Björn Against

I expect Shallow Rewards is going to be an infrequent concern for the next month or two. With a baby due in a matter of days, job change (positive) and a new album to finish, I will barely have time to complete the few columns I've promised the Village Voice. I thought I should address the likely downtime somehow, and as I was talking to my editor at the Voice this afternoon, about the future thrust of those pieces, we ended up in a back-and-forth over the Grups thesis from the April 2006 issue of New York Magazine. I had completely forgotten about Adam Sternbergh's excellent article, which speaks at (re-considerable) length to subjects I've been obsessed with of late (unexamined delusion, the difference between entitlement and ambition, unreality in the internet age). I decided to crumple together some related thoughts I couldn't force into record reviews.

A key point goes unaddressed in Sternbergh's fun-for-the-park look at too-old-to-be hipsters: namely, where this disease comes from. By and large our parents didn't concern themselves with pop culture as self-definition, at least not for so long, which is why we were allowed to grow up with the delusions of entitlement and possibility we're so infected with. Sooner rather than later, they worked to provide our leisure. We don't seem to appreciate that they made personal sacrifices to afford us the blasé liberal arts cynicism we've returned on their investment. And I'm not talking about wars or even financial constraints, I'm talking about entertainment, and, more in line with Sternbergh's piece, passion. Our parents dreamt of doing lots of things and didn't, dousing their desires to make sure we could explore ours more fully. The working at gas stations and walking miles in the snow...many of our parents had to supplement their family's income, and wanted better. They sought to erase the pain of institutional education, peer pressure, hazing, and all the other social trauma they endured growing up. They wanted to make sure we knew we were "special," because nobody ever told them they were, or at least not often enough. Every one of the Grups was told they were "special." They were overpraised and overadored, and for some reason, as adults, are now undereager to confront that their sense of self-worth is necessarily exaggerated by this legacy.

As positivist parenting goes, things are obviously even more out of control today, the psychosis of "very advanced for their age" children who drop from the womb with Erik Satie on loop in the delivery room, Dad standing in front of his wife's splayed thighs with a table of the elements going, "WHAT'S BORON, WHAT'S BORON, YOU CAN DO THIS SON!" (It's an easy joke). Being oversold on yourself fosters serious existential dread, and that's our burden. Almost nobody seems to be comfortable with the reality that, on the whole, most of us are unextraordinary. The effort we expend to reassure ourselves that our parents and teachers weren't fucking with us or fucking us up—the blogs, the drugs, the one-album-and-out "bands," the YouTube gag reels—is one huge mashed potato Devil's Tower, and we are drooling in front of it.

Ultimately, our parents' drive to deliver a better childhood is proving a mistake, if a well-intentioned one. We are a generation embarrassed to have day jobs, embarrassed to work for a living. Embarrassed not to be kings and queens^[1].

There's a reason golden age game show contestants were introduced with the appendix, "in her spare time, she likes to...": because not long ago, passions were pastimes. The ability to even pursue them was considered novel, a post-war peacetime privilege. Our parents had—or were ready to accept—responsibilities they wouldn't put their "passions" before. The breadth and degree of responsibility one could handle defined a person of their era. Managing a staff of fifty, paying a mortgage, and still making time to play a game with your kids: that was impressive (and still is). Selecting a few hours' worth of songs you didn't make, to play for a hundred drunk people in a dark room every third Wednesday? Are you putting that on your resume? I don't understand how two people of the same generation, well into their 30s, can live these two lives with equal conviction, but I see it every day.

Self-indulgence: let's make it self-expression to an irrational degree, without regard for the consequences of your actions. Far too many people are guilty of this in the Grup and "proto-Grup" (under 30) class. This generation is living on reality debt, charging endless-summer self-absorption and, "I do what I want and I make the rent: VICTORY" to an imaginary point in the future—very late-30s, early-40s—when we'll hang it up and get "normal," "steady" jobs and have a couple kids and downshift into a comfortable suburban life, poof, just like that. But right now—everything is right now—we're enjoying life, taking every penny to the bar or putting out records that sell two-hundred copies and that a couple thousand college kids link to on MySpace and download and forget about six months later. Why are we still looking for dopamine releases via courses of action with such obvious and constantly reinforced inconsequentiality?

In a few best-case scenarios, some of my peers are running their own companies, living the dream, and doing reasonably and sometimes extraordinarily well. My parents, and I'm sure yours, always sold me on, "If you can do what you love for a living, go fot it." That was the goal, the meaning of life, and it still is, and it's a great philosophy—provided what you love to do is also a skill, and that skill is inherently profitable. I love to listen to and compose and write about music, to run my mouth about the politics of pop, and point the finger at other people who do the same. But you know I've costed it, and it turns out that none of these activities are profitable^[2], so I enjoy them in my spare time, and fix computers for a living.

This course of action makes sense to me, and seems obvious, but to so many peers I encounter, work is worse than a four-letter word: it is psychologically troubling, a squirming emotional sore spot they live in denial of and avoid discussing. With unsettling frequency, I find that my generation can only identify and embrace success if it stems from self-expression, to such an extent that people are numbing and abusing themselves through drink and drugs to suppress frustration and a crushing sense of failure for having a job. Unheralded, productive labor—a paycheck—is a drag because it's not fun and it's not "who I am." As Sternbergh mentions, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon, but it was less of a problem in the recent past, an easily marginalized jab at the bohemian set in the days of Peter Pan Syndrome. Today, individual recognition is such an enormous part of our models for success and accomplishment that we derive no sense of satisfaction from our jobs. We are in a state of existential contradiction because work is ordinary, and we are supposed to extraordinary. Mom said so.

^[1]And nearly every one of us that succeeds on our own terms is snide and callous and unrepentantly egomaniacal and extroverted about their success, in private if not public. See here.

^[2]Brass tacks: fewer than 10 people could make a living (e.g. middle-class) wage via Pitchfork, thanks to the other 60 or 70 who don't (and don't seem to mind that they're engaged in a talking head pyramid scheme). I've said before that writing for a living is an untenable, abhorrent aspiration of the very rich and overeducated, but I'm talking about writing about music, pop culture, op-ed garbage like that. I have friends who write meaningful articles and books on finance and law and the environment and political history: they deserve to and make out just fine.