Então, no artigo que eu coloquei abaixo (eu prometo que vou parar de brincar de copy & paste e fazer um post minimamente meu nos próximos dias) tem a velha história da crise dos 25. Agora que eu já estou do outro lado de lá, sinto uma certa MATURIDADE pra revirar meus olhinhos e dizer "ai, papinho de jovens, me poupe", exceto que eu super tenho um blog que eu uso para discutir a lot of crap etc etc.
O interessante disso tudo é que eu sempre achei que eu era parte, talvez o exemplo mais caricato, dessa coisa sua-classe-social-determina-todos-os-seus-pensamentos-mais-íntimos, embora eu sempre tenha acreditado que era possível fugir disso.
Vendo o meu facebook, eu vejo que não é bem assim. Não tem como escapar de certas coisas/interesses/referências/vontades. Well, não poderia entrar em uma discussão profunda nem se eu quisesse, mas pode ser interessante notar algumas coisas.
Tem dias que eu acho que todas as pessoas são praticamente iguais. Eu acordo, olho para as pessoas, as histórias das pessoas, os problemas das pessoas... e acho que são todas variações do mesmo rascunho, cujo final eu já conheço. Em outros dias, eu tenho certeza de que as pessoas são completamente diferentes e enxergam as coisas de formas bizarras e inesperadas. Minha conclusão super profunda de hoje é: quem fica mais de meia hora por dia brincando de redes sociais se ferrou, já elvis total e virou parte de uma massa amorfa. Isso vale um pouco para tv também. Os assuntos rodam muito rápido. As bandas, as piadas, as referências e blá. Mas aí vem você e fala: DUH! As pessoas têm falado isso há mil anos. Bom, na verdade, elas têm falado sobre os excessos.
Acho que, talvez, o problema seja outro. Preciso mudar para outro século ou, melhor ainda, para um universo paralelo para ver o que acontece, porque eu tenho a impressão que o tempo está corrido demais e que é muito fácil se perder em banalidades - tudo bem, minha vida é a soma de várias banalidades -, mas acho que vale tentar.
O que acontece é o seguinte: a gente cresce, o tempo fica mais corrido e, portanto, mais valioso e tal e, por isso, passar muito tempo batendo foto de comida, comentando, ou no meu caso, liking coisas aleatórias no facebook ("tsunami no sudeste asiático", like; "meu pai perdeu o emprego", like..) só fode a sua vida. Essencialmente, eu passo tanto tempo pensando nas minhas crises e na vida mais legal das pessoas que estão viajando e nas personagens que tiveram vidas mais emocionantes do que a minha,que eu acabo virando exatamente a pessoa genérica que eu preferiria evitar ser se tivesse escolha. Pode ser também que eu precise fazer o que me dá vontade e ser feliz, mas, then again, eu nunca estou feliz com nada, né?
Porém, talvez eu tenha escolha de fazer alguma coisa diferene, ainda que por apenas 40 dias, mas isso vai exigir um certo distanciamento de certo hábitos nocivos. Pouca gente (só gente linda, tá?) lê o meu blog, mas eu imagino se isso fosse lido por outras pessoas quaisquer a reação dessas pessoas seria:
a) Ai, fico o dia todo na nétzi e sou super único e especial ou;
b)Ai, fico o tempo todo na nétzi, ela tem razão,eu deveria passar menos tempo na nétzi... mas foda-se ou;
c) Ai, sempre tive essa opinião e sou super único, embora não faça nada remotamente útil com o meu tempo fora da internet.
Para o primeiro grupo, oh, well..
Para o segundo grupo, minha reação é mais compreensiva, porque eu tenho sido essa pessoa desde os primórdios da internet.
Para o terceiro, nem comento.
De qualquer forma, acho que quero fazer um novo experimento.Eu me lembrei dessa vez que fiz quaresma e limitei meu acesso ao facebook. Eu não quero ignorar pessoas que não têm outra de forma de falar comigo a não ser pelo fb, mas acho que se eu me limitar a responder mensagens de inbox por celular já é um progresso e tanto. O meu experimento requer um certo nível de comprometimento e pode ser têressantzi, mas, pelo menos com as ideias que eu tive até agora, eu acho que as peças não vão formar um conjunto muito coerente.
Agora, acho que a parte radical mesmo é começar o projeto das cartas que eu enviarei.
Sobre as cartas que eu quero receber, a trama se complica. Eu consultei três pessoas sobre o assunto e as três acreditam que eu preciso fazer alguma coisa com as cartas, DAR para RECEBER, porque eu não posso só ganhar as cartas e ficar feliz, porque seria muito egoísta da minha parte. Eu ia criar um evento de facebook (olha a modernidade me pegando), explicando que eu queria muito ter um pedacinho de papel com palavrinhas das pessoas e umas fotos, ainda mais porque, quando eu for famosa, vou precisar dessas coisas para escrever a minha biografia e contar sobre as pessoas que conheço.
