#generation why?

[thirdity]

I am teaching my students a book called The Bathroom by the Belgian experimentalist Jean-Philippe Toussaint — at least I used to think he was an experimentalist. It’s a book about a man who decides to pass most of his time in his bathroom, yet to my students this novel feels perfectly realistic; an accurate portrait of their own denuded selfhood, or, to put it neutrally, a close analogue of the undeniable boredom of urban twenty-first-century existence.

Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?"

[thirdity]

You want to be optimistic about your own generation. You want to keep pace with them and not to fear what you don’t understand. To put it another way, if you feel discomfort at the world they’re making, you want to have a good reason for it.

Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?"

[thirdity]

When a human being becomes a set of data [...] he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?"

[thirdity]

In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves.

Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?"

[thirdity]

These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?"

[uhheyitsray]

Generation Why from Conan Gray’s EP Sunset Season fanart

[chemicalvip]

DARE TO RESIST

Generation Why? Apparel

(A portion of the proceeds donated to BLM.)