Millennial Manifesto for an Upcoming World

Those of us born during the 80s and 90s, it is said, grew up under a paradigm of mostly visual stimulation. The image was and still is everything: “Video clip killed the radio star” goes to the catchy tune by The Buggles. Naturally, this led to the alert of the experts, who, under an apocalyptic rhetoric, announced the arrival of a fragmentary mentality incapable of generating deep and long-term thoughts (the old belittling the young, a tale as old as time itself, pun intended).

Videogames, video clips, anime, and Tarantino movies could be considered the four horsemen of the apocalypse: those ready to extirpate the world and psychological understanding of all its substance, to reduce neuronal connections to their minimum expression, to turn us into easily conditioned Pavlovian creatures. However, in more than one respect, such prophecies seem not to have been fulfilled but to have unfolded as the exact opposite of what they preached in the first place. Yes, it is true that, to a large extent, we resemble a bunch of overstimulated beings with less attention span than a mosquito. But couldn’t the overstimulation be a greater energetic capacity? A return to Dionysian sacredness?

As for lack of concentration (and that obscure stigmatization that turned out to be the 90s epidemic of ADHD), in most cases, it is a matter of “being everywhere and nowhere at once,” a role that may quietly grant us some reminiscence of the altered states of consciousness acquired through meditation. Overstimulation has made us immune to it, in the same way a snake becomes immune to the venom it carries within its body every day. We are all city dwellers with the brains of hyped squirrels.

We surpass the speed of light, we travel through time, and images become substance. After all, why should we fall into this arbitrariness in which only in written words is substance found? Few remember that Plato himself was worried about the propagation of books, for they would mean the undermining of oral tradition. This meant a warning to the young to only use books moderately as a secondary helping tool, perhaps. The old becoming scandalized by youngster´s behavior: a tale as old as time.

Our substance, our existential stimulus, is different from our parents’: now it is pure image. It is more colourful: We generate neon gods almost daily. We have as many gods as musicians, publicists, graphic designers, filmmakers, photographers, and so on. All of these constitute a creative act, which requires a certain potential: whatever this potential capacity is, it has been exponentiated.

Television parodies, dank memes, acid humor, and ecstatic nights in the desert allow us to lighten our inherited karmic weight. A lot of weight has been thrown at us. Still, the culture of massive information and accelerated images has given us the necessary tools to drain it, to cut with a millenary chain that has been the yoke of the human being. This has happened spontaneously; we could call it the natural course of events. What for older generations is vanity, stupidity, superficiality, and lack of “metaphysical depth” (keeping in mind that wars waged during the 20th century by the heirs of the Enlightenment, it would be necessary to analyze whether the metaphysics they used were not, at their root, corrupt), for us represents a certain redemption.

If the entire millennial and centennial population chilled with the expectations of a world not built for us but that, nonetheless, we shall inherit sooner or later, existential dread levels would decrease. The deflation of all promised to be so much more than it is would bring us a new world that is fresh, relaxed, and immune to false messiahs. Spontaneous, childlike sensitivity and intuition would break through as the new values.

If we are accused of being a childlike generation, then praise be, for this translates as VIP passes into heaven. However, heaven, understood as a separation from our natural organic life cycle, poses more dangers than blessings.

This leads me to the second part of the argument: the upcoming globalized world for the benefit of the common youth. I believe the extinguishing of any civilization has arisen from separating our lives from our deaths or expecting death as a distant event to redeem us from all the accumulating miasma. We are dying, the emptiness lies beneath us, and such an event gives us space to continue generating wild gods capable of promising only what they are at that moment. The blank space of the canvas emerges as the promise of a great work. The purge of all the tortuous elements that have been tormenting us could be considered our priority, no longer as a matter of intellectual pride but of pure survival instinct.

I will elaborate next. Human power has exponentiated to titanic levels, a third great war would end each and every one of us, or leave us in a cavernous age followed by a nuclear winter. As I mentioned, our surrender to the seemingly superfluous and childish is a metaphysical deflation. This deflation is not casual: it arises from the deepest and most visceral survival instinct. It is a “relax or die” taken to the extreme; our early exposure to images of violence has brought us to a heightened awareness of all that we can become if we are not careful. Romance is not dead, but it has entered a certain repose. This repose is waiting to end once the conditions for its resurgence are propitious. We will not poke our heads in until the last tyrant has faded away from old age and his son enjoys the radical simplicity of an afternoon eating Lays and playing Xbox with his friends.

Perhaps then our closeness will increase, our lust for destruction will be tamed, and perhaps in that peace, we will gain the confidence to, with great enterprise, bring greater life to a neon polytheism, to greater and more complex nights of euphoria, to more evident poetry in the mundane, and cold beers on a summer sunset.