Ia explicar que cada carta poderia ter a seguinte indicação:
a. Se pode ser publicada/divulgada/citada/comentada com outras pessoas;
b. Se a carta exige resposta (dar para receber, right?);
c. Se a pessoa quer que eu coloque a carta sobre o meu corpo nu e bata fotos numa performance artística.
Tá, a última é sugestão do Luis, mas acho que não vou disponibilizar meu corpo nu, acho meio demais ter que me prostituir pra receber umas cartas. Azamiga não tá tão l0ka assim, né?
Certo, voltando ao projeto de algum século distante e/ou universo paralelo. Assim, eu não posso ficar de esposa de marido rico nesse meio tempo, de modo que não posso abandonar meus deveres de abraçar árvores e enviar emails experiência mais genuína, mas deve ter alguma coisa a mais que eu posso fazer para me purificar (aqui, eu tô fazendo cara de retartada, para indicar a ironia do termo) da modernidade, só pra ver o que acontece.
Lembro também do meu projeto de ficar 40 dias em um voto de silêncio - ideia que o André odeia com todas as suas forças.
Estou pensando em substituir redes sociais e meu falar incessante por CARTAS. Ou seja, agora todo mundo vai ter que me aguentar em versão analógica.
Estou há dois dias reescrevendo essa porcaria, porque eu fico divagando com mil ideias e matando tempo no trabalho, de modo que vou simplesmente publicar como está e aguardar COMENTÁRIOS, porque eu estou carente.
Besos calientes, sileciosos e de tempos mais simples,
A.
_______________________________________________________________
The Shrinking Boundaries of Being a (Certain Kind of) Twentysomething
Chronicle Books / Emma Koenig via Facebook
Emma Koenig, 24, has a blog. It's called Fuck! I'm In My Twenties and is full of cutesily hand-drawn musings about the plight of the aimless millennial. This blog is popular enough to have been turned into an Urban Outfitters book and now Koenig is working on a TV pilot. And of course no improbable rise to trendy stardom would be complete without a fawning, way-we-live-now profile in The New York Times, which was published yesterday. Reaction to the piece has been, let's say, mixed. Because of an implied privilege in Koenig's work (mom and dad are gainfully employed, her brother Ezra is in Vampire Weekend), and an abundance of clever cluelessness, the comments section on the Times profile is littered with people calling her a whiner or a spoiled brat, deeming her frivolous and self-obsessed.
This is a common criticism of a particular set of young creative types who tend to blab on about their own lives. Some of that criticism is a bit overblown — young people are young people, and young people like to talk about themselves, that's been true almost always — but a good deal of the backlash does, in some ways, feel merited. Young twentysomethings like Koenig do tend to flit around with a blithe but stubborn assumption that their microcosm is the same thing as the broader world. For all the wishy-washy, noncommittal, unsure stuff they write about, there's a distinct sense of absolutism to their work. They are forcing the world to be small and narrow so they can be its chief interpreters.
Fetishization of youth is certainly nothing new — watching someone do something for the first time is more interesting than watching them do it for the seventh — but doesn't today's idolized or glamorized or simply documented twentysomething seem a special, frequently irritating species all its own? Like the generations before them, these kids are consistently prodding at and testing their boundaries, only it's not taking them as long as it used to. They seem very quickly satisfied with a world of their own creation that they understand. For all the supposed youthful idealism and political openness these kids vaguely espouse, the world of twentysomethings seems to be getting somehow smaller, more specific. There's that same whimsical but detached irony, again and again. The same cloying cultural references, the vaguely smug assertions about how people and places work. They're all insecure but wear that insecurity proudly, like a cape. Though this world they live in is based on a kind of affected wobbliness and uncertainty -- all the glamor of being a noble, dreamy work-in-progress -- it's still a world they've mastered. And have thus deemed The World, for everyone else. Something's happened amidst all the helicopter parenting and participation trophies and unending spools of internet that's made a current crop of post-collegers determined to not go to the mountain, but pull the mountain to them and shape it to their own liking. Or to at least assume, incorrectly, that they've done that.
People got to talking a lot about this general twentysomething problem around the time that HBO's Girls premiered, because it had lots of handy talking points. For example, Lena Dunham's character Hannah insisting she is, "at least a voice. Of a generation." That line is teasing at a particular kind of contemporary youth certainty that one has something to say, and is determined to say it, without really knowing what that something is. Or whom to say it to. But, of course, they now have the big sprawling medium to say it anyway.
