Dating : A Generation Obsessed With Clout

Conversations over Coffee with Renato, a good gay who shows up to brunch at 12.

Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection . . . Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others’ money. . . . These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846)

Written 173 years ago and it still holds up. Read that quote again, but this time replace the word money with social media followers. Do that and you get the 2019 version of Kierkegaard’s critique on modernity.

Kierkegaard is my favorite philosopher for many reasons with his seminal piece, The Present Age, being the main one. It shows how far, or how little for that matter, society has come when it pertains to the empty nothing that is the reflection.

Arcade Fire even wrote a song about it.

Shallow virtues are bad in any form they come in, I guess. But maybe my generation and the ones to follow are getting dumber. People are always going to be obsessed with money, my peers and I included.

But it seems that Millenials and Gen Z’ers have a stronger predilection for validation in the form of followers, likes, shares, and retweets over the unbridled pursuit of money and wealth. Neither is good but one is better.

We are attention whores.

That is what makes us dumber than previous generations. We’re not worse. In the aggregate, we espouse equality and love unlike any group of people before. We have a lot going for us.

But we are dumb. If you think a social media presence yields a higher return on investment or has a practical application that far exceeds the pursuit of money and wealth… guess what? You’re dumb.

I don’t think Renato is dumb. He doesn’t like people who do things for the wrong reasons. He wants a career in fashion and has quickly learned that there are as many self-serving “entrepreneurs” as there are passionate ones.

An introvert, he likes to go at things alone. Big groups, playing up to a crowd and pretending to be something he’s not doesn’t appeal. Granted, we all probably think that about ourselves.

But all of us at one point or another pretended to be something we weren’t. If you don’t think so, that’s because you’re full of shit. Take a shower, you smell bad.