Getting Past Coupland

A friend of mine in September posted on his blog a short rant about the forgotten people between Generation X and Generation Y (read it here). This got me thinking about Douglas Coupland's Generation X, the 1991 Canadian novel that coined the term we all know so well. Ironically, Coupland did not mean to call his generation by this name; he used X as a way to generalize the people he was writing about, so that every person reading the book would see their own generation it in. Boy did that backfire!

The novel itself is full of wry wittisms, ironic and sarcastic dialogue, self-imposed laziness, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom -- everything that the early 90s and the grunge movement came to symbolize. Reality Bites (and Ethan Hawke) anyone?

I'd like to think that our generation is moving past that. Sure, we make fun of mass consumer culture while occasionally shopping at Walmart, but a certain degree of activism has crept into our flippant remarks about the Republican Party and Paris Hilton. Instead of just commenting, we are actively engaging in dialogue. I hope. And I hope that everyone hopes as well. But there are still an awful lot of assholes out there.

In the margins of the book, Coupland placed short terms and definitions that persist in the Generation X lexicon and worldview. Here are some of my favourites. Can you spot which ones are still relevant today?

• McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.
• Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: “Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”
• Mid-Twenties Breakdown: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
• Safety Net-ism: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.
• Divorce Assumption: A form of Safety Net-ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.
• Now Denial: To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.
• Status Substitution: Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: “Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW.”
• Conspicious Minimalism: A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The nonownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.
• Cafe Minimalism: To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets.
• Voter's Block: The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.
• Musical Hairsplitting: The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: “The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.”
• 101-ism: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.
• Ultra Short Term Nostalgia: Homesickness for the extremely recent past: “God, things seemed so much better in the world last week.” [Currently, these sentences begin with “Back in the day...”]
• Conversational Slumming: The self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor.
• Tele-Parablizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: “That's just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!”
• Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.
• 2 + 2 = 5 ism: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time.
• Down-Nesting: The tendency of parents to move to smaller, guest-room-free houses after the children have moved away so as to avoid children aged 20 to 30 who have boomeranged home.
• Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
• Dorian Graying: The unwillingness to gracefully allow one's body to show signs of aging.
• Obscurism: The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one's education and one's wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.

I suggest you read everything by Douglas Coupland. This novel is his best known, but it is certainly not his best novel.