Sean Monahan’s piece at The Face feels like a (self-)conscious attempt to claim and define the midlife crisis of USian early-Millennials, and as such perhaps clarifies the contempt in which Gen-Z supposedly holds them. Part of this is about the implicit audience, which is a phenomenon that attends the majority of “brand” writing, perhaps unavoidably: the unmoored-ness being described here is not the same as the unmoored-ness of those demographics who do not read The Face, or—if they did—would not feel addressed by its anecdotes of precarious professionals declaring that “Paris is now cheaper than Berlin!” Or, rather, it is exactly the same unmoored-ness—but the audience of a piece like this implicitly has the option to roll the dice on a relocation out of the US, the sort of job and accumulated capital that might make it viable. It is the unmoored-ness of those without any such options which is the basis of the thing they’re fleeing.

It’s a typically incoherent thing, portentous and gloomy: genuine insights and flashes of fine style in desperate need of some structure, and of the genuine introspection that might inform such. “Where’s my American dream, which I always knew to be a fiction, but which I’ve laboured to sustain nonetheless?” As I said a few days back, nothing hurts quite like meeting the dark shadow of the exceptionalisms that shaped you. In many ways Monahan is emblematic of that which he needs to position himself slightly outside of, slightly above: horrified by “brain rot”, but clinging to the concept of addiction as an excuse that relieves his generation of responsibility. Sure, they raised you in a casino society—a contextual point which rarely accompanies the sneering yet painfully accurate Boomer claim that “everyone wants a prize”—but it’s not like you don’t know that, not that you don’t still on some level hope that you might be one of the few to beat the house and come out with enough chips that you never need to play again.

I suspect it’s that elision, the moral histrionics and hypocrisy, that drives Gen-Z so crazy: that sustained kidult wail of complaint and confusion, the hand-wringing, the unexamined complicity. It’s been said many times before, but nonetheless: worlds end every day. But there are also moments when a widely-shared world ends not with a neat denouement, but rather with a slurry of lazy tropes and cliches; this final season of The American Century is a disappointment to everyone except the fandom that formed around the caricature villains of the piece, who saw its costumed heroes for the hypocrite cyphers they always were, and demanded a new show-runner to bring them low.

On some levels it’s hard for me to empathise with the sort of person who could read that article and see themselves in it—and that’s my hypocrisy, perhaps, as a British creature of the generational cusp. My own turning-forty naked-lunch moment came with Brexit, and here I am, having fled it—albeit by the skin of my teeth, and more through desperation and dumb luck than strategy. But everything’s always bigger in the States, as the saying used to go—and so the USian Millennials get Trump 2.0 as their fogged mirror on the morning after the night before.

That said, I recognise the basic despair that underpins the piece and its subjects, and I know enough history to see it as something that every generation goes through in its own way once it hits the maxima of its own gravity’s rainbow. At the same time, there is also a ‘there’ there—as I’ve said elsewhere, it isn’t the phones, but it isn’t not the phones. For a variety of reasons, personal and familial, I have long considered the disease model of addiction to be deeply wrong, if well-intentioned; that Monahan works with the concept of “learned helplessness”, but doesn’t connect it to the “screen addiction” that supposedly afflicts his Lost Generation re-boot, is perhaps his generation’s signature move.

I’m drawn repeatedly to the comparison someone made between mid-2020s technomedia and late-Victorian laudanum: two destructive and fiercely habituating products that were gleefully and profitably peddled as a “solution” to every damned thing, a structural force experienced as an individual misery. Can the lost kidults of individualism’s heartland rediscover the collectivity that might allow them to do something about it? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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(Yes, generation theory is the bunkum of marketing people—but sometimes you just have to conjure with the egregores already in play.)