Koenig's "Fuck! I'm In My Twenties" is ostensibly for kids, specifically women, her own age. There is a lot of griping and lite philosophizing about relationships, about email, about expectations of early womanhood meeting reality. So it is largely for the people she's standing shoulder-to-shoulder with. But then along come lots of other people, from different demographics, staring at the site with varying degrees of curiousness and disdain. As a reflection of that, it sometimes seems that Koenig isn't exactly writing for her age group, but rather sending things up the ladder, ringing a bell and saying, "Hey this is what things are like down here these days." There's a navel-gazing anthropology to the site that's both arrogant, in its assuredness and thinly masked ambition, and naive.
But look, the fact that kids right out of college are self-deprecatingly romanticizing their lives on the internet for whoever wants to pay attention isn't really the problem. Sure that increasingly loud chatter is, on principle, fairly aggravating, but the true enemy here, the ballet flat-clad villain, is what's actually being said. In Koenig's world of twentiesdom, and on Dunham's lightly parodic but also sincere show, kids are stumbling around with a "aren't I a beautiful, fascinating mess" attitude that prizes self-imposed ennui and quirky angst over anything, well, productive. It's all stumbling for stumbling's sake with the vague but entitled hope of a bestowed reward at the end. The twenties depicted on Koenig's blog are all inward-facing, mannered irony and ineptitude, though a win is ultimately still expected. This kind of thing confirms a creaky "kids today" stereotype that frankly isn't fair.
The implied universality -- the assertion that this is everyone's 20s -- is really what gets Koenig in trouble. And sinks plenty of other young millennials too. Look at many of the headlines on the for twentysomethings, by twentysomethings blog Thought Catalog — "5 Things You Need To Do In Order Survive Your 20s," "Why Are People My Age Having Babies?," "If We Could Be Boring" — and it's clear that this rather small handful of kids is positioning itself as the arbiters of the entire generation. This is maybe owed to the universal arrogance of youth, which is of course nothing new, but the trouble is now we're rewarding it. It's become a trade, a vocation, a field of oblivious yet increasingly lucrative study. Youthful confusion and wondering and wandering are all part of being alive, but we seem to be increasingly indulging it -- especially a particularly cushy subset of it -- in a way that's not doing anyone any good.
To be fair, this might all be oldster crankiness. I'm currently on the final-year victory lap (swan song?) of my twenties and am perhaps finding all this immediate "omg look what's happening now" reportage from the trenches of age 24 -- very niche trenches at that -- to be a bit eye roll-inducing. The fact is, I'm a fairly privileged college graduate who writes on the internet myself, so maybe I am guilty of the same thing, with every self-indulgent Tumblr missive and subtle Twitter brag. (And blog posts calling out an entire generation based on a few indulgent apples.) Maybe the internet has made all of us think our little lives, all listless and uncertain, are fascinating and worth attention and praise. And maybe it's convinced us that, despite all our storybook flailing and I'm-such-a-fabulous-mess-ing, we secretly do have things pretty well covered. Because a small corner of the internet has told us we do. So it's probably not Emma Koenig's fault; the internet has existed in fully-fledged form nearly her entire adolescent life. It's all she knows.
I'm sure she'll someday look back at this point in her life and wonder what all the fuss was about. Was everything really so fraught and silly? And was the world really as small as she made it seem? Fidgeting around with jobs, drinking too much, staying up too late, dribbling on endlessly about sex and romance, thinking you are the center of everything; this is all the stuff of many people's twenties. But there's also working and voting and helping people (I hope) and getting help from people (for sure) and crying and mourning and growing and working some more. That's all perhaps bigger stuff than fits on an Urban Outfitters book table, and likely unsettles many a neatly crafted worldview. But that stuff is all there, for most or at least many twentysomethings, right now. If only we could get someone to talk about it.
http://www.flavorwire.com/
This is a common criticism of a particular set of young creative types who tend to blab on about their own lives. Some of that criticism is a bit overblown — young people are young people, and young people like to talk about themselves, that's been true almost always — but a good deal of the backlash does, in some ways, feel merited. Young twentysomethings like Koenig do tend to flit around with a blithe but stubborn assumption that their microcosm is the same thing as the broader world. For all the wishy-washy, noncommittal, unsure stuff they write about, there's a distinct sense of absolutism to their work. They are forcing the world to be small and narrow so they can be its chief interpreters.
Fetishization of youth is certainly nothing new — watching someone do something for the first time is more interesting than watching them do it for the seventh — but doesn't today's idolized or glamorized or simply documented twentysomething seem a special, frequently irritating species all its own? Like the generations before them, these kids are consistently prodding at and testing their boundaries, only it's not taking them as long as it used to. They seem very quickly satisfied with a world of their own creation that they understand. For all the supposed youthful idealism and political openness these kids vaguely espouse, the world of twentysomethings seems to be getting somehow smaller, more specific. There's that same whimsical but detached irony, again and again. The same cloying cultural references, the vaguely smug assertions about how people and places work. They're all insecure but wear that insecurity proudly, like a cape. Though this world they live in is based on a kind of affected wobbliness and uncertainty -- all the glamor of being a noble, dreamy work-in-progress -- it's still a world they've mastered. And have thus deemed The World, for everyone else. Something's happened amidst all the helicopter parenting and participation trophies and unending spools of internet that's made a current crop of post-collegers determined to not go to the mountain, but pull the mountain to them and shape it to their own liking. Or to at least assume, incorrectly, that they've done that.
