Reading 31
“Young people don’t want to be us because they’re not even the same species as us. Even if they did want to be us, the proposition would be absurd, like a human trying to emulate an orangutan. The world has changed so much between my time and theirs that someone just ten years younger might as well belong to a different geological epoch. […] Is it any wonder, then, that older generations’ contributions to the conversation are, at best, a kind of verbal meteor shower, the flickering, nattering remains of planets that haven’t existed for eons?”
- Meghan Daum, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019)
“If you disagree with someone on ideological grounds, the reasonable response is to either lay out your own argument or, if the provocation is indeed too tiresome, disengage altogether. Disengaging does not make you, as they say now, ‘complicit in oppression’ (or, as we used to say, ‘part of the problem’). It suggests you have better things to do, which, let’s face it, is the kind of suggestion that drives Twitter trolls and ideological opponents berserk.”
- Meghan Daum, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019)
“Sometimes I think the problem is that we’re being let in on too much. We’re not only getting front-row seats to everyone’s dopiest inklings, we’re getting backstage passes and discounted merchandise. Social media sneaks into our brains, steals half-formed thoughts, and broadcasts those thoughts before they’re anything close to being ready for what used to be called ‘public consumption’ (or, as we used to say, ‘ready for prime time’). I realize now that much of what I’ve been reacting to these last few years is nothing more than undeveloped versions of already undeveloped thoughts. I think about what this means for young people, especially teenagers, whose thoughts are supposed to be undeveloped, even stupid. I think about all the stupid thoughts I had as a teenager, all the uninformed, half-baked, insensitive, self-serving, grandiose, totally-embarrassing-in-retrospect things I said to my friends and my parents and my teachers. What if someone had handed me a microphone and invited me to say them to the whole world instead? Would I have taken them up on it? Of course. Would the world have been worse for it? Of course.”
- Meghan Daum, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019)
