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I’m sick of hearing about generation Y. There’s a hand-me-down attitude in the name, an implied dismissal of everything that our generation has worked for in the past twenty-three years. We’re not a generation defined by our love for technology, for video games, for cable television and fourth-graders that curse like sailors (and almost as much as we did in fourth grade). We’re not defined as the generation that sends everyone to college, or the generation that has skyrocketing rates of depression. We’re the generation that, simply, came after Generation X. It’s as if our older slacker brother finally got a job and handed down all his old T-shirts. And that’s some fucking bullshit.

Let’s face it: if you were born after 1980, and if you’re reading this you’re probably my friend and therefore born after 1980, you’re getting shit on. You’re besieged by the siren calls of MTV and TRL. You’re constantly swimming in a sea of advertising, mostly dedicated to your demographic, mostly selling sex with hotter women than we will ever meet and the joys of getting drunk on new, classier malt liquor. You’re being forced to watch prodigies like LeBron James and Alicia Keyes and Conor Oberst found at an ever younger age, making you feel old at twenty. And on top of all this, you don’t even have a proper name for your generation.

In the mid 1990s, right as Gen-Y started to pick up speed, there were a couple of other terms that were flying around. There was the Nintendo generation, raised on Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog. There was the Internet Generation, which was a pretty good fit. We grew up with the internet; it hit maturity right around the time we were discovering we now had hair in our nether-regions and our voices were cracking. It even went through a crazy high-school love affair with the kindly gentleman from New York, Wall Street. But then snowball.com decided to appropriate it for it’s advertising–THE DESTINATION FOR THE INTERNET GENERATION–and it slowly went out of favor. Not to mention that it abbreviates to the iGeneration, which makes it seem like all of us were invented by Steve Jobs.

Still, how’d we end up with such a derivative, boring name like Gen-Y? Laziness, I guess. Without a Dennis Coupland to come up with a catchy title, and the other titles focusing on just a tiny aspect of our personalities, magazine writers and editors fell into a rut and did the easy thing. After all, Generation X used to be called the post-boomers, which was even an even more boring and condescending title–they were the “after” generation. But there seems to be a greater acceptance of Generation Y on the part of the kids, at least until they start to think about it and realize what’s going on. And there’s also the problem of how we behave, and whether there’s a big difference between us and those who have come before.

Do we have ideas? Is there a philosophy forming in college dorms and student ghettos that’s noticably different from ten years ago? I’d have to say yes. For one thing, there’s much less of Coupland’s knee-jerk irony, and a huge rise in tasteless jokes. (Why’d the baby stop crying? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) But that’s not really a sign of difference, more an evolution. But what is different is the way upward mobility has become the new religion of America, followed by most people exactly the same way Catholics treat their beliefs. Instead of getting baptized, going to confession, receiving Communion and being confirmed, all without any real sense of what the religion is about, the new sacraments are: doing well in high school, taking a Kaplan course to beat the SATs, going to a good college and coming out with a high-paying job. Why are we doing this? Because it’s what we have to do in order to survive, just like Catholicism is what I’m supposed to do in order to get eternal life in heaven.

This same, godless, assembly-line approach to life gives yield to the other thing we do, which is find something, anything to believe in. The number of niches that have been created just so that we can be part of something bigger than ourselves is absurd. There are: frat boys, sorority girls, indie kids, fundies, neo-hippies (pot and adderall!), goths, politicos, and any number of smaller subcultures that don’t have easily assigned names. If something’s got potential, people will latch on to it. Look at the Dean movement online, or the Draft Clark thing, and you realize that people are putting their faith in someone, devoting huge amounts of time to him, purely because other people have already put their faith in him. Anything that makes life a little more enjoyable, that could make things improve even the tiniest bit, is worth the effort.

But the defining aspect of our generation is the growing sense that we’re screwed, and the other two behaviors are intimately tied into to this. There’s our ever-increasing dependence on technology, to the point where an internet virus causes huge financial losses and a power outage shuts down an entire quadrant of the country. (People: the New York blackout might have been the biggest blackout ever, but a hundred years ago there were no blackouts. (Because there was no power. Shut up.)) There’s the extremely short-sighted policies of the Current Administration, and even those who think Bush is God are a little worried about their future. There’s the ever-greedier behaviors of corporations; people who unironically wear advertising on their T-Shirts because they just don’t know any better. There’s the dawning realization that corporations do not have our best interests at heart, and the frightening on that there’s not much we can do about it. You see it in the eyes of everyone–no matter who you talk to, they’re spooked about what comes next. Another huge attack? Not being able to find a job after graduation? Robots taking over our economy within twenty years? (That one’s a stretch.) Even fundamentalism is a way of coping with the modern world–having an omniscient, omnipotent Other in control of everything slows the world down, gives everything some meaning. It’s a fight against science, and science is a fight against mysticism, and the battle lines have been drawn.

