The thing about postmodernism
Many people focus on pessimistic nihilism when speaking about postmodernism.
You often hear people taking a very crust-punk attitude regarding the meaning of life, art, culture, and whatnot.
“There’s no point in anything”, “Life has no meaning”, “it doesn’t matter if we live or die so why bother?”
You know, the kind of edgy ideals which are usually held by angsty teenagers.
But they forget about the optimistic side of nihilism which treats life like a choose-your-own adventure game.
More importantly, they forget about another side of postmodernism entirely which is the fragmentation of culture entirely.
There is now a subculture or a club or a little discord server for people who like whatever weird shit you like.
FORGET:
- The Beatniks
- The hippies
- The goths
- Punk rock
- The romantics
- The surrealists
- The symbolists
There is no great movement of our generation.
Our generation is defined specifically by its lack of a cohesive movement.
In fashion, it is currently known that there aren’t really any major trends that last a whole season. Things move too fast. There are microtrends that last maybe a month and then everyone is on to the next thing.
In art, everyone is doing their own thing, and like-minded individuals form collectives. There is a collective for every kind of artist across time and space.
In literature, we no longer favor great epics or even 300-page novels. No one will read it. There is one stanza Instagram poetry, there is pulpy, young-adult erotica, and there are short-form microblogs and listicles. Pick your poison.
No one bothers to create masterpieces anymore because they’ll just get drowned out and pushed down in the feed. Your Magnum Opus that took you 4 years to write will just get tl:dr’d in favor of Peter Griffin Funny Moments compilation #48 and Dancing Orihime cosplayers.
Instead, we split into tribes
It must be the law of atrophy. What a great irony it is that once we become sufficiently advanced, our social structures revert back to resemble the tribal state humans lived under for the majority of our existence.
Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that much of our psyche comes from that earlier and more primal state. It must take a long time before we can truly internalize more sophisticated ideas. Sure, we can think about them. But can we even truly live up to those higher ideals?
And If so, would they even be considered higher? Perhaps not according to postmodernism.
