Generation Whine
Self-pitying twentysomethings and the Boomers who made them.
- October 5, 2012 | 12:00 am
NO RECENT TV moment has gotten more cultural attention than the opening of HBO’s “Girls”—in which aspiring memoirist Hannah Horvath, shoveling noodles into her mouth, is told by her parents that they’re cutting her off. “You graduated from college two years ago, we’ve been supporting you for two years, and that’s enough,” her mother declares, and Hannah’s wounded hangdog look morphs into outrage: “Do you know how crazy the economy is right now?” she says. “I mean, all my friends get help from their parents.” When “Girls” premiered, the general response to that exchange was a resounding cry of recognition. An NPR reviewer pointed to it as the moment when he “fell in love” with the show. The clip was shown by a presenter at a recent Stanford conference called “Promoting Positive Development in the Third Decade of Life.”
“Girls” is part portrait and part send-up of a particular type: relatively privileged, newly ejected from the liberal arts bubble, armed with an expectation that the world will react to their quest for fulfillment with appreciative patience. And one reason the show struck such a chord was surely that its real-life inspiration is everywhere right now. A steady stream of articles and books is constantly reminding us that today’s young people, the recession’s unlucky children, are experiencing their twenties as an unprecedented period of paralyzing limbo.
When The New York Times’s Style section profiled 24-year-old Emma Koenig, creator of the popular Tumblr FUCK! I’m In My Twenties, it cast her as an emblem of millennials everywhere. “She is typical,” said the caption accompanying a picture of Koenig at home on the couch with her mom, “of her generation: bad jobs, duds for dates and an assist from her parents, whose house she recently moved out of.” During the past year, the Times has also chronicled the recessionary blues of “offspring who cling to the nest” (like the 26-year-old living at home and launching an Etsy-style Web business for small-scale artisanal-food purveyors) as well as Ivy League grads who flock to unpaid internships or who are waiting out the bad economy altogether (like the Harvard lit major who abandoned her job search to tour the country in an old Chevy minivan with her band).
The most recent addition to this cultural chorus is an ambitious generational study, stuffed with data and statistics, titled Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?. The book was penned by mother-daughter team Robin Marantz Henig (a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine) and Samantha Henig (a 28-year-old Web editor at the same magazine). Reading Twentysomething, it is hard not to feel a persistent familiarity in the back of the mind—and not just because its authors’ thoughts on the subject have been aired in assorted forums, including the Times and Slate. The déjà vu has to do with the strikingly specific portrait of the twentysomething that emerges, despite the book’s all-inclusive title and the broadness of its anthropological ambitions. The twentysomethings of Twentysomething are mostly angsty aspiring creatives whose Art is incompatible with adulthood. Many have parents willing to bankroll them, to a point. They are constantly tweeting and Tumbling, always about themselves.
It goes without saying that self-absorbed twentysomethingdom is nothing new. In the 1991 novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland coined the term “me-ism” to describe “a search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate his own personally tailored religion.” The worldview of this new set is instead a kind of “you-ism”—a tendency to look inward under the pretense of looking outward. This, after all, is a generation of twentysomethings taught to indulge and unpack every psychic injury online and to expect that endorsement for their own experiences is just a few clicks away.
HERE ARE NUMEROUS places on the Internet where you can read all about the particular torments of being a young person adrift in a grim economy, but perhaps none captures the spirit of the genre better than Thought Catalog. The group blog was launched in February 2010, gets some 20 million page views a month, and now has a permanent office in Brooklyn. Its posts are heartfelt meditations on subjects like “Why Does Graduating From College Suck So Hard?” (Answer: “Having a degree that felt like it was written on a cocktail napkin.”) Ryan O’Connell, Thought Catalog’s 26-year-old creative director, is its defining voice, cranking out earnest dispatches from his private life. In an essay titled “How to be a 20-Something,” he plays the misty-eyed mentor offering up tidbits of spiritual encouragement: “Work at a coffee shop but feel hopeful about your career in advertising, writing, whatever. Remember that you’re young and that the world is your oyster. Everything is possible, you still have so much to see and hear. You went to a good school and did good things.” Hundreds of commenters respond to his musings with grateful enthusiasm. “How do you know my life?” one wrote.
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