So what occurs to me is that Baby Boomers/Gen X and Millennials/Gen Z (the cutoffs are a little arbitrary, but bear with me) both grew up in the shadow of extinction, but have had qualitatively different experiences of it.
For the Boomers, the big fear was a sudden, violent catastrophe; nuclear war. US and Soviet ships start shooting at each other off the coast of Cuba; someone, somewhere in the huge and ponderous Cold War military apparatus, mistakes a meteor for an incoming ICBM, and just like that, your world is over. You’re always just one bad day away from death on an unimaginable scale.
This fear has never really gone away (and certainly it’s had something of a revival, recently), but it went into remission after the end of the Cold War. For Millennials, the overwhelming fear isn’t of a sudden catastrophe, it’s of a death by a million cuts; global warming. A slow decay growing faster; a downward spiral as everything you love and value crumbles and rots and turns to garbage around you.
When what you fear is a sudden catastrophe, normalcy–“business as usual”, abstracting maybe a few reforms of the political systems–becomes a refuge. It could all be gone in a flash, but at least it’s here now. It’s real, it’s solid. You can live in it, while it’s standing.
When what you fear is a slow rot, “business as usual” becomes part of the horror. You’re not escaping anything; you notice things getting worse around you with every passing summer; even worse, you are–however infinitesimally–assisting in your own demise; slowly and thoughtlessly, you are weaving the rope that will be used to hang you. Normalcy becomes your executioner.
You are 21 YEARS OLD, and you are a MALE. You are an individual of varied tastes to put things in an understandable manner. You love to READ and PLAY VIDEO GAMES, and you also love to ROLEPLAY. Your STRIFE SPECIBUS of choice is a CANE WITH AN UNUSUAL HANDLE and an REFUNISHED WOODEN STICK, part of your CANEKIND and WANDKIND STRIFE SPECIBUS. Even though you should be doing college stuff, you do enjoy reblogging about most anything that catches your fancy so you tend to have bouts of work and play at random times. What will you do?
ALT
