The idea of "living for the weekend" is nothing new. The history of what we call "youth culture" is really just a history of young people being unable to reconcile their day-to-day lives with their social lives, finding solace in the tribal rites of a Saturday night and workless mornings rather than careers, kids, whatever. A search for a brief few years of drug-taking, shame-walking, clan-fighting, shyt-talking "otherness" before we finally become our own parents, whether we fukking like it or not.
Do you spend the first four days of your week scrolling through the Sport Bible Facebook page or waiting for Twitter to kick off about the latest moral catastrophe, nursing obscure chest pains, desperately awaiting that moment where the clock turns 5 or 6 or 6:30 so you can hit the nearest bar and throw a load of shyt you wouldn't de-ice your car windows with down your scarred, collapsing airways? Your sense of disillusion is not unique. The only thing that's different about it is the Facebook part. Boundless indulgence is a decades-old problem, an inescapable part of the late-capitalist condition, a symptom of the endless, warless, nothingness of modern life.
You'll find similar feelings expressed in cultural artifacts as revered and ubiquitous asSaturday Night Fever, Quadrophenia, and Bright Lights, Big City. You and your friends might feel like Young Soul Rebels, finding a higher truth through your boundless hedonism, but in actuality you're just shadowboxing your way through an increasingly unambitious cliche. You don't have to be the Christiane F. of your school year group to be a wreckhead now. Even the kids who read Redwall books in the library at lunch get it. These days, it's more transgressive to abstain than to overindulge.
Photo above by Jake Lewis
The concept of the teenager is now in its sixties and it's starting to look dated. Where once giving in to those idiot urges that arrive on Friday night was recognized as an essential, natural phase that young people just went through—a kind of existential pubescence that would be rinsed out of their systems once their hangovers started to last days rather than hours—it feels like people today are forgetting to do the moving on part.
It's no longer just teenagers and students who seem to be running away from real life. It's people in their twenties and thirties, too—people who should really know better but don't seem to know how to do much else. Fully grown, semi-functioning adults who are unwilling to surrender those endless nights spent staring at their own harrowed reflections in club-toilet cisterns and can't find much reason to give them up, either. People like me.
This is my generation, the generation with no real incentive to grow up. No kids to feel guilty about, just jobs that let them scrape the money they need to feed, house, and wash themselves. Only the screams of their bosses and worried phone calls from their families goad them on. They're an army of First World wasters trapped in an Escher maze of immaturity.
A friend of mine told me recently that he'd read it would be impossible to make Big now, because 30-year-olds still do the kind of things teenagers do. It wouldn't be funny or shocking anymore to see a grown man buying a pinball table or wearing jeans to the office. It probably wouldn't work even if he were 40 in it.
