“What does it even mean to be happy? Imagine being an Antonius when you have had the greatest success; or you have arrived in Paris, you are under the Arc, and you are above all those people and power… In that moment you are all alone, if you are asking yourself ‘Wow.What now?’, then you are the loser, you lost. I mean in that moment, you have lost in the greatest of victories. And lastly, realizing and reflecting on all this. Does it offer more to life than what ignorant people have?Or is art, like everything else, just for sex after all?” (Loser’s Club,2011)
Are you happy with who you are? With your body? Your life? Or maybe you are just like me. You are okay with what’s going on, but sometimes, just sometimes, all you want to do is put a cigarette in your mouth, music in your ears and stand in the middle of the rain. For most of the week, the best moment of the day is when you wake up and see that there is still time to hug your pillow, pull the blanket, and sleep just a bit more. Our current pop culture recognizes this, but the alternative it provides isn’t always satisfying for everyone.
You can always argue that you are positive by nature, and be happy with cliche quotes found these days under Instagram models’ posts with emojis like 🔮 🔮 ,however me and Dostoevsky wouldn’t agree with you. We think we are irrational-meaning we sometimes take decisions that we know will have negative consequences, just because we can, and that choice is essentially what makes us human rather than machines. There are also already lots of people who are smarter than both of us writing about how in today’s culture objectification of women or toxic masculinity has been imposed on our generation and messed up our lives forever.
On top of that, we have embraced our depression as a generation, as dark humor has been more popular than ever and there are teenagers all around the world laughing at phrases like “because I don’t have any friends” or “FML” and at the age our parents listened to dance music and watched Grease, we are listening to suicidal thoughts of now dead hip-hop artists while relating to Black Mirror or Rick and Morty( or in my case some Ricky Gervais, George Carlin or Californication).
Well, is this because the world we live in is getting sadder than ever? Obviously we are all still racists, sexists and ignorants but after all, our impact on the world has been much less-worse than our predecessors and even though not enough, we have at last learned how to stand up for equality nowadays. But there is one more thing to consider, we have learned to do so because we are constantly aware of all the wrongs – all the racist, sexist, ignorant comments and actions taking place in the world even if we’re not the perpetrators. Due to the impact of the internet and social media; anyone, anywhere knows about disheartening events going on on the any side of the planet. Having to process this much negative information all at once is bound to have effects on our psyche, which makes it a generational issue.
Just a couple generations before our parents were dancing in discotheques, times were also as romantically sad as ours, and that has-at least in my opinion-produced the best artists of all time-especially in music and literature. At that time, a good writer was considered someone who could convey sorrow from the heart into paper. Am I one? Hardly. But do I deserve to be one? Did I go to jail like Oscar Wilde because of my sexual preferences? Or can my family be compared to that of Kafka’s? The answer to the last two questions is no, but does that mean my struggle is worthless because I have been leading such a comfortable life? I think not, and that question actually is the root of why we may feel like no one else understands us, because we don’t believe we deserve to be sad as we are taught that we have to be grateful for all our comfort in our pop culture. I will have to end my words here, but you my dear reader, please don’t forget that we are all trying to find our way through life, and it is okay!
“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is 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. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” (Fight Club,1999)
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