made an interesting point in the film Midnight in Paris that people often tend to think of bygone eras as “golden ages,” when they should concentrate on making the best of their present lives. A newspaper columnist once wrote that the problem with stereotypes like golden ages isn’t that they are untrue but that they aren’t very deep.
I also don’t really like Ellis talking about his personal life as much as he does in this book, but it is partially a memoir. And I have been guilty of over-personalizing occasionally in some of my blogs. It is material, what many writers crave.