(no subject)

[kyrasantae]

I think that I'm starting to piece together some relic-of-a-lost-generation explanation for the old-school/pop-culture-rejection outlook on life I think I first recognized in, hmm... grade 5?

Now that we are well into late modern society, it is "normal" of a sizable proportion of the population to have a poorly formulated sense of themselves as agents in the world and to have a vague sense of their past and their future. This "diffused" or "default" identity appears to be increasingly "normal" because of social and economic conditions that encourage an other-directed, image-oriented personality, bent on immediate gratification through the consumption of goods and services sold by corporate-capitalist enterprises.

Not everyone falls prey to those influences, but an increasing number of people seem to. In fact, it is easily argued that for some time now people have been targeted from childhood on by corporate-capitalist enterprises with encouragement to be passive in their identity formation. Consequently, with each successive cohort, more people have passed through their adolescence and into their adulthood without actively engaging themselves in their own identity development, in spite of opportunities to do so.

—James Côté, Arrested Adulthood: The Changing Nature of Maturity and Identity (2000), pp.151-2