Repeating patterns

Muse #198 - things repeat every generation

Credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/matryoshka-dolls-women-figurines-6159770/

Every generation thinks that they are unique. But yet, similar patterns keep repeating. The context might be different. The technology might have changed. And the techniques might have evolved. But, all the same, what one generation thinks of the previous (or next) generation often repeats in similar patterns.

This is what Douglas Coupland calls “Clique Maintenance” in his book “Generation X - Tales for an Accelerated Culture”

Clique Maintenance: The need for one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: “Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.

— Generation X - Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland

Everything changes. But yet, everything is the same. Interesting isn’t it?

Sidenote:

Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s―a generation known until then simply as twenty-somethings.

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs―"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges―peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.

Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.