As the last of the daylight surrenders to the encroaching twilight, the symphony of the young queuing zealously for the night’s revelries sends a shiver of nostalgia down my spine. For Ms. Bennett, a self-proclaimed ‘aging millennial anthropologist,’ this has become a near-sacral evening rite. She watches with an almost ethnographic curiosity, bemused yet engaged, dissecting the finer details of this vibrant subculture from the doorstep of her dwelling, abutting a popular concert venue. The youth — radiating the brash confidence of those who know they are at cultural ground zero — adorn themselves in attire that echoes back to a time when Ms. Bennett herself was the pulsating heart of the newest trend.
With Spotify as her guide and a fair measure of sardonic wit, Bennett endeavors to leap across this ever-widening chasm of cultural disconnect. The enigma of ‘Jayden’ — or more accurately, jxdn, as she later learns — captures the quintessence of this generational dance. Here lies a pivotal moment, strikingly encapsulated by the exchange between Bennett and a world where relevance is fleeting, typed out in alphanumeric codes known only to the digital-born demographic.
Yet this is far more than a quixotic tilt at the windmills of cool. For our protagonist, the tumult of middle age is more than fighting a youthful facade. It’s about grappling with a sense of value in a world that once courted her generation with a fervent intensity now seemingly reserved for the younger heirs to the cultural throne. Millennials were promised influence and importance; their tastes mined and valorized as they shaped trends and political landscapes. They served as digital mercenaries in a time of online renaissance, arbitrating cool with the effortless élan of those born into the technological utopia.
But as the tides of time ebb, Bennett finds herself in an era where the term ‘middle-aged’ is met with a cocktail of bewilderment and a spritz of denial, garnished with the irony that the relics of her cohort’s youth are now vintage treasures to the new guards. The expectation of life’s script, with its presumptive march towards stability, home ownership, and family life, seems to have been edited, slashed, and rewritten for many millennials who now navigate a reality where security and ownership are but lofty ideations in an ever-precarious gig economy.
As Bennett muses, maturation ostensibly gifts one a blissful apathy to the shifting sands of cultural cache, yet for her and many of her contemporaries, there’s a palpable desperation to cling to the vestiges of cool. For what is cool but the currency of the contemporary, the marker of relevance in an ever-churning sea of hashtags, memes, and virality? To relinquish such is to fade into obscurity, to concede that the world which once heralded your arrival now looks to your successors with greater enthusiasm. Entwined with professional identity, the release of cultural significance is no mere triviality but a seismic shift in self and substance.
The resignation to cultural background music is thus not Bennett’s dirge. Instead, she adopts the relentless pursuit of the now as a new vocation, learning the lexicon of the latest trends not as an act of surrender to the whims of youth but as a spirited defiance against the impending obsolescence. To stay afloat in this relentless tide isn’t a mere vanity project; it’s survival. After all, in her own words, who succumbs to insignificance without a fight when the beat of relevance still echoes within them?