We’re fucked. The whole damn generation is the Fucked Generation. No one’s really been willing to come out and say it, and so we’re generation Y: the bastard sons of that bitch Generation X. Striding purposefully forward with no real destination, fake family units smiling brightly into a future clouded by fog and microprocessors and RFIDs, grinning in the face of total destruction. This is who we are. Say it loud. Say it proud. Give yourselves a new identity–not one that’s derived as a matter of after whom we were born, but one that’s a function of what we are. Force it into the national discourse; make the Times and the New Yorker bleep out our name. Make the people understand we don’t like what’s going on, and we’re just about ready to start making some changes. Because if we don’t, it doesn’t mean we’re any less fucked. It just means we’ll be sitting around asking, “Y us?”

So here’s the thing about Chuck Klosterman’s new book: he’s stolen almost every idea I had for when I published my first in two, three, or ten years. Romantic love as a Hollywood concept? Yeah, I’d thought of that. The importance of Saved by the Bell to a certain generation of young people? Yeah, I’d gotten that too. The NBA as the only sport that matters? Check. Presenting the table of contents as a CD track listing? That was my ace in the hole.

What I’m getting at is that I should be pissed off, or offended, or something, since I’ve now been beaten to the punch on just about everything I had to contribute to popular culture. Surprisingly, though, I’m not. Because Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is not only better written than I could manage at this point, it’s also probably more insightful than I ever get. And, oh yeah, he’s an editor at Spin and I run a tiny-ass mezine.

So here’s a quick briefing on what “cultural criticism” is: it’s a way for guys who are too obsessed with Pop Culture (capitals are necessary) and know it to turn things around, rationalize their behavior. It’s okay that Klosterman has watched nearly every episode of The Real World three times, identifying with the protagonists like close friends, because he’s smart enough to realize that this is dumb. He’s also smart enough to argue that everyone’s been affected by the quintessential reality program to some degree (at least, those of us of a certain age), resulting in a lot of people who are, for all purposes, one-dimensional. You’ve got your guys who are party animals, the folks who are quiet intellectuals, the folks who are screamingly ignorant, and your Pucks. He points out that as the producers realized that boiling down the roommates to their defining characteristic equaled drama, the MTV-watching populace did essentially the same thing.

And so it goes for a wide range of topics: why soccer is a loser sport (it’s for those kids who aren’t good at anything else, because you can’t be bad at soccer); how the “downer ending” of Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back: Non-Special Edition led to slacker culture and a stoned Winona Ryder singing “My Sharona” in a gas station; how children’s cereal ads lay the groundwork for hipsters and other elite groups in college and beyond; the strange, Rapture-oriented world of Evangelical Christians.

There is a problem with this approach, though, and that’s that it tends to solipsism, a definition of which is handily included among the epigrams at the start of the book. Almost all of these essays are directly from Chuck’s mind; there are not a lot of external sources that he quotes other than his friends and associates (though there are many hilarious footnotes regardless). The best essay in the book is, hands down, “Appetite for Replication,” in which he goes on a road trip with a Guns & Roses cover band called Paradise City; he gets a lot out of the descriptions of the band members, how they react to others on their tour. It’s not surprising that this is one of the two essays that appeared in magazines first. Everything else is new to this book, and it suffers somewhat because of this.

Even then, he stumbles on some cultural news that’s pretty revealing. In an essay about The Sims, that game where we try to remake our lives as much as possible on a computer, he writes this about his seven-year-old cousin, Katie, as she tells him to ignore the backstory of his Sim:

“It was uncharacteristic for Kate to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. . . . [But] in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception.”

It’s a pretty damning account of the effect computers have on kids imaginations, and it’s no less powerful because Klosterman stuck with someone he knew pretty intimately to write about.

But I guess the beef I’m getting at is that the book never really comes together as an argument. It’s great that he details all these things about how we are and how we behave in such a highly connected, corporate driven world (though he does, strangely, omit chat rooms and instant messaging and the web except for a brief chapter on porn–at last, something original to contribute!). He says at the beginning that everything is connected, even if nothing matters on it’s own. But the problem is that he doesn’t really write about these connections. He doesn’t talk about how The Sims is connected to internet voyeurism, or how the characters can emerge as one-dimensional as the characters on The Real World (and how can you miss that, when half the Sims Family Album pages are wanna-be Kristof’s directing The Real World LCXI: Bobby’s Computer?). He doesn’t draw parallels between Saved by the Bell and the cereal commercials, even though they were presumably shown in between one another. If you’re going to have an essay titled “George Will vs. Nick Hornby,” and have it be about baseball and soccer, don’t you at least owe it to yourself to reference how Nick Hornby added to the previously mentioned John Cusack Experience mentioned in the first essay, “This Is Emo”? Klosterman has all the pieces there, but he never really puts them together. Maybe that’s what he intended, though. I’m sure that he’d say this is exactly what our lives are like today.