This brilliant piece by Zoe Williams about Russell Brand powerfully captures something about the cultural environment I grew up in which I’ve always struggled to put into words:
There was a baseline assumption that we were all laughing at the same thing. This was an era in which the highest value was in not taking yourself too seriously. This reflected the economic and geopolitical context: the debt bubble that would bite us in 2007 was making everything, from flights across the world to pints in a newly liberalised licensing culture, much cheaper, and the cold war had ended. Nobody was singing pop songs about nuclear annihilation – they were singing about zig-a-zig-ah. It was a time marked by its hedonism, the casualty of which was earnestness.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/18/the-nasty-noughties-russell-brand-and-the-era-of-sadistic-tabloid-misogyny
I found this intensely alienating as a deeply earnest teenager. I almost wrote ‘pathologically earnest teenager’ and then realised how this reflex was itself an expression of that lingering alienation. Discovering Alasdair MacIntyre’s work in my early 20s led me to see this as a lack of moral seriousness, but I haven’t really thought about it since. I mostly experienced it as a feature of my own experience which began to subside as a postgraduate student, possibly simply by getting older but also I think through friendships and relationships with people who hadn’t been raised in this environment.
It’s startling to look back on this now and realise the relatively privileged character of experiencing this through an existential prism. With the fairly significant exception of rampant homophobia (which I wasn’t really able to label as a thing until much later in my life) the toxicity which that environment bred didn’t impinge on my experience, only the incongruity between my developing character and the environment I was in. But my god does that toxicity seem obvious in retrospect:
Mark Carrigan 