So Much for the Afterglow

Find it Here!

The '20s have not started out quite as quiet as the 2010s did. Despite that, it has shown itself a decade of change more than the previous decade has. The only question, it if it will end up being for the better or not. We are about due for a cultural shift. Here is hoping it will be an improvement on the last one we are still suffering from.

Even though we talk a lot about its affects here at Wasteland & Sky, the Current Year of 2022 is the 25th year of Cultural Ground Zero. For those unaware, 1997 was the year western culture flatlined after a slow decline since at least the 1960s, before becoming the zombie monstrosity of a punchline it has been ever since. One only has to look at the events that occurred back then to see how little has actually changed in the ensuing quarter century, which is what the above piece was meant to do. We're still living in the rusted ruins of a world long since executed and left dead, waiting for it to finally fall decay into the dirt.

That said, some of us are still trapped there, and not entirely without reason. That was a time where there was a lot more hope, and people need to live with hope, even when the current times are telling you to not have any. We simply cannot go without it.

So what about that Generation that grew up in that eye of the cultural storm that was the 1980s through the early 1990s? What about those who came of age in a world with more promise and hope than the one that exists today? The kids who grew up in that time period where technology was always Progressing and humanity was readying to reach its zenith, soon learned, in record time, about the truth of this materialist utopia they had been sold. It was never coming.

But that wasn't how it was supposed to go! World peace was a stone throw away. All we had to do was listen to the newsman, our teachers, and our government officials, and sacrifice all that had come before us to the Cult of the New, and we would reach the Eternal Summer we dreamt about as kids. Everything was laid out for us. What was known and advertised as Generation Y back during this time, kids more or less born between 1979 and 1989, the younger siblings of Gen X, were a generation that was sold false hope by the people in charge and were too young and naïve to realize their trust had been misplaced until it was too late. And then they were abandoned for a new cohort made up by the people who wanted you to forget those previous promises.

I wrote about that time period itself in my Y Signal book. For a long time, as someone who was plugged into the decay of Cultural Ground Zero at the time it was happening, I had been trying to understand just what it was Generation Y thought was coming and where they might have gone wrong along the way. The answer turned out to be far more complicated than I could have known at the time. Y Signal was an attempt to see what would happen if Gen Y had an inkling of what was coming ahead of them. How would they react? Would anything change? Could it be changed? How can one approach the world when they were lied about so much of it, even worse when the lies weren't always intentional? How does one deal with that? You can see the final result for yourself, but the book itself is primarily aimed at the time period it occurred in.

However, I'm not the only one who was focused on understanding the lost Generation Y. There are others, thankfully, dedicated to understanding this period as well.

I reviewed author and musician David V. Stewart's Eyes in the Walls a while back. This was a story, not unlike my own, focused on the time period of the '90s and those who lived in it. I highly recommend reading that story to anyone interested in the subject. It really does evoke that time and place to tell its tale. I'm not going to spoil the ending here, but there really isn't any other way it could conclude. That was simply how the 1990s were.

I also partnered with David, as well as author and editor Brian Niemeier, to release Generation Y: The New Lost Generation earlier this year, as a way to celebrate both a quarter of a century since 1997, and to help those unsure of what Gen Y is, to learn what exactly we were writing about. This subject is still oddly contentious, so the book was a necessary release to hammer the research down for newcomers. It was free then, and it still is now!

All of this preamble is to get to the point of the matter, which is today's subject. While the above works focus on the era itself and the people who were around back then, I wanted to talk about a different book today. David V. Stewart recently put out another book on Generation Y, but this one instead takes place in the here and now in the modern day. Afterglow: Generation Y is his newest released work, and focuses on our subject, the new lost generation, as they deal with today, decades after their heyday and vanishing into the background like they were told to by the wider culture.

While the other works mentioned above discuss the time period and how it affected those growing up in a world dismantled overnight, this book talks about how that experience led them to where they are today. Think of it as Generation Y: 25 years later, and you might get the gist of it. Where did the New Lost Generation end up?

