24th March 2023.
Is it ever possible to be too lucid?
Young people today are far less prone to substance abuse than their forebears: they smoke less, drink less, snort less and shoot up less. Unlike previous generations, our minds haven’t been chemically tampered with. We didn’t have a latchkey culture, having mostly been raised by diligent helicopter parents who took us to after-school activities and made sure we did our homework on time. We took the anti-drug propaganda seriously because we actually cared about our grades. We cared about our grades because we wanted to end up at the best university we could go to with the aim of getting the best paid job we could qualify for. The one trait that defines Gen Z is being sharp-elbowed: most of us prefer to chase money and status over any kind of supposedly noble “aesthetic.”
By comparison, the minority that chases so-called “authenticity” is just copying their parents. You can see it in the 90’s influences they espouse: the rave warehouses; the Kodak cameras; the lowercase typefaces; the loose denim; the faux-egalitarianism. I can’t lie — those kids like to do a lot of drugs. But they are in no way representative of our cohort. They’re just trying to recreate a coming-of-age experience that their Gen X parents constantly boasted about at home.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are more interested in hustling our resumés to the highest bidder and going to nice restaurants. I know — pretty square.
But all this strait-laced behaviour means Gen Z can’t hide from the world in a cloud of weed smoke or in a Valium bottle. We have to face it square-on: warts and all. Lots of questions start emerging the older we get, the more we press forward into life.
I heard the first whispers in the back of my head at school, when I realised that secondary education was becoming a platform for advancing various social agendas. Why do the senior teachers keep spouting more and more bullshit that we have to pretend to agree with? Then there was university. I know countless kids who tailored their essays to the dominant campus ideology because they knew it would get them higher marks. More questions start to percolate — why can’t people just write what they think? Then, next thing you know, you’re applying for jobs, and the people who seem to do really well at getting offers are often relentless self-promoters who chirp vacuous slogans on social media. Why them?
My generation only started asking these questions because we were sharp enough to spot the patterns. If we were high, we wouldn’t have cared as much.
The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more questions emerge. You start to see where the incentives lie. You start to understand what figures of authority want young people — particularly young men — to become. They certainly don’t like them now. For reference, YouGov found that just 8 percent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. With each year that passes, there are more young men who come to understand what the plan is for them.
And they don’t like it.
Look at who young men have elevated as an icon: Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Bale managed to flesh out a certain attitude that wasn’t picked up by audiences at the time — cynicism. Today’s young men don’t simply see Bateman as an entitled yuppie asshole playing around with people’s organs. They find him hyper-conscious, alert; disappointed in and disdainful of his surroundings despite his wealth and status. He is the system’s simultaneous beneficiary and critic. It is precisely because he understands his ecosystem that he feels no empathy for anyone within it. Having come up in the world of corporate soundbites and meaningless conversations, Bateman knows it’s all bullshit. His lot is being condemned to secretly take out his frustration through violence, usually on those that won’t be missed. As he admits:
“I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me, and I don’t know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.”
Greed and disgust. I’ll come back to this later.
Perhaps Bateman’s just a born killer. But the film suggests that there’s an element of nurture involved, too. One scene I keep coming back to is near the end, where Bateman returns to Paul Allen’s apartment, expecting it to be as bloody and messy as he left it. However, he finds it immaculately redecorated. In fact, a real estate agent is hosting an open house and touring a couple of prospective buyers. Bewildered, Bateman asks the real estate agent:
“I want to know what happened here.”
Stone-faced, she cooly replies:
“Don’t make any trouble, please. I suggest you go.”
It’s an eerie exchange between two liars; two people who want to present something different than what really exists. The real estate agent has cleaned up the flat herself and concealed the dead bodies in order to flip the place quickly and discreetly. It’s a useful insight into the world Bateman inhabits: what kind of society could cause such disdain, such frustration in the first place? A vacuous one only concerned with outward appearances, rather than reality. It is no stretch to compare this fictional world with our own surroundings.
Young people have turned to Bale’s Bateman because, perversely, they can relate to his lucidity. Given the world he inhabits, he is too lucid to be properly functional. He’s never escaped into chemical euphoria, and never will do. It’s precisely because Bateman’s done everything “right” — boarding school, Harvard College, investment banking — that he’s come to learn how the world really is. Consequently, his dissonance from others is compelling. Young people these days don’t smoke weed, or pop pills. Their drugs of choice are wholly intangible. They prefer to dose themselves with inconvenient truths — truths that often cut viciously against the grain — and hide their habit under the guise of irony.
There is a whole army of youngsters out there who swipe eagerly on their phones, seeking the day’s dose. Maybe the dose comes from the camgirl ringleader guy who got arrested last year. Maybe it comes from a media-savvy entrepreneur hustling crypto and traditional values. Maybe it comes from an anonymous Twitter account waxing lyrical about the Bronze Age. The medium matters less than the message. Young men want to hear things they can’t say in public, or around their teachers, or around their colleagues. In a world where young men accept the messaging far less than their fathers and grandfathers, their need to hear dissent is fundamental.
A lot of the messaging can be intense, and crude, and provocative — but that’s what heightens the buzz. It provides a clean break from the norm. This is another reason why the “Bateman” archetype resonates with young men: they are starting to operate between “split” personalities. The offline personality follows rules and defers to bureaucrats. It feigns indifference. It complies in order to accumulate wealth and status. The online version — which usually awakens at night — is unrestrained; frenzied. It spits in the faces of its overseers. Bateman’s twin forces of greed and disgust are constantly pushing against each other. Greed keeps Gen Z from outwardly disrupting the status quo; disgust keeps them detached from it.
In short, they are too lucid for their own good. Having gone through life aiming for stability and position over cheap highs, Gen Z has been forced to confront an ugly world at an incredibly early stage in their lives. They are old enough to understand what is going on, but too young to put their livelihoods on the line in protest. Today, they trade edgy jokes on social media. Tomorrow may bring something darker, more psychotic.
