Freddie deBoer has touched upon the ersatz personality (alluding to ersatz parenthood) of entertainment, most directly in his "you aren't the shit you like", here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-the-shit-you-like. If you have not yet come across it, I think you might find it sympatico.
You are spot on that far too many of the so-called Millennials, and perhaps a good chunk of their Gen-X older siblings, have had to more-or-less raise themselves. This rings true for my own barbarian existence, and though I have accomplished some measure of success in my own right, I have had to seek out my exemplars on my own -- and have selected some terrible role-models amidst the good ones, with plenty of opportunities to learn from the pain of my own mistakes.
Every generation has seen its share of ill-equipped or distant parents, and the five-member detached house in the country with the yard and the dog was an exception even during the post-war boom during which it was so lionised, but there seems to be something acute in the childrearing (or lack thereof) practised upon the cohorts who have come of age since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Perhaps it is one of those ironies of life that, once the Sexual Revolution had ebbed and having children became as personal a choice as getting a tattoo -- in other words, when we finally had developed a world into which not a single unwanted child would of necessity have to be born -- the very driving force of the nuclear family dissolved, and the stable upbringing to which the nuclear family aspired became all the rarer (even in situations that superficially resemble the nuclear family).
Which, as you note, is not to say that parentless barbarians such as myself now form a majority of our or any generation. But the trend is clear; anyone who's spent more than a few shifts in the Tumblr mines has breathed in the coal-dust of desperation and alienation and pain with which a great deal of young people live, despite the unprecedented wealth of information and opportunity that nearly all of them have access to. It became rather too much for me to stomach, after a time, but I suspect the situation has hardly bettered since my retreat from that particular platform.
Nevertheless, more and more of us are born into a world in which we are not needed, to parents who cannot articulate why they deigned to snatch us from the void and condemned us to futilely strive against the gnawing emptiness waiting to reclaim us once we close our eyes for the final time.
The revelation of the ultimate meaninglessness of life is hardly new; there have been nihilists and hedonists as long as there have been people. But in times past, children were both inevitable and necessary, and the vast majority of the population was too taken with the business of filling their bellies and warming their beds and keeping the magistrates at bay to worry about the looming dark for too long.
Now the darkness looms more deeply than ever, and so many of us have little better to do than to brood upon it or to distract ourselves from it. And doubtless it is for that very reason that some people elect to have children, now that such an election is possible -- to stave off the madness and terror and ennui of their own meaninglessness. But a child cannot be fit for this purpose, or at least might feel betrayed at having been drafted into a sort of cosmic Ponzi scheme merely for the psychic palliative care of its parents.
Every child brought into the world eventually demands to know the reason they were conjured from nothing. Previous ages had ready religious and material answers, which could be supplied gently or cruelly -- the gods, the harvest, the hunt, the fight, the childbed. But we have spent the last few thousand years, and especially the last few centuries, systematically demolishing these answers, and the answers which replaced them, and the answers which replaced those (with fewer and fewer replacements each round), until now we have no steadfast answers at all, outside of evolutionary psychology and individual whim.
But the question remains, and always will. It is interesting to see what answers we are trying out this time around.
"You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty." Love this comment
This is a rather wonderful article; a very good intro to Jordan Peterson.
Freddie deBoer has touched upon the ersatz personality (alluding to ersatz parenthood) of entertainment, most directly in his "you aren't the shit you like", here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-the-shit-you-like. If you have not yet come across it, I think you might find it sympatico.
You are spot on that far too many of the so-called Millennials, and perhaps a good chunk of their Gen-X older siblings, have had to more-or-less raise themselves. This rings true for my own barbarian existence, and though I have accomplished some measure of success in my own right, I have had to seek out my exemplars on my own -- and have selected some terrible role-models amidst the good ones, with plenty of opportunities to learn from the pain of my own mistakes.
Every generation has seen its share of ill-equipped or distant parents, and the five-member detached house in the country with the yard and the dog was an exception even during the post-war boom during which it was so lionised, but there seems to be something acute in the childrearing (or lack thereof) practised upon the cohorts who have come of age since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Perhaps it is one of those ironies of life that, once the Sexual Revolution had ebbed and having children became as personal a choice as getting a tattoo -- in other words, when we finally had developed a world into which not a single unwanted child would of necessity have to be born -- the very driving force of the nuclear family dissolved, and the stable upbringing to which the nuclear family aspired became all the rarer (even in situations that superficially resemble the nuclear family).
Which, as you note, is not to say that parentless barbarians such as myself now form a majority of our or any generation. But the trend is clear; anyone who's spent more than a few shifts in the Tumblr mines has breathed in the coal-dust of desperation and alienation and pain with which a great deal of young people live, despite the unprecedented wealth of information and opportunity that nearly all of them have access to. It became rather too much for me to stomach, after a time, but I suspect the situation has hardly bettered since my retreat from that particular platform.
Nevertheless, more and more of us are born into a world in which we are not needed, to parents who cannot articulate why they deigned to snatch us from the void and condemned us to futilely strive against the gnawing emptiness waiting to reclaim us once we close our eyes for the final time.
The revelation of the ultimate meaninglessness of life is hardly new; there have been nihilists and hedonists as long as there have been people. But in times past, children were both inevitable and necessary, and the vast majority of the population was too taken with the business of filling their bellies and warming their beds and keeping the magistrates at bay to worry about the looming dark for too long.
Now the darkness looms more deeply than ever, and so many of us have little better to do than to brood upon it or to distract ourselves from it. And doubtless it is for that very reason that some people elect to have children, now that such an election is possible -- to stave off the madness and terror and ennui of their own meaninglessness. But a child cannot be fit for this purpose, or at least might feel betrayed at having been drafted into a sort of cosmic Ponzi scheme merely for the psychic palliative care of its parents.
Every child brought into the world eventually demands to know the reason they were conjured from nothing. Previous ages had ready religious and material answers, which could be supplied gently or cruelly -- the gods, the harvest, the hunt, the fight, the childbed. But we have spent the last few thousand years, and especially the last few centuries, systematically demolishing these answers, and the answers which replaced them, and the answers which replaced those (with fewer and fewer replacements each round), until now we have no steadfast answers at all, outside of evolutionary psychology and individual whim.
But the question remains, and always will. It is interesting to see what answers we are trying out this time around.
"You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty." Love this comment