What's Wrong With My Generation?

In the fall of 2002, I started college in Grinnell, Iowa. I opted for a liberal arts education over a specialized degree in economics at St. Stephens', Delhi, because it promised to open up an intellectual universe that encouraged learning for learning's sake. Over the past eight years, however, I have tended to harbor mixed feelings on what I see and experience on campuses. As I have enjoyed and profited from the company of outstanding teachers and peers, I've nonetheless found myself at odds with so many others. My generation invented Facebook and made it a runaway success, but it lost something along the way. We can stay in touch online with friends and family, but we have lost the art of conversation. We can write computer code or blogs, but we have lost the pleasures of penning a persuasive argument. We read emails and news articles all day, but we have lost the joys of reading books that open our minds to hitherto unknown worlds. We seek power and profit or pleasure and expressiveness in all we do, but we lack a sense of purpose. So what's wrong with my generation?

Perhaps it's wisest to begin with introspection. How many of you write every day? No, I don't mean emails or post-its! I mean writing to yourself, your friends or anyone else who cares to read. By writing, I mean expressing oneself in a creative yet disciplined way on a subject that matters to you. That takes out most blogs, twitter and Facebook updates, essay assignments, and grant applications. And when you do write, do you reflect long on a word or strive for succinctness? Or has writing (or typing) merely becoming a kind of expressive act on the one hand and a chore on the other? Most importantly, do you enjoy writing? Do you usually complain of writer's block or do you get thrilled at the prospect of penning down your thoughts in a structured way? If we consider the average person born between 1980 and 1995, I think, the answers are pretty straightforward: either writing is a necessary evil required in college and beyond or it is a purely expressive act in which anything goes. Of course, there's no "right" response here, but isn't it worth pondering what our responses today might reveal?

In the spirit of that question, let's consider reading. What do you read? Emails? Newspapers and magazines? Harry Potter? Dan Brown? Jared Diamond? And why do you read? Simply because you need to check the news and your inbox? Or because fantasy worlds appeal to you? You might say it's impossible to find time to read for pleasure nowadays; there's just so much work to do at home and at work. Fair enough, I'd say, but you do watch TV, surf the Net, spend hours on Facebook, and so forth. Surely, you could read for pleasure now and then when you get the time. And when you do read, would you read slowly like we sip wine? Or would you skim through the pages of a novel much like you'd down a beer in a jiffy? Lastly, if one were to ask you to recall what you read, what would you remember? The plot, the characters, and the author's turn of phrase? Or merely that it's something about the world of wizards or the mischief of the Catholic Church? Again, for those of you born between 1980 and 1995, I am not so interested in what your specific answer might be, but in the overall patterns we can start to discern here.

Broadly speaking, I find there are two sets of responses: Utilitarian and Sentimentalist. The Utilitarian sees reading and writing as means to some worldly end. It might be grades, jobs, grants, or just name-dropping at a social gathering. Formal education in schools and colleges is, as economists say, an "input" that serves to produce the finished product: an industrious, rational self-interested calculator who minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. To speak of learning for the sake of learning before such a person is to invite ridicule and scorn. Wake up to the 21st century, they yell, and get yourself a Master's in some technical subject so that you can earn a six-figure salary within the next five years!

On the contrary, the Sentimentalist sees no pleasures in industry, rationality or calculation. These are far too bourgeois-rational for, say, someone deep into Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. They say: let's save the planet, stop making war, organize concerts for starving Third Worlders, and lead authentic lives. The world is bereft of goodness and kindness, they argue further, so we must dream and express ourselves online and offline to our friends. Art is expression; words are expression. Academia attracts such people en masse because it offers healthcare benefits and a stable middle-class life without hard work. Joblessness also attracts such people en masse because it is the lot of artists and hippies to revel in the slings and arrows of bourgeois society. But if one suddenly stop a sentimentalist to ask about reading and writing, one should expect mumbles and incoherent phrases. Conversation, after all, is not to be expected of someone who knows that anti-war protests and Habitat for Humanity are the hallmarks of the authentic life.

College and graduate students overwhelmingly fall into one of these two categories. Or sometimes even in both? Arguably, the finest example of my generation is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. If you know anything about him or saw the fictionalized account of his life in The Social Network, you'll know what I'm talking about. Here is a person who is exceedingly smart and ambitious, much like our Utilitarians on campus, but his relationships with his friends are notably shallow and his speech resembles monologues rather than conversation. But he is also a creator, an entrepreneur, someone who avidly reads ancient Greek philosophy and advocates Stoicism in a money-obsessed age. He could be any of your restive nerdy/geeky friends from college, except that he's the world's youngest billionaire. But he doesn't converse, read or write much beyond what's minimally required of him. And it doesn't prevent him from doing well for himself!

If you've read until this point, you might have guessed what I'm talking about. It is not that my generation has mastered non-verbal communication or their auditory skills as substitutes for reading and writing. They have instead opted for shallowness and superficiality. What is true of your peer in the comparative literature doctoral program is also quite true of your banker friend on Wall Street. Education is a means to an end. In other words, the Utilitarian must try to maximize his job prospects by writing and reading minimally, and the Sentimentalist must simply re-affirm her naive moral convictions in what she reads and finds. Vast worlds are shut off for these blinkered individuals. It is not merely the pleasures of the mind that are out of vogue, but an experiential understanding of the world around us. It is now possible to study economics or politics without paying attention to the homeless people on the streets. It is now possible to protest against the US war on terror while retaining Bush-like stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant, irrational, pre-modern bigots. It is now possible to earn a lot of money or hold many degrees without a clear sense of purpose in life. It is now possible to socialize without listening to others. It is now possible to love without affection, live without values, and learn without passion.

Something is very nearly lost forever in our world: intellectual depth and moral seriousness. You cannot expect someone who drinks fair-trade coffee at Starbucks to earn "good karma" to be anything but shallow and superficial. Everything is a means to an end: relationships, knowledge, clothes, speech, food. But what good is such instrumentalism, whether it is Utilitarian or Sentimentalist? Can it help us understand the world and ourselves better? Can it help us change our world ever so slightly by our actions? Can it make us better human beings? None of these ends require a higher education degree. Indeed, there might be much to learn from those who are less fortunate than us economically and educationally. But how can a well-schooled upper-middle class teenager today take someone less privileged seriously? Our social inferiors are either to be despised or pitied, depending on your ideological convictions. The world is, as VS Naipaul wrote famously, what it is, so my generation simply choose to extend their middle-class privileges in corporate, government or academic spheres. Restive yet unmindful of what is missing, they affirm their commitment to cynicism and moral flippancy. Now where do we go from here?