Nostalgia

I am nostalgic. There, I said it. I live in the present, but I am fueled by my past. Every day I live, I draw upon themes from the days that have passed before me. Everything from music to TV, movies to snacks, board games to AIM – I ride the cloud upon which I was raised, seeking some sort of associative security, some sort of comfort. Those were the times of innocence, back when authenticity was real. Looking back, we see those emotions as real. And we still feel their effects.

In this post-ironic age, we still remember these feelings. We still remember the rush of our first kiss. We still remember the first time we lost a tooth. We still remember the first time we saw an R rated movie.

-Watching Doug on Nickelodeon?
-Trying to understand Doug’s beatnik sister?
-Eating Dunkaroos and Lunchables?
-Taking Flintstones chewable vitamins?
-JOing to Britney Spears?
-Going to roller rinks holding hands with your girl crush so you wouldn’t fall down?
-Spending the night with your first girlfriend?
-Going to prom in a ridiculous limo?
-Not understanding Rocko’s Modern Life?
-Chatting on AIM all night instead of doing homework?
-Listening to the sound your dial-up modem made?
-Listening to Vitamin C’s Graduation song/Green Day’s Good Riddance before your graduation?
-Slow dancing to O-Town’s All or Nothing/Eve 6′s Here’s to the Night?
-Watching all the girls in your class obsess about The O.C./One Tree Hill?
-When everyone had a Razr phone?
-When everyone had a Razor scooter?
-Getting all your music from NOW?
-Deciding which seat to take?
-Watching Boy Meets World?
-Wearing Volcom/Vans/Quiksilver?
-Crushing on Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap?
-Watching Shia Labeouf in Even Stevens?
-Learning things from the Simpsons?
-Watching the Mark McGuire-Sammy Sosa homerun contest?
-Watching Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, and Scotty Pippen play for the Bulls?
-Watching Michael Jordan play for the White Sox?
-Watching Space Jam?
-Flying on planes without the extra security?
-Using VHS tapes and Walkmans?
-Buying CDs from your local record store?
-Hiding puberty boners from classmates behind binders?

I miss those days. But I feel like they weren’t as good as I remember. It was just life back then, just the daily routine. They didn’t have the same emotional weight back then that they do now. And someday I’ll look back at this era of my life, my time at Yale, and romanticize it in some excessively long listicle. But regardless, we still feel the power of nostalgia, the pull of those emotions, the template upon which we live our lives now. These things have made me who I am now, regardless of how real or not they were at the time. This is my post-authentic childhood.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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The post-authenticity project

Sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote. The past few weeks have been traumatic. I’ve realized I’ve lost myself. I don’t know what’s true anymore. I don’t know what’s good. I have nothing to anchor myself to. How can I be authentic? I authenticity even possible anymore? What does authenticity even mean?

I’ve had these feelings for a while now. When Arcade Fire won a Grammy, I knew we were entering a new age. But the things that have happened over spring break have really changed the way I look at life. Last weekend, I visited some friends from high school at a state university a few hours from where I grew up. I realized I could see myself there living with them, partying with them, studying with them year round. It felt too right. And I met a girl. She was unlike anyone I’ve ever met before. I felt like we instantly connected. But we only had one night together before I had to go back home. We live thousands of miles apart. And yet for one brief night, I felt so at home. I may never see her again. I don’t know.

And now I’m back home in an empty shell of a town. I lived my entire life here until moving off to college. Every street I drive down has a thousand memories. This is the road where the afterparty to my eighth grade graduation was.
And also where I first hooked up with my now ex-girlfriend one year ago. This is where my friend crashed his car while driving drunk and had to spend the summer working on a construction crew to pay for the repairs. This is where I went to eat before prom junior year.

But now there are no more stories left to write. There’s nothing left for me here. At every corner, there are shadows of my past. But we’ve all moved on, moved out. We’re all just visitors, constantly reminded of the past we shared. Everything we do in this town is just a reflection of the times we once had.

Which leads me to post-authenticity. I don’t know what it means to be authentic. Is it about being true to yourself? I don’t know myself well enough. Is it some sort of abstract quality possessed by tribes in Papua New Guinea or Pabst Blue Ribbon? I just don’t know anymore. The hipster generation fetishized the authentic while at the same time undermining its meaning. They were the post-ironic generation. But the hipster died circa 2010. We’re in a new generation. The hipster generation exposed the meaninglessness of authenticity. We can never regain true authenticity. We are the post-authentic generation.

Remember those meaningful times we had as a kid?
Remember pretending that a cardboard box was a spaceship?
Remember the pain of losing your first tooth?
Remember having that growth spurt in junior high and finally being good at basketball?
Remember the first time you shaved? Your first kiss? Prom night?
The first time you got drunk? And how your friends took care of you as you threw up in the hedge?
Remember sneaking home past curfew and trying not to wake your parents?
Remember your first day of college when your sister helped you move in and you met your roommate for the first time?
Remember freshman orientation and meeting the people that would become your best friends over the next four years?

Authenticity is dead. But we still feel pain, love, joy, sadness. Even though we can’t claim to be true to anything, even ourselves, we still have our emotions and our memories, even if they’re tainted with age. With the hipster came the death of authenticity. But with the death of the hipster, we’re left with post-authenticity. Post-authenticity is more than just post-hipsterism. It’s more than just a resurgence of meaningfulness. It’s a new generation born out of the death of the hipster, the economic recession, the state of technology, and the changes in the production of cultural goods.

Over the next weeks, I’ll continue to develop this idea of post-authenticity, exploring what it is and what it means for our generation. While my observations are certainly limited by my own position, hopefully what emerges will be a broader picture of the state of our culture in the years to come.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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Ghosts of a pre-hauntological past

Yesterday I spent five hours laying on my bed in my sky blue Am Appy briefs listening to Neon Indian.

And I began to think. Who am I? Why am I at Yale? What will I do with my life?

I think 2012 will be the end of history. Not the end of the world. The end of history. We’ve reached a post-authentic age.

Art is dead.
Poetry is dead.
Opera is dead.
Symphony is dead.
Painting is dead.
Sculpture is dying.
Photography is dead.
Bloggable indie is mainstream/dead.
Film is stale.
Post-reality television is dying [via Skins].

There’s no future for our generation. This is the end of a generation. An end to history. Everything that can be done has already been done. We are generation:Slutwave. We are media whores.

Modernism is dead.
Progress is dead.
Conceptualism is dead.
Authenticity is dead.

We are the post-hipster generation. We are all hipsters. We are the generation of hauntology. We have tasted the forbidden fruit of post-irony, and now we will be expelled from the Garden of Eden. We are aware of the nakedness of our own performativity. Progress is a sham. We are the post-modern, post-conceptual, post-authentic generation. We have nothing to our names but our insincerity. We are the end of history.

After laying on my bed thinking these thoughts for five hours, I got pretty tired of listening to Neon Indian. So I turned on Toro y Moi and sang along. It was fun.

Faithfully,
Miles Wayfarer

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