There have been a couple great articles in the last little while summing up the year, the usual best of movies, books, missed great culture, and blah de blah–but the two articles that got me thinking were these: 1) “The Year We Broke the Internet,” and 2) “Generation X is Sick of Your Bullshit,” which was written in response to this article on New York Magazine.
1) So, we’ve broken the internet… for once I’m thankful that a broken lede isn’t referring to the publishing industry, but to how f*#@ed up the internet has become. Referring traffic isn’t so much about driving discovery of great content anymore but damning us all to getting lost in a mess of tangled up wires masking themselves as a website. I’m one to blame–I use social media as a holding ground for all of the articles, notes, photos, thoughts, and bits and bobs of information that I’m trying to keep track of. I don’t read everything I post–I often post it to mark it to read later, because I think the header is interesting, and because I think it might be of interest to people in my circles. I’m doing it fast–scanning headlines and first paragraphs and often entire articles, and not thinking it through in some cases, but forwarding it along because that’s what you do. And every year I try to rid myself of the awful, voyeuristic celebrity gossip sites–but they’ve become an automatic response, something my fingers are doing the minute my mind becomes idle or I’m simply bored and need a distraction. I mean, do I need to know anything about Kim Kardashian? I’ve never seen an episode of her show–could care less about her rock, her fiance, her child, her thoughts on motherhood–and still, I click, and click, and click, and click. And I used to use the internet for good. Built great websites, wrote good content, and here we go again, another habit I need to slow down and look closely at–how to use the internet for good, again.
2) I loved this article so much:
But that’s okay. Generation X is used to being ignored, stuffed between two much larger, much more vocal, demographics. But whatever! Generation X is self-sufficient. It was a latchkey child. Its parents were too busy fulfilling their own personal ambitions to notice any of its trophies-which were admittedly few and far between because they were only awarded for victories, not participation.
But the one thing that struck me about the reply-rant, was the whole, “the first generation not to do better than their parents” refrain. And it’s got me thinking about how we qualify doing “better,” and what it means to be a parent, and the kinds of things that occupy your mind when you’re waiting for the TTC in sub-sub-zero weather. Because, while I’m certainly not monetarily doing better than my parents at my age, I don’t judge my life’s success in that way–my mother had two children by the time she was 24, wanted to go to university but didn’t, and spent her life doing menial jobs–sometimes two or three of them at a time (both she and my father worked all the time). Yes, they did a great job paying off their mortgage but my mother didn’t even have a chance to enjoy any of the benefits of her hard work–her car accident stopping her life short at thirty-four. She sacrificed her freedom, in a sense, so that I could have mine–two degrees, dancing around for while until I hit my own career path, not settling down until I was in my mid-twenties, and not having my own baby until I was much older, and while we haven’t got our house paid off, we lived the hell out of our years before we had kids. My mother was saving it up for later–a later she never got to experience. So, I guess I’m saying that it’s all relative. Money isn’t the guiding focus of our life as it was for my parents–in a sense. It’s not that I want to have an ‘artistic’ life or have been driving to be ‘different,’–but I always knew I didn’t want to live in Mississauga where I grew up (not that being one zip code away in Toronto is all that), that I wanted to travel, meet people, experience things in a way that was only made possible because my mother worked so hard to throw me out into the world and into the person I became. So, I don’t want the “glory” like the kids in the other article, and I’m not so pissed like the Sick of the Bullshit article, but it did get me thinking about what I’ll be leaving for my kid, and how hard I’m working now that it really matters, and one day I might get my house paid off, but I will always love the Beastie Boys, and be thankful my mother got knocked up when she did.