Negation of Self, Desolation of Soul

Lately, I have had a lot of thoughts about what the typical family life is and was like for the average White Gen Y. The bulk of my growing up was in the faux-boom of the 1990s, the last misleading spark of a dying era and civilisation, leading into the mild delirium that was the 2000s. My family was a fairly regular demographic blip on the radar: Ranging from between lower middle, middle, then to slightly upper middle class, mostly established within suburbia, caucasian, with two children, a boy and girl.

If there's a ying and yang in a family's siblingry, I was always the more quietly introverted and perceptive to my elder sister's explosively extravagant extroversion. Of course, both of these have these strengths, but, judging from my and others' experiences, I think there's a tendency towards older sisters resenting younger brothers for the parental shift of attention, the female ego not taking kindly to a new entrant soaking up all of her deserved affection and praise. In other words, having a younger brother is prime breeding ground for a ball-busting cunt.

The strategy of parenting for my full-time working Baby boomer elders was first and foremost, appeasement and distraction. Raising kids was more of an errand to run or delay; plomp him in front of the TV, distract him with video games and action movies, send him off to play a variety of sports he's shit at (and the dad can watch them, and latter boast of how much he hated it but went anyway, so you owe him). There I was surprisingly well behaved for most of my early years, considering how marginal of a punishment I would probably get, but I took to the Western ritualised routine of self-subduction eagerly. In that sense, I embraced the treasures of the depersonalised, self-absorbed materialist world of the consumer. A want unsatiated is just a product away.

As my sister and I grew older, the inter-generational differences became more noticeable. A juxtaposition of baby boomers' detached, greedy idealism and Generation Y's whimpering, near-instinctual desolated nihilism.

I always got the impression I was some kind of obstacle to my dad, a pothole in the road to swerve around, or some street constructions to cross the street from. My old man was the epitomy of the dejected Baby Boomer who embraced a token, perverted representation of the 1960s idealism, fantasies of bohemian Hippydom and smoking weed, and then onto the crack pipe of status and greedy materialism, which in the end, consumed and destroyed him. I learnt one thing from my old man that I think we can all learn from baby boomers, do not let your own decadence or escapism control and ruin your life, because it will. It's certainly doing the same to our society.

My mother was the opposite, an absorber of retarded Oprahian ideals of "the power of love"; unpragmatic, a force unto itself, deluded self-esteem boosting, a dereliction of reason and sense, an unhinged maternality unleashed in a world where true femininity is regarded as an unrestrained raw female emotion.

My parents owned a business which propelled them to financial comfort and then compensated their and our lifestyles consequently, soaking in the consumer, status worshiping lifestyle as a part of themselves, their being.
But then, the whole facade of prosperity came crashing down. Borrowing to pay for new cars, profit diminishing, lifestyle downsizing, and eventually going bankrupt once the house of cards collapses in a new, failed venture. The status driven neo-yuppie Baby Boomer who faces this massive shock to their ego and lifestyle will do one of two things: Break down and disintegrate (father), or take the blows, slow down, and eventually learn and adapt (mother). Either way, once you have that lifestyle, more than likely you will continue to submit to that religion. Especially when you lose it.

Things got worse, I got into a serious fight with the old man, who followed suit by calling the police on me to get me arrested and nearly put in jail, kicked out of home at seventeen without any world-weariness, money and few friends to turn to. A dozen or so separations and re-unions later, my mother followed suit, and slowly rebuilt her life, getting a cushy government job. My old man is the same place he's been for the last five years; unstable, unemployed and a perennial victim.

A few miscarriages later, my sister eventually had a baby with her boyfriend, and then, following suit of my parents, split up and re-united a couple times, only to settle at shared custody in the end. If anyone is holding out any hope for Generation Z, you won't find any optimism from me, the coddling, placating and self-absorptive tendencies of our generation's single mothers leaves much to be desired.

In a sense, my family history is more or less a representation of what plenty of the Young White Male of our times has to face, largely. It may not be as up and down and unstable (or it may be plenty worse), but the trend is consistent: a family with a detached or/and weak father, and an overbearing, over-represented mother, whom society embues with the "You go grrrl" idealism of post-feminist doctrine, all contributing to create an individual disconnected from his world, but on fire inside.