Last night, before we drove back to New York, S and I went for a walk on the beach, which was mostly empty in the magic hour, except for a few kids playing in the waves, a woman fishing, and a man, beer-drunk, with headphones on, singing to himself. I hadn’t had a moment like that in awhile, where Platonic beauty seemed to rule—chaos and anxiety and meaninglessness overthrown.
I think I’ve become a little frightened of beauty—because chasing after it has, in the past, led to as much embarrassment as rapture.
Sometimes in 19th century novels, you’ll come across characters who are described as ‘God’s fools’ or ‘holy fools’—but I’ve never seen anyone described as “Plato’s fools”. Instead we tend to rely on the word “romantic”—which doesn’t quite capture the religious nature of falling in love with the Beautiful, chasing the Beautiful around the corner like a shadow.
There is a precipitous drop off in the frequency and power of cultural production after the year 2010; people born in the mid 1970s to mid 1980s were the last to hit their artistic primes before smartphones, and before the end of analog production methods and materials. Arguably, 2015 was really when you began to see the last waves hit the shore: late Malick, Carrie and Lowell, the European fiction boomlet to name a few examples. I think we’re finding out that not only are people too numb and distracted in an absolute sense anymore to pursue higher levels of culture, digital tools have made things too easy.
This links to another recent obsessive thought of mine: brain-extender amputation (an idea from McLuhan)—chopping off the phone, social media. Artists will have to go in electronic free zones, sensory deprivation caves, so as to actually re-sensitize. Otherwise, AI generated content will be preferable, or at least equal to soulless churn of human-produced content—
The modern aristocracy is built around the social media followings, which is as bad as it sounds.
Notes towards a theory of Zoomers:
I remember my father was upset, in the mid 2000’s, when I refused, or just couldn’t learn stick shift—why bother, most cars were automatic? For Zoomers, everything is stick shift.
The Zoomers manifest long running social, anthropological trends; collective social transformations will be writ large on the Zoomer: they are the transformation.
Zoomers gender and sexual politics and ideologies hide an extreme, Reagan-era-esc drive towards conformity. The most sought after jobs are in finance. Based or woke—the Zoomer wants to live in a TikTok-able condo, want to travel for the sake of putting it on The Gram. Lifestyles without lives in a metaphysical sense.