People got to talking a lot about this general twentysomething problem around the time that HBO's Girls premiered, because it had lots of handy talking points. For example, Lena Dunham's character Hannah insisting she is, "at least a voice. Of a generation." That line is teasing at a particular kind of contemporary youth certainty that one has something to say, and is determined to say it, without really knowing what that something is. Or whom to say it to. But, of course, they now have the big sprawling medium to say it anyway.
Koenig's "Fuck! I'm In My Twenties" is ostensibly for kids, specifically women, her own age. There is a lot of griping and lite philosophizing about relationships, about email, about expectations of early womanhood meeting reality. So it is largely for the people she's standing shoulder-to-shoulder with. But then along come lots of other people, from different demographics, staring at the site with varying degrees of curiousness and disdain. As a reflection of that, it sometimes seems that Koenig isn't exactly writing for her age group, but rather sending things up the ladder, ringing a bell and saying, "Hey this is what things are like down here these days." There's a navel-gazing anthropology to the site that's both arrogant, in its assuredness and thinly masked ambition, and naive.
But look, the fact that kids right out of college are self-deprecatingly romanticizing their lives on the internet for whoever wants to pay attention isn't really the problem. Sure that increasingly loud chatter is, on principle, fairly aggravating, but the true enemy here, the ballet flat-clad villain, is what's actually being said. In Koenig's world of twentiesdom, and on Dunham's lightly parodic but also sincere show, kids are stumbling around with a "aren't I a beautiful, fascinating mess" attitude that prizes self-imposed ennui and quirky angst over anything, well, productive. It's all stumbling for stumbling's sake with the vague but entitled hope of a bestowed reward at the end. The twenties depicted on Koenig's blog are all inward-facing, mannered irony and ineptitude, though a win is ultimately still expected. This kind of thing confirms a creaky "kids today" stereotype that frankly isn't fair.
The implied universality -- the assertion that this is everyone's 20s -- is really what gets Koenig in trouble. And sinks plenty of other young millennials too. Look at many of the headlines on the for twentysomethings, by twentysomethings blog Thought Catalog — "5 Things You Need To Do In Order Survive Your 20s," "Why Are People My Age Having Babies?," "If We Could Be Boring" — and it's clear that this rather small handful of kids is positioning itself as the arbiters of the entire generation. This is maybe owed to the universal arrogance of youth, which is of course nothing new, but the trouble is now we're rewarding it. It's become a trade, a vocation, a field of oblivious yet increasingly lucrative study. Youthful confusion and wondering and wandering are all part of being alive, but we seem to be increasingly indulging it -- especially a particularly cushy subset of it -- in a way that's not doing anyone any good.
To be fair, this might all be oldster crankiness. I'm currently on the final-year victory lap (swan song?) of my twenties and am perhaps finding all this immediate "omg look what's happening now" reportage from the trenches of age 24 -- very niche trenches at that -- to be a bit eye roll-inducing. The fact is, I'm a fairly privileged college graduate who writes on the internet myself, so maybe I am guilty of the same thing, with every self-indulgent Tumblr missive and subtle Twitter brag. (And blog posts calling out an entire generation based on a few indulgent apples.) Maybe the internet has made all of us think our little lives, all listless and uncertain, are fascinating and worth attention and praise. And maybe it's convinced us that, despite all our storybook flailing and I'm-such-a-fabulous-mess-ing, we secretly do have things pretty well covered. Because a small corner of the internet has told us we do. So it's probably not Emma Koenig's fault; the internet has existed in fully-fledged form nearly her entire adolescent life. It's all she knows.
I'm sure she'll someday look back at this point in her life and wonder what all the fuss was about. Was everything really so fraught and silly? And was the world really as small as she made it seem? Fidgeting around with jobs, drinking too much, staying up too late, dribbling on endlessly about sex and romance, thinking you are the center of everything; this is all the stuff of many people's twenties. But there's also working and voting and helping people (I hope) and getting help from people (for sure) and crying and mourning and growing and working some more. That's all perhaps bigger stuff than fits on an Urban Outfitters book table, and likely unsettles many a neatly crafted worldview. But that stuff is all there, for most or at least many twentysomethings, right now. If only we could get someone to talk about it.
http://www.flavorwire.com/
