My 17-year-old is mopey a lot of the time. I asked her why, and she replied, "Everything's dead!"
"What do you mean?"
"Everything's been done! Music, art, film. Politics sucks. It's all dead."
She said she didn't envy my age (who would?), but that I was around when punk first hit, and was old enough to remember the hippies, etc. Today, it's all rehash. I can see her point, kinda.
....................
Music aside, here's component of the problem...
On the one hand, you have the Corporate Dream of the Future which is essentially: Today! But, with different stuff. The cars might be flying, or, thinking "green", there may be no cars, only bio-fueled, fuzzy logic driven, Eurostar-style trains with nanoskin but - and here's the kicker - you'll still owe Citibank money and they'll still charge crazy-ass interest and your job will be shaky, we mean flexible and Madonna will still be doing yoga on stage and called "controversial" by helmet haired chatbots - but there'll be autonomous mil robots monitoring for terror so it's good!
And then there's the Emergency on Planet Earth Future which has three main divisions:
1.) Romantic primitivism and, it's paramour, general ass tunnel-ism from J. Kunstler and his fellow "big die off" travelers who, once you cut through the graphs and peak oil doomer math are saying nothing much more complicated than: 'We hate today, let's try yesterday!'
2.) Sober considerations of the real challenges we face (see, for example "An Inconvenient Truth" - a solidly produced, mainstream call to arms on climate change).
3.) Dystopian, auto erotic asphyxiation sessions amongt from the (see, for example, Cormac McCarthy's post apoc, all cannibal, all the time novel, The Road).
If you're a sensitive and alert kid, you understand the splendid bullshittery of the Corporate Dream. What kind of future is more of this (gesturing broadly at a suburban mall and a flat screen showing a Hill Rodham speech)? A bad one and you know it. It probably isn't even sustainable except, perhaps, in some sort of maniacal, Dalek kind of way.
As for item 2; the climate change related job is big and you'd like to get your hands dirty Rosie riveting the problem.
But aside from a few heroic organizations working against the tide what you mostly see is a gigantic apparatus tirelessly laboring to keep the carbon cycle as destructive up as it is.
And then there's issue 3: it's tough to dream of a better tomorrow (or any tomorrow, actually) when the haute lit types are tripping over themselves to calmly, artistically, sensitively - and to critical acclaim - depict a world gone totally to the cockroaches. Stream poisoning.
But there is a way out of this funk - that's what I tell the concerned teens in my life. Yes, there is a way out and it involves following the advice of HST who once wrote: "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro." We have to change the old man's words to fit our moment because the going is tough and getting tougher.
Which means it's time to get weird.
Know what I love about the hacker POV? Know what makes me want to leap like a 5 year old for her first ice cream cone? Just this: complexity and challenge present zero obstacle to effort. In fact, the greater the complexity, the better the eventual nerdgasm when victory comes.
Kid, I say, you've got to:
* Learn the systems that are fucking with you and the fuckers who are those systems' masters
* Recognize them as your enemy and the Enemy of the Future (no hedging - they're not misguided, they're pig fuckers, through and through)
* Hookup with people are similarly motivated to learn and...
* Start pushing back as best you can in solidarity with the best and brightest
The future will be built in the doing, the weird will manifest via the effort.
Study everything - from the meaning of Horus to the ancient Egyptians to the meaning of a soliton to why middle aged people love to play Kool and the Gang's "Celebration. When you're in that office gig or construction job or home health car job or whatever it is you're doing think hard about the structure and super-structure of your place in space time and then, think hard about how it might be re-arranged.
.d.