![]() ![]() Yet the world is full of noise: Information is both more accessible (and perhaps more oppressively omnipresent) than ever and also less reliable people select their own facts, and business-funded think tanks produce reports indistinguishable from hard data, except that they are not remotely true. Millennials aren’t strictly pessimistic by any means, but the occasional tussle with feelings of emptiness and despair seems de rigueur for my generation. Millennials are not engaged at work (71 percent confessed this to Gallup), they have lost faith in our political system (only 19 percent say a military takeover is unacceptable), and many are lonely (57 percent reported such in a recent survey). In the meantime, they put off getting married, having kids, buying houses and so on. Long-lasting careers seem out of reach millennials are told to go to college so they can make money, but mostly they just amass debt and then job-hop in hopes of paying it off. The moral structure they produced has been vastly loosened and replaced with a soft, untheorized tendency toward niceness - smarminess, really, as journalist Tom Scocca put it in 2013. Studies show that traditional sources of meaning, such as religion and family formation, are less relevant to the lives of young people than they were to our parents. When it comes to doubting the essential meaningfulness of the world, millennials have their reasons. In this weird world of the surreal and bizarre, horror mingles with humor, and young people have space to play with emotions that seem more and more to proceed from ordinary life - the creeping suspicion that the world just doesn’t make sense. To visit millennial comedy, advertising and memes is to spend time in a dream world where ideas twist and suddenly vanish where loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left where beloved children’s character Winnie the Pooh is depicted in a fan-made comic strip as a 9/11 truther, and grown men in a parody ad dance to shrill synth beats while eating Totino’s pizza rolls out of a tiny pink backpack. I am not a nihilist, but a mood of grim, jolly absurdism comes over me often, as it seems to come over many of my young peers. His inclusion in a lineup of the U.S.S.R.’s patron saints doesn’t mean anything. The wiener is not a socialist icon in fact, he is a breakdancing sausage from a Snapchat filter. The image, created by Twitter user appeared on Twitter in mid-July, where it circulated among various casual users before finding its way to my feed. In a sepia-toned portrait that looks like a dark relic of the Soviet era, five figures stand frowning in profile: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and finally a computer-generated hot dog wearing green headphones. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the creators of “Tim & Eric,” a surrealist comedy show on Adult Swim.
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