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I recently watched a movie called Tokyo Story. Tokyo Story is an interesting film that I hated to watch because my brain is so rattled by social media, so I can’t watch anything with patience anymore. It is a Japanese realist film from 1958 that shows an elderly couple visiting their now adult children in the city. I saw it just today and it brought me comfort to see how both the elderly people and the younger people complained about other generations. Despite being set in a far away time and place, daily life was similar to now and days. We (my fellow zoomers) are aware of how older people tend to complain about the younger generation and we complain about the old. We are aware of both the archetype of the curmudgeonly old man who shakes his fist at clouds, and the naive teenager who complains without putting in work. These archetypes frequently exist in and are expressed by art such as music and memes.

These archetypes are a part of larger phenomena of generational angst in which we see the era, or time that we are born as being fundamentally rotten. This is fueled by both nostalgia for the future and lust for the newness of the past. This is the phenomenon of thinking that your generation is special, or fundamentally screwed. This is why I believe that we are the last generation and humanity will die out after us. I know this is unlikely, but I believe it anyway. I see our condition as a fundamentally tragic one, and I come up with reasons why our generation is cursed. Social media addiction. Earth’s heat death. The world’s heat death. The death of art by malaise. Death by hentai. The death of art by AI takeover. The death of human activity by AI takeover. The death of God 2: the sequel. Etcetera, more nihilist slogans, more excuses for not doing anything. That’s what young people do and I’m a young person so I do that.

Generational angst is not grounded in material reality, and It is simply a matter of our imagination. Obviously we have been gravely affected by social media, but I also can’t imagine a teenager from the 1960s loving Tokyo Story’s lifelike stillness either. I also cannot imagine myself finding Tokyo Story interesting if I was in the 1960s either. If I was born in 1949 I would think that Tokyo Story was simply boring, because I would not have had the gift of the internet and social media to provide me with the education that allowed me to have some appreciation of it.

Does this mean that we should commit generational angst to the flames as it is nothing but sophistry and illusion? I think before we do that we should consider how easy it is to criticize a concept and that we may be making mistakes by being so relentlessly skeptical. We would be complaining about complaining if we destroyed generational angst with facts and reason? As soon as you kill god how quickly is it replaced with something else? While being neurotically obsessed with generational angst is missguided, could generational angst be used in our favor?

Yes. Generational angst is good. It is the ultimate form of expression of one’s suffering. Generational angst is the (a) fundamental motivation of art. This is why angsty annoying pretentious teenagers are always into creative things like literature, Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, Deleuze, Rap, and Rock and Roll. The reason why so much good art is made about generational angst is because generational angst is the origin of artistic expression. Art started long ago in a cave when a young cave child covered their hands and body with colorful sand and dirt and screamed at their parents and tribe for holding them back.

Think about it. Hamlet is about a teenager complaining about things.
The odyssey's twelfth line has Homer begging the audience to “sing for our time too” Every new music genre is considered naive noise before it becomes established. My friend wrote a short story in eighth grade for school, called Ok Boomer. Creativity is built into generational angst.

Now I want to assure anyone reading this that this is not necessarily true, because generational angst can be a negative force. But it can also be an inspiring muse. I'm not certain about anything, and I have to second guess everything I say. I am so unoriginal.