Afterglow contains original short stories written by Stewart and mostly posted on his blog between his musings on culture and the rapid technological change over the past few years. I admit I had read a lot of these when they were originally published, but still read them over again in the full release here. They hold up very well, especially for those interested in the subject.

He has been writing on the subject for years now, just as a lot of us have been, and the book starts with his original Gen Y story that got him started. The titular Gen Y describes a typical afternoon of a kid getting home after a long day of school to an empty house. This simple tale is short and to the point, but it accurately describes a world that no longer exists, and is long extinguished, and yet perfectly frames the tone going forward. This is a place Generation Y is very familiar with, and it is a place many of them still live in today.

The next piece, Generation Why, serves as a more descriptive introduction for those who might not be able to quite understand the previous fragment of where it comes from. For those who still, for whatever reason, don't believe Generation Y exists (despite the subject having been written about extensively and solidly defined by its proponents for years, at this point) this piece serves to nail down the terms and definitions for the rest of the work to follow. It makes a good case as to why this Lost Generation has been such a hot topic these last few years, even among people who don't quite understand why it is a subject at all.

A different Gen Y tale from the same author!

In total, the book contains 16 pieces of varying lengths. David was kind enough to allow me to include three of them in the above Generation Y: New Lost Generation, but they have a different context here in their original place among the author's other stories. Instead of being used to define the Gen Y experience as a whole, here they are used to paint a picture of people struggling to find their way in a world that has forgotten them and really has no room for the people they were always told to be. The more you argue this cohort doesn't exist, the more you prove just how true these stories and experiences are. Erasure defines their entire lives. They are lost, and have long since abandoned hopes of being found.

Stewart describes this static state as Middlebury, a term he uses many times throughout this book (and which is also the name of the last story) to describe being caught in the middle. He also dedicates the work to those still trapped here. The name reoccurs for good reason.

There was once this term known as "failure to launch" that died out a while back because, well, that would describe everyone in the modern world at this point. The phrase referred to young adults who were unable to start their life and were stuck in a period of adolescence stemming from this inability to begin a career in the rat race. But in a time where careers can be ended with one wrong word (and a definition of "wrong" that changes with the wind), community itself being dead, the media and politicians continually calling for Armageddon against those they are supposed to be serving, and the future looking bleak among those with even a the minuscule amount of IQ, you would be harder pressed to find anyone able to start a "proper" life in a world of alienation where nobody knows your name and has no desire to learn it.

This decay had been around for awhile. The sadly forgotten Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam described the slow death of community over the course of the 20th century and his hopes for a revival based on trust and goodwill. However, said book also was released in 2000, post-Cultural Ground Zero and pre- 9/11, making it the last gasp of a sort of 20th century humanism and trust in Progress that simply cannot return. The book needs to be revisited today, because it (unwittingly) understood a lot of the problems that were to come.

Over time, this festering wound of alienation and atomization became infected, worsening as the years went on due to lack of treatment. Now, all the societal ills and jaded cynicism of today is a result of it never being treated. Even now, as suicide rates continue to rise, we have one western country asking if they can help dispose of the body instead of understanding any sort of cause. This is the exact opposite of what a healthy society would do. No one cares, and they haven't for a long time now. For those who remember otherwise, it is still hard to accept. 

This is very different from the world Gen Y grew up in, where everyone had a shared culture, things were always looking up, and you could always count on at least having something in common with the guy next to you in traffic. You were, at the very least, in this together. Now, you are on your own in every aspect of existence, and all the people who sold you that vision of the future that you just had to pull up your bootstraps for, the one you were lied about, are now told you were never promised anything of the sort. Get in line, shut up, and die alone in a cube. It is a mystery as to why depression and suicide as at an all-time high and rising, though. A real puzzler!

Those suicide rates are the highest they've ever been, and they're only getting worse. Pills and drug usage are more common than they've ever been. Heavy drinking and getting high is considered normal among everyone alive today in a way that was never socially accepted before, and depression is at an all-time high. It hasn't always been this way, and neither had it ever been quite this hopeless for those growing up now without a higher purpose or reason to get up in the morning. What is the point of living to be a cog that will eventually break apart in the grind, only to be replaced when your usefulness has worn out? Is this all there is?

