Every Generation is the Same

From the October 1977 issue of the magazine Back To Godhead.

In one of the earliest internet viral videos I can ever remember watching, Baz Luhrmann recites a fictional graduation speech by writer Mary Schmich:

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll *fantasize* that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

I emphasize fantasize because there is a human (or is it American?) tendency to think that every new generation has somehow lost their soul, lost their direction, and is heading toward destruction. The fantasy also includes the illusion that one’s own generation is somehow the good and credible one. It’s laughable now that parents would consider The Beatles and Led Zeppelin to be satanic or somehow corrupting their children. But, as immortalized in Detroit Rock City, it happened—and often. I think perhaps what I above called too politely “a tendency” is actually an ego reaction to a new generation collectively repudiating the old one. Rock n’ Roll repudiated puritanism and warmongering in the name of Democracy. And for all the guffawing about the hippies trying to ruin America with free love and communism, many of those flower-powered revolutionaries went on to their corporate jobs, stopped doing psychedelics, raised families behind white picket fences, and now look remarkably similar to their previous generation, but a dose more liberal-minded.

If You Get Rich, You’re Smart

FTB “For the Boys” Clubhouse is one of many mansions around the country where wannabe TikTok influencers live for free in exchange for making content around the clock and paying a commission (often up to 20%) of their advertising revenue to the house owners. FTB’s owner—a wealthy real estate investor—likened it to the gold rush, claiming that “A lot of people are just dropping out of college and moving here literally with a bag and the hopes of becoming an influencer.” As much as 15% of global advertising funds are going toward influencers like these boys and girls at FTB. These TikTokers got to choose between drowning in student debt for a $50,000 a year job or living in a mansion for free and dancing on tables for $35,000 per month. Who is making the stupid decision? In a capitalist value system, wealth is used as a proxy for intelligence, and intelligence is just figuring out how to play the game really well. I feel like they figured it out.

In September 2020, University of Wisconsin English professor Barrett Swanson visited FTB Clubhouse in Los Angeles. In his self-aware article about the visit, Swanson has a bit of an existential awakening as he sees these young college dropouts making more money in a month than he ever will on a tenured professor’s salary. As judgemental as he is at first, it doesn’t take long for him to see that while he may not be dancing for Likes on the internet, he is focused on giving his students an enjoyable experience for the sake of the year-end reviews which secure his tenure and his income. Often times this end goal means that Swanson doesn’t do or say the things he wants to in order to not rock the boat and keep his students (followers) happy. Is this very different from creating content in order to please your followers so that you, too, can secure your income? Swanson rightly uses the term Yelpification to describe this dynamic of modern society.

As technology has sped up the evolution of culture, so too has it sped up our kneejerk assertions that somehow TikTok, Instagram, and iPhones have indelibly harmed a generation of young people. We see them heads down over their phones, seemingly lacking most critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and we fantasize that when we were twenty, we were superior morally and intellectually. Except in rare cases, this is hilariously false.

The human brain is barely done forming at 25 years old, and most famous TikTokers are under 22. It’s no secret that people in their 20s do ridiculous stuff, often for no good reason, and lack certain neurological skills that often don’t develop until later, if ever. This is the case in 2021, it was the case in 1969, and it was the case in 1851 when Moby Dick opens with the manboy narrator Ishmael in his early 20s stating:

Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

So, TikTok is perhaps the new watery world that wayward souls set out to explore out of boredom and lack of options. They have their whole life to figure out what they want to do with it.

I, for one, do not think that stabbing whales in the head from atop a rickety old ship is somehow a better or more rewarding way to spend your time than working out on camera and dancing with your friends in a mansion. Pick your poison, this is what life has to offer.

Swanson—clearly judging the housemates for being seemingly ignorant to the wildfires literally raging all around, the social justice protests in the streets, and the ongoing threats to our country’s stability— asks the boys their thoughts on the state of the republic. One of them looks up from his phone and says “What? Nah, man. Things are getting better every single year.” And he may be right.

