Anybody with two grey cells to rub together can see that there is hardly anything in the modern zeitgeist that can be considered original, innovative, enriching, insightful or definitive of the current generation. See: the media industry realizing that they don't have to put out new ideas and making nostalgia-pandering remakes that simultaneously seek to debase the original with the poisonous cultural values of today.
It's always been a topic tugging at the back of my mind. I have two threads that contribute to the current state of affairs.
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The popular narrative of America having a peaceful 90s euphoria from the perceived defeat of the Soviet Union which terminated into the post-9/11 grunge era (the "fuck Bush and Cheney" era) and later into the accelerated Roman decadence we now find ourselves in thanks to academia and the planned subprime crisis. In other words, we celebrated too fast and got complacent. It should be noted that much of popular culture as we know it is rooted in this era. I personally consider Fight Club to be the last Great American novel, despite it being the author's first work. Which leads into...
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Technology and media in itself depriving people of meaningful experiences and critical thinking. Pokemon, for example, is a franchise that financially eclipses both Marvel and Star Wars, but the creator based it off his childhood experiences collecting insects. Now think about how many children practice it as a hobby today. Less and less people are reading and literacy rates are declining; it should be noted that reading has a noticeable impact on critical thinking skills and capacity for empathy. You can also see it with creative endeavors in general; going back to the Pokemon analogy, more and more media is created with a reliance on the target reader having already consumed previous media. For example, more shows and works are based on their audiences knowing certain plot conceits and structures from other past media. Reddit Player One is one of the most blatant examples in recent memory, and it points to our current creatives lacking real-world experiences to draw inspiration from on account of consuming inferior simulcra and basing their childhood growth and values on that culture instead. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis experienced the First World War firsthand; how many creators venerated today went through a similar experience?
The screen is better than reality and the screen is owed by a small number of people that NO ONE no matter how innovative could break through.
Furthermore, there isn't anything left to create. What does any mansion on TV have that a small apartment doesn't have? Small apartments have stainless steel, dog washing stations, club media rooms, pools -- everything.
There aren't anymore things to even invent.
True. There are plenty of worthwhile ideas out there, but it's alarming how the media landscape has changed to be so derivative and "trend-based" when previously new creators were able to at the very least experiment with and propose concepts that hadn't gotten a lot of attention or provided novel insights into the human condition. (Keep in mind this applies to creative media.)
For example, here's a novel in the past decade with the conceit, "What if you could sell your remaining lifespan for money?" The actual plot is mostly a romantic setup you could see through, but the central premise provides plenty of food for thought to linger on after you've finished reading it and does not require familiarity with media consumption.
Here's a short webcomic I read recently where I didn't feel like my time was wasted by completing it. The author acknowledges there are a glut of works out there that have already covered social-credit dystopias but it was the only work this year that had me thinking about where we are at culturally. It doesn't provide a realistic solution (really, no good work that covers sociopolitical situations does), and it's not going to win any merits on technicals or writing, but it did contribute something meaningful on its own and that exceeded anything else published this year.
My writeup is mainly inspired by my own observation of the shift in creative communities within the past five years as well as online discourse.