Reaching A Better Place

We’re not shouting through megaphones at the Man anymore

A speaker came to my university not so long ago to talk about the dying out of student activism and protest – I guess the figures are showing that we just aren’t kicking up a fuss about the Man anymore. To me that sounds about correct.
There was a stat I read a while ago that something like twice as many people in the UK put votes in for some reality TV show than they did for the general elections.
The news reports more tragedy than ever but the rate of coverage isn’t matching any increasing rate of interest or compassion in us all.
Then there’s the decreasing amount of interest in religion. Ask someone from my generation what their religious view is and they’ll probably declare they don’t know and don’t care – they’re agnostics but they don’t know what ‘agnostic’ means.

And, you know, I take this as a good sign for the future. No, really.

History: we elected that government and they know best

So once upon a time in the mid and early 20th century backwards we in the West actually had faith in politics, apparently. I find this notion a bit odd really, but in WWII, in England at least, the government banned all newspapers from printing any reports that Britain might be losing, and people were apparently okay with this. They were also apparently okay with all the pro-war propaganda.
Not only in the past were we united as a country politically, but we were so comfortable with authority that we allowed it to seriously infringe upon our lives. 

The day before yesterday: that government we elected is bad, let’s do something!

After WWII things started to shake up a bit. Maybe the government wasn’t so great, maybe it was even…a bad thing! So in the UK and the US we had the Beatnik and Hippie movements in the 50s and 60s. In Japan the Emperor was no longer seen as a deity. Across Europe artistic and literary movements such as Modernism, Surrealism and Dadaism sprung up to challenge all that order and objectivity that the authorities enforced. The government had very much become the Man.

Yesterday: ugh, we can’t do anything, it’s hopeless

Cue the hippies making the future perhaps a bit more liberated (but no flower power revolution), the Japanese student protests failing and the Vietnam War going on for a stupidly long time despite all the protest. Oh, and by this point the Berlin Wall had been up for ages and the Cold War was still frosty. It was the 70s and 80s – it was Generation X. MTV, Regan, Thatcher, 80s yuppies and the Wall Street Crash. The Man sucked and we’d resorted to retaliating with depressed sarcastic remarks while we guzzled Coca Cola to Madonna videos.

Today: I don’t really care, let me just have a good time

On to the 90s and the 00s and we don’t give that much of a crap. Not really. We still have the benefit concerts and direct debits to charities and we recycle too, but we’re not all that committed. Social and political criticism has become a pastime and Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins have become household names.
We’re not sure we’re actually making a difference but it’s okay because, what with our iPods and a more or less constant connection to Facebook, youtube and online episodes of South Park, being angry about stuff is just…meh. It’s still cool to care about stuff, just not too much or it becomes a drag. We do our bit. Whenever that gets old we have reality TV, MTV Cribs, cell phones with games built in and the largest amount of information ever known being funnelled into our heads all day, every day.
Sticking it to the Man just gets old too fast and there are so many more amusing distractions out there, you know?

Tomorrow: I’m having a good time and I’m doing my bit.

Future prediction: 10s and 20s and we’re still not inclined to pick that megaphone and shout at the Man. That matters even less though because now we’re recycling more than ever , exercising more, dieting more, buying Fair Trade and we’re easing our way out of the grip of the marketing fist. We used to be fixated on the lives of celebrities and fabulous homes and really expensive goods. We’re really still interested but we’re gradually recognising that all that crap doesn’t really make us happy.
We’re gradually slipping away from the utterly superficial and gradually caring more about things that matter. It’s a slow change in direction, but it’s a progressive change nonetheless.
And the best part is that we’re not doing it because we’re angry or desperate or hopeful of some massive socioeconomic shift that will save us all: we’re doing it because it just feels more and more right, more and more natural.

In other words…

The above ‘timeline’ has massive generalisations, but the point I’m making is that while generations may not be getting smarter, necessarily, they are getting savvier. And Generation Y (the people in their teens and 20s who were born roughly between 1983 and 1997) is, dare I say it, the savviest yet.

Personal Development, Not Communal Development

The reason I like these trends on how we’re living our lives is because Hippies, Beatniks, Communists and Nazis have all failed. Obviously I’m glad that the Nazis failed – the point, rather, is that they’re another example of a failed movement towards communal development.
Why these movements failed is something that historians can debate until the cows come home. While the details may differ the cause for all of them is the same: people rejected their ideologies. Hippies offended the right wingers. Communists offended the Capitalists. Beatniks offended the establishment. Nazis offended everybody.
Not everyone was willing to embrace the next big idea, be it secular or fundamentalist or right wing or left wing.

History is showing us that big ideas (these efforts at communal development) are not going to save us all, as they were intended. They can be useful and fascinating, but we all have the knowledge to function as good people, and by extension as good societies, without needing to refer to manifestoes written by Marx and co.

Our shortcomings as societies do not exist because we haven’t found the best idea on how to run things yet: they exist because as individuals we’re not functioning as well we could be. We’ve gone from blind ignorance and submission to governments, to getting wound up with them and staging weak semi-committed protests, to feeling powerless and jaded beneath authority, to not really caring and just trying to be happy.

Personal development is so encouraging because it’s about individuals working on themselves, not standing on soap boxes and marching outside gates waving signs. I don’t promote my own political or religious beliefs on this blog because I know that those big ideas are not what personal development is really about. Everything I write is of value to me as an individual and it goes on this blog because I believe it will be of value to lots of other people as individuals.

And personal development is growing. I’m not referring purely to the self-help industry, but also to the wider spectrum of individual improvement.

Fitness seems to be getting more and more popular. Ten years ago I’d never heard of a personal trainer and now I hear plenty about them. Suddenly everyone seems to be going to a gym and the ones that don’t feel that they ought to. Then there’s all the buzz about organic food and getting your five fruit and veg every day, plus there’s also all the brain training games.
Efficiency, too, has become almost a cult as we shift from a yearning for the convenient to a yearning for the fastest and most easily managed. Blackberries, Skype, Instant Messaging, the iPhone – we’re all looking for the next widget that will help us be more effective.
This concern for gradual improvement extends to causes outside ourselves too:  we don’t seem to care which party is in power but we make a big deal about buying Fair Trade coffee and free range eggs and re-using our plastic bags.

This is why I take it as a good sign that the average young person today spends more time texting their friends than they do watching the news. We’re not looking to authority to tell us what to think and we’re not looking to authority to pick a fight.
We’re doing what makes us happy, and in our small, consistent and cumulatively effective ways we’re working to make others happy, because that makes us happy too. And we don’t need slogans and strikes to do that.

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