The Darkness Revealed

The Srimad Bhagavatam, a key Hindu Purana over 5000 years old, predicts the stages of human consciousness known as Yugas. While I’m taking these to be chronological in our sense of linear time, it’s worth noting that they can also be understood as levels or dimensions which all exist simultaneously. The current Yuga started in 3102 BCE and is known as Kali Yuga. The epoch of Kali—which means “strife”— is characterized by two things: conflict and sin. Here are some key excerpts that are pretty impressive by way of predictions.

Beauty will be thought to depend on one’s hairstyle. Filling the belly will become the goal of life, and one who is audacious will be accepted as truthful. The principles of religion will be observed only for the sake of reputation.” —SB 12:2:6

In the age of social media, anyone audacious enough to post a lot online, consistently, will be considered “authentic” or truthful. This is the new self; authenticity is now a tenet of branding—a fact that would seem to undermine the very definition of authenticity.

Wealth alone will be considered the sign of a person’s good birth, proper behavior and fine qualities. And law and justice will be applied only on the basis of one’s power.” — SB 12:2:2

In the modern world, intelligence, beauty, and equal protection under the law are all magically conjured if the person happens to be rich and famous.

A person’s propriety will be seriously questioned if he does not earn a good living. And one who is very clever at juggling words will be considered a learned scholar.” — SB 12:2:4

Professor Swanson is a professional word juggler and lives as a learned scholar who wows people with his eloquence—not so different from what I’m trying to do with you right now. It’s no secret that many professors, writers, artists, and so on, regardless of their material wealth or the popularity of their creations, are often not “whole” people, and do not necessarily warrant the respect we give them as a culture.

And for the most relevant except:

The kings will mostly be thieves, the occupations of men will be stealing, lying and needless violence, and all the social classes will be reduced to the lowest level of sudras. — SB 12:2:14

This last quote is the most telling for the purposes of this post. Sudras refers to the lowest rung of the caste system where the menial workers and untouchables are, but is taken here to be symbolic. This all mirrors, for me, the experience of esteemed professor Barrett Swanson realizing that his life was really no different from the TikTokers. Whether you’re Kim Kardashian, Joe Biden, a local plumber, a social media influencer, or a scientist, we have all been spiritually relegated to a level where we are living for other people instead of for ourselves. As expected of the Kali Yuga, value systems are out of whack. The people who make it to the peaks of our society (i.e. collect immense wealth) are not guaranteed spiritual wholeness or personal health, in fact, they often make it to the top by sacrificing spiritual wholeness and personal health.

This alone shows that money, power, and attention are only indirectly if at all, connected to real value. What is real value anyway? I don’t know. But I know it’s unlikely to be found while you’re slaving away at a job for decades trying to impress everyone around you so that you can eat at night. The one thing that I can say confidently about real value is that once it is attained, a person will be kind, they will feel whole, and they will feel at peace. Many hyper-successful people in our society feel a bit empty, are constantly afraid of losing their control (greed), and are not often unkind. I think this, again, is a symptom of the fact that we are all playing a game we know is silly, but we think we need it to eat and keep our families safe. In the words of Bob Dylan:

You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks
But you’re going to have to serve somebody, yes indeed.

Hell is other people. Heaven is inside.

At one point, professor Swanson explains that his office hours at school have morphed from students exploring the content and the concepts passionately, to them complaining about anxiety, depression, and stress. He says there are so many emotional support animals at his lectures they sometimes feel like animal obedience training courses.

The cynical, old-school lens wants us to think that somehow the new generation is suffering more or is weaker than previous generations. I tend to think they are just suffering more openly—and that that’s a good thing. Millennials now have the terms to explain their suffering—they can talk about capitalism, they can talk about mental health, they can talk about bigotry, about the sham of politics, about corruption, about celebrity, about power, and about ideology.