The only way this purgatory can be fixed, you are told, is by voting, and if it wasn't for that gosh darn bad guy team voting against you, the materialist paradise you were offered as a kid could finally be brought into existence. Then you could sit around consuming all day, because there is no other purpose to your life other than dopamine addiction for you and your neighbors. What a horribly vapid existence!

Naturally, this isn't how it really is, but it sure contributes to the radioactive atmosphere around basic discourse these days. As if people need more reason to hate and mistrust their neighbor, to add to the radical individualism of being Special they were fed by Hollywood currently cutting them off from understanding others. Regardless, it's still happening, and it's still only getting worse the more we ignore it.

But you do.

Despite this reality, Stewart's book is not particularly pessimistic about Generation Y's relation to modernity, the antithesis of the world they were raised to survive in. He describes many scenarios and lost people making their way through this defeated era with little in the way of hope, but also find ways to dig themselves free of the traps they had fallen into. Regardless of how bad things can get, there is always purpose, even in the worst moments. Suffering can lead to clarity, to knowledge, and builds resilience. By the end of Afterglow: Generation Y, you will see traces of the world Gen Y were promised springing from their dreams, their struggles, and their newfound hopes, in what they can build in the destruction around them. 

That old hope we had is still there--we just have to dig for it. This might take some time, but it will all be worth it, in the end.

Despite the subject matter, Afterglow is an easy read. Stewart has a comfortable style of settling the audience in and guiding them through his characters' ordeals and has a real knack for finding the core issue they suffer through and what eats at them. At times, it comes across as almost autobiographical, despite that obviously not being possible when one considers what happens to each character in the book. The author gives the impression that he loves these people, and considers them more than just characters in a story, which adds to the impression of this work feeling like he went out and interviewed members of Gen Y for their life stories. If anything, this is the book's strongest aspect and gives it a stamp of authenticity. Should you not understand what this cohort is by the time you are finished with this, you may by beyond help. Stewart adeptly and accurately explains all here, leaving little room for skepticism about the subject and who these people really are.

As mentioned earlier, 2022 was a bit of a banner year for the subject of Generation Y. After years of discussion, the gathered information, the plentiful theories, and the general discourse, has finally begun to hit on a wider scale, defining what so many have been spending their time trying to define. Truth be told, this book is one of the best on the topic.

Afterglow: Generation Y contains 16 pieces of wonder and speculation about a generation that had long since been forgotten and abandoned by the society that spawned it. These are stories about alienated adults trying to find their place in a world that long ago informed them they have no place here. Such a work could easily be nihilistic and hopeless if handled incorrectly. Nonetheless, Stewart's respect and love for a cohort lost in the rusted maze of modernity makes it stand tall. There is no other book quite like this one out there, and you would be doing yourself a disservice by passing it up. One can't know where discourse on Gen Y will go in the future, but Afterglow has cemented itself as an essential part of that discussion. It should not be ignored.

There are certain subjects we in the west need to address if we wish to dig ourselves from the pit Cultural Ground Zero left us in ages ago. Until we do, we will only live in the ruins of a heyday that came and went like a leaf in an updraft. 1997 was 25 years ago--it isn't coming back, and nothing we can ever do will give us the events and miracles that existed to get us to that point, or any other point in history. It is gone. You cannot roll back the clock, but you also cannot charge blindly away from the past and hope it somehow works out for you. We have a quarter of a century of rot to prove blind Progress does not work.

Until we learn to bridge what we lost with a future we can see on the horizon, one we can build towards, we will be trapped in the the dead dreams of a materialistic century that has no relation to reality, and perhaps never did to begin with. That will not lead to any sort of future not still dealing with the sins of the past.

So let the afterglow fade into history like it should. That doesn't mean we can't carry the best of it forward as we face the storm clouds looming ahead. Rough roads await us. There is always a path past them, as long as we find the right trail.

[You can find Afterglow: Generation Y here!]

For more on Generation Y, you can find Y Signal here!