I'm reading Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, and it really has me thinking a lot about my teenage years. I feel as if I grew up right on the edge of the luxury-consumer age, at least in my town--no one had cell phones or iPods, which didn't exist, even. I don't remember purses being a status thing, like they definitely are now. I can't imagine finding one girl in my affluent hometown who didn't know what a Kate Spade was, or the "status" such a purse carried. I certainly can't imagine carrying a Kate Spade in high school, but then again, I didn't even carry a purse. Just a beat-up backpack. Anyway, the point is, I definitely did not feel the consumer pressures that I feel now, or that my high school age brother must have felt (or if he did not, many of his girlfriends probably did) to consume, and to consume luxury goods.
However, in thinking about counterculture, rebellion, and conformity, I'm faced with the startling truth that I've been fed two VERY different messages since my teenage years: a) don't be conformist: (e.g. you don't need those Doc Marten's just because everyone else has them) and b) don't TRY to be different (e.g. you're just getting your nose pierced to be different). So which is it? No choice is ever without elements of one or the other. The options with the nose piercing were: conform to look like everyone else and not have the piercing, or rebel against the beauty standards that society sets forth. According to the above dichotomy, neither choice is correct, yet there's no middle ground. You can't get half a nose piercing.
I'm not certain how much this has affected me, to be honest. How can I evaluate that? I'm in a place now where (and I'm talking philosophically, abstractly, in thoughts) nothing seems authentic--no choice, no desire, no feeling--so if I have a slightly rebellious bent, who's to say where it came from? That rebellion, as the book so punishingly points out, isn't authentic, and it's not really rebellion. Rebellion = mass culture. I'm just another unoriginally rebellious person who thinks they're all radical and shit, and in the meantime, I'm buying things, buying things, buying things. Pretty convoluted, in the end.
The book, really, has only convinced me further that authenticity doesn't exist anymore. Might never again. I'm not necessarily saying that's bad, but I'm saying that's how it is. And any persona you cobble together these days is only the inauthentic pieces of what you've found around you. I am who I am, but I'm not organically this way. Does that make sense?
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