It seems each generation sheds their parent’s psychological bullshit only to clothe themselves in newfangled defense mechanisms fit for the moment. For instance, while my generation has done amazing mental labor helping correct misconceptions passed down to us in regards to race and our economic system, we’re now confused with selfhood in a digital age and how to operate meaningfully in a world we didn’t build and in large part don’t like.

I think it sometimes all feels very out of control because, as a people, we are focused on material wealth and personal independence instead of psychological health and community interdependence. This is changing slowly. But this slow rate of change means that every generation sees in the new generation a reflection of themselves, the same suffering, the same confusion, the same crotchety cultural rules, and the same misguided definitions of success. Instead of everyone having the spiritual revolution they collectively need, they point to rock and roll, atheism, socialism, political correctness, social media, or capitalism as the thing that ails the new generation.

In the words of my partner Marley—who introduced me to Kali Yuga when I spoke about this post, “What happens in the age of Kali Yuga is not that things actually become darker but that the darkness which has always existed becomes illuminated by our consciousness.”

By my calculations, the age of Kali Yuga has about 426,879 more years to go. That means things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. The only thing you can do to escape now and/or speed things up is to dive deep inside yourself to find value in the cards you’ve been dealt—both personally dealt and generally in terms of being born into this world at this particular time.

There is the guy who goes to work every day 9-5 at some corporate office park wearing the same clothes and doing some repetitive job at his computer that offers him no value except money, and who lives in a personal hell and hates what he is doing. He is in Kali Yuga. There is also the guy who goes to work every day 9-5 at some corporate office park wearing the same clothes and doing some repetitive job at his computer that offers him no value except money, but who lives in heaven, who is kind to those around him, who understands the absurdity of this incarnation and even thinks it’s funny. TikTok is not valuable. Academia is not valuable. High-paying jobs are not valuable. Nothing that I can point my finger at is valuable in the sense that it has value to everyone—value is simply a meaning we give something. Value is made by you and you only¹, it’s not collected from the outside world.

I’ll end with the words² of Stephen Jenkinson, a former palliative care director who worked with the terminally ill in Canada:

I have been asked many times to come and talk about finding meaning at the end of life. That is the standard request. There is this idea that meaning is somehow potentially elusive or even fugitive and has to somehow be wrung from the circumstances.

It's a particularly modernist dilemma to find meaning, but the real problem is in conceiving of it as something you have to find. You can hear the language implies that it's hidden, or that you're not looking in the right place, or that there's some nefarious architecture that keeps it from you.

But what if meaning's not hidden? What if it's not something to find? What if that's not the story? What if the story is that meaning is not found at all but that it's made? It's made by the willingness to proceed as if certain things must be: like life has to continue, not "you" have to continue. Life is not your lifespan or your children's lifespan or the lifespan of what you hold dear.

How about holding dear the fact that nothing you hold dear lasts? How about holding that close to your bosom?

It's not hammered into the sky for all to see so that nobody could forget. It has no police, it has no enforcement branch. If you're not willing for it to be so, it probably won't be. And what's the consequence of that? Well, look around you. Our way of life is the consequence. It's a hurtful kind of comfort, maybe, that the dominant culture of North America is in some kind of beginning stage of a terminal swoon.

It's not a punishment though. No more than dying is a punishment for having been born. Our particluar dilemma, I think, is trying to live the realization that what the world requires of humans is not that they piss off already: “Why don't you all die and then we'll go back where we were?”

No, I think the world whispers, "All we need of you is that you be human³. That's it."

1. Of course, food and safety are innately valuable to all living beings and we should make sure our actions always move the world toward more people being fed and safe rather than less.

2. Jenkinson is another source my partner Marley suggested in her sagely wisdom. I edited this text from the video transcript for clarity but without altering the meaning too much. See the original here.

3. Speaking of just being human, I end every post with a picture of my son and a picture of my breakfast: