is waif
SUPERGOOD: HAVE THE YOUTH LOST THEIR EDGE?
Here at Waif, we’ve caught wind of a trend among our younger readers: they don’t like bad behavior, or the depiction thereof. It seems they want even their niche, bizarre magazine content to come pumiced into a shape more easily swallowed, which is to say, edge-free.
“A bullet hole? No thanks, I’m tired of ‘death’ being fashion,” commented one disgruntled adolescent on a Waif Instagram post.
“Lovely photography but underage/binge drinking isn’t something to glorify,” wrote another discontented youth on a second post.
This being a bastion of journalistic integrity, Waif welcomes criticism in all forms. Shout your complaints from the mountaintops. But this line-toeing, it seems, is a trend not limited to our little Waif world: like the content they want to consume, teenagers appear to have lost their edge. What was until recently a perpetual certainty of adolescence -- that danger and provocation and the flouting of rules are all cool things -- has abruptly flipped. Teenagers are more risk-averse and prudish than ever before.
Let’s take a look at the unvarnished facts. According to several decades of public polling, teenagers today drink at half the rate they did thirty years ago, and do things like take drugs, attend parties, smoke cigarettes, and have sex way less than their parents did, which is a depressing thought. They spend more time safe and sound at home, and they wear their seatbelts more.
"There’s no way I’d have the creative savvy to write this article if I hadn’t spent high school smoking weed out of a Gatorade bottle with my friends."
o teenagers today, bad behavior is just that. This is a far cry even from when I was in high school approximately seven years ago, when the antidote to the doldrums of teenage-hood was to take swigs out of a bottle of plain Rubinoff and throw around a glow-in-the-dark frisbee in a field.
Of course, the good news is that for all the above reasons, teenagers today are physically safer than in the past, something this publication wholeheartedly endorses. But at what cost?
Clearly problem #1 is that this dreary rule- following and solitary digital existence, this flatlining of youthful rebellion, has given young people the misbegotten idea that the media they consume should not inspire discomfort. Important ideas are often best conveyed through the unsavory and the grotesque, lest we forget.
Secondly, youthful indiscretion provides the raw material for personal growth and art. From
what wellspring of youthful folly and puerile decision-making will art originate for the next generation if they’re all at home watching Twitch streams and listlessly scrolling through Instagram? Hunter S. Thompson didn’t write Fear and Loathing after watching Summit1g play “Splitgate: Arena Warfare” for a week straight. And there’s no way I’d have the creative savvy to write this article if I hadn’t spent high school smoking weed out of a Gatorade bottle with my friends.
Once more, I have the data to back this up. A number of studies suggest that as IQ has risen over the last 30 years in young people, creativity has taken a nosedive towards the x axis. Of her 2014 study on high schoolers’ creativity over several decades, the researcher Katie Davis told WNYC, “What we found was the creative writing became more mundane--they may take place in a school or in a home, whereas in the earlier pieces [from the ‘90s] they may take place on Mars.”
Some combination of the hysterical obsession with standardized testing and the stultifying effects of staring at your phone all the time instead of thinking thoughts is likely to blame.
What explains the new disinterest in risk and provocation? My theory is that the unintended cost of more liberal child-rearing has been the excitement- defeating lack of opportunity to rebel. Gone are the great generational clashes of the 20th century, those halcyon days when parents could credibly threaten to send their children to military school because they’re in a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band or whatever, and with that loss has gone the romance of sticking it to authority. Not only did the attitudes and aesthetics of 20th century counterculture calcify into our new status quo, but the act of rebelling itself became boringly acceptable. What’s the point of getting tattoos on your eyelids if everyone’s totally cool with it?
But the jets in this whirlpool drowning all meaning out of counterculture would be capitalism. Over the last two decades, corporations have affixed themselves to the zeitgeist with ruthless efficiency. This generation has grown up in an era where art, politics, and commerce are all braided together into a tight and tasty Twizzler of culture, this the age of sponcon, identity
marketing, and steely-gazed political messages from Gillette. What we aspire to and what we consume are two halves of the same tuna melt sitting under the heat lamp of neoliberalism. We’re decades removed from when corporate America’s attempts to co-opt punk and skate culture were laughably clunky; corporations now precede and anticipate and in fact create what is cool. They’re the helium of the cultural balloon.
Young people evidently see this mingling of commerce and culture as no impediment to authenticity in an age when an editorial from Slate just might--wouldn’t you know it—be brought to you by Samsung. Perhaps, then, it’s this corporatization that accounts for the banal sensibilities of teenagers. Provocation, after all, will only hurt one’s personal brand. That would-be influencers will now actually post fake sponsored content seems a fitting coup de grâce for the age of teenage rebellion.