INTELLECT OPTIONAL

June 22, 2020

This weeks Ideas:

The millennial generation, of which I am a part, is a usurped generation. We are a generation taught and raised on old institutions and rhetorical ideals, while actually being intellectually fed a diet of corporate marketing, media, and politics. As the generation has matured, it has become wrought with cavities of decay. The idealism that could have very well been harnessed for creating individual development was commandeered to endlessly serve a “catastrophe” happening somewhere in the world. A “you must wear the ribbon” culture run amok.

We are the generation of the virtue signal. The twisted psychology of the millennial zeitgeist demands that your attention be paid to the brand, the cause, the story, or the opinion which will bring you into good favor with an imagined leadership of public opinion. Decades of attention have been given to the consumptive arenas that dominate our time: TV, internet media, blogs, video, etc. All a projection and abstraction if the realities of life. The consumption has made the mind of the millennial weak and malleable. If you happen to believe that you have achieved exit velocity from the consumptive conditioning of our time, consider that you still weigh your thoughts only as they contrast the accepted rhetoric. After all, as Marshall McLuhan has taught us, "the medium is the message".

Every piece of information that we consume through a screen has been run through a combine before it reaches your mind. I am not above it's influence, but I try to be aware of this. Rather than learning to think and generate ideas that well up from within, our consumptive habit has the psycho-cultural mindspace pinned to the media machine. The air has become so thick with marketing, media, and politics that it's hard to understand that the world would go on existing just fine without our opinions of these things. This is how our generational moment was usurped, because we breathed deep this toxic air.

We allowed a whole generation to be hypnotized by ideals and forget we have the birthright to steward ourselves based on the ideals we choose and the values of our forefathers that we decide to carry on. God, for the life of me I will not allow my footing to give way and be whisked away by ideal that would have me sacrifice myself to causes that would usurp the responsibility I have to my own life.

The millennial generation is a generation usurped because we gave up a sense of self for the projection of self. We position and play the game just as our upbringing would lead us to do: Project who you are instead of becoming who you are. And why would you choose differently? It is much easier to project instead of doing the work to truly become. However it comes at the cost of never autonomizing oneself.

A usurped generation? That's a big problem to take on and I am only one man. I do know that the answer to the problem will not be given to you. You won't be externally "empowered" to do something about it. In fact, it is safe to assume that if you are empowered for a cause it is just a way to draw down the energy and attention that could otherwise be put toward strengthening yourself. My answer is to be healthy (in mind, body, & spirit), grounded, helpful, and dependable. My garden is imperfect, but I keep it growing toward the light as best as I can. I do what I can to live outside the clownworld that the usurpation has spawned. I am a part of it nonetheless.

I envision a time coming where my generation wakes up from their infatuation with the world as it has been imposed. A time when we realize that on an individual level we have the keys to the car, but have been opting for the goddamn arcade simulator all along.