I don’t care what anybody says –
the Baby Boomers ruined America. They
appropriated and then bastardized the objectivist thinking of existentialist
philosophers to say that selfishness is a virtue, and it’s all been downhill
from there. The distinction between the
rebellious liberalism of Woodstock and the excess of the Reagan Era is really
just the cynicism that naturally comes with age.
Generation X, for their part,
took Socrates one step further – if the only true knowledge exists in knowing
that you know nothing, then surely the wisest among us will make a conscious
decision to just stop caring. And Gen
X-ers were really good at not caring about stuff.
Now we Millennials are coming
into our own, and man, what a mess. The
Millennials are probably not the stupidest generation, but they seem to want to
look that way. There are countless
examples, but one of the best is milking.
A descendant of planking and Tebowing, milking is the latest in a series
of fads that involve people taking pictures of themselves doing stupid,
pointless, or nonsensical things, often at notable locations, and posting them
on the internet (presumably to show their friends and acquaintances just how
stupid, pointless, and nonsensical they know how to be).
Planking involves lying flat,
like a plank. Tebowing involves getting
down on one knee in prayer, like Tim Tebow.
Milking, naturally, involves pouring milk over your head while fully
clothed, commonly with a deadpan expression on your face. So you can see why this would be all the
rage.
One question that immediately comes
to mind is, why milk? Is there some significance to the use of
milk as opposed to any other liquid?
Evidently not, as milking is already losing ground to its more excessive
and wasteful cousin – porting, which is just milking with red wine instead of
milk. But whether some hip young moron
is insulting the dairy industry by wasting milk or ruining his shirt with a
fine red wine is beside the point. I’m much
less concerned with milking in particular and more concerned with the fact that
doing stupid things has become a fad.
Now, some would argue that it’s
circular or rhetorically unfair for me to categorize milking, planking,
Tebowing, and porting as “stupid” in order to support an attack on Millennial
culture. Ok, but by “stupid” I really
just mean worthless, pointless, uninspired, wasteful, irrational, and lacking
in any sort of creative merit whatsoever; I think “stupid” is a fair enough
shorthand for all of that.
I think that supporters of
milking (idiots, as they’re commonly known) would likely argue that milking –
like the other stupid -ing’s – is an exercise in irony, and that by not
understanding that fact I’m proving that milking is effective. After all, irony only works if some people don’t
get it. That’s a fair point in the sense
that every generation has its own unique sense of humor, which will naturally
involve redefining the concept of irony (the Baby Boomers really lucked out,
they had Steve Martin to do this for them). But just because you’re being ironic doesn’t
mean that anyone who criticizes you doesn’t get it.
If you’re a savvy milker, you’d
next argue that milking is ironic because
it’s so stupid and yet is treated as a completely serious endeavor. In other words, my argument that milking is
stupid is both completely valid and an unknowing endorsement of the act of
milking (thereby making me the real idiot, or so it would seem). Ok, now we’re getting somewhere.
The Millennial Generation’s
concept of irony apparently hinges largely upon contriving absurd situations
for no reason other than to address them with unflinching seriousness. So what’s cool about milking is that it’s a
stupid activity that’s conducted seriously, and anyone who points out how
stupid it is only bolsters its validity as an expression of whatever it’s
supposed to be an expression of. So what
is it supposed to be an expression of?
Irony is a powerful rhetorical tool, but only if it’s to accomplish some
worthwhile end. And that’s what I’m
really getting at when I say that milking is stupid. It’s deliberately stupid in an ironic sense,
but it’s deliberately stupid for no
reason in a literal sense. And that just makes it stupid.
So milking is cool, and milking is
stupid. It’s cool to be stupid. Sarah Palin knows it, Larry the Cable Guy
knows it, and the Millennial Generation knows it. Stupidity is a fad. Where the Baby Boomers decided that it’s
virtuous to live for yourself, and the Gen X-ers decided that it’s smart to not
care, the Millennials have decided that it’s cool to be dumb. And not just to be dumb, but to be proud of
how dumb you can be. So proud that
deliberately pouring milk over your own head and posting photos of it to be
viewed by everyone you know is a generally accepted means of demonstrating your
worth.
There are two basic schools of
thought on the conception of the Millennial Generation as the “Me Generation” –
the generation of individuals who think that we all want to see pictures of
what they ate for lunch, updated in real time.
The first school of thought is that technology and social media have
changed the way that people interact, and in doing so have actually changed the
social nature of people – Facebook and Twitter have actually taught us to be
self-centered. The second school of
thought is that people have always been this way, but technology and social
media have given us an ability to act on it that we never had before – Facebook
and Twitter have simply exposed us for who we’ve really been all along.
I tend to lean towards the second
school of thought. I don’t think that
the Millennials are so different or any worse than their predecessors, but they
sure are making themselves look that way.
I guess if you really dissect it, milking is a means of acknowledging
and embracing the reality that the Millennial Generation finds itself dealing
with by taking what are now accepted behavioral norms to an extreme. As Eminem put it, “I am whatever you say I
am.”
It’s human nature to give in to
your self-absorbed inclinations when you know you can get away with it. The Millennials understand that, and rather
than fighting it they’re pushing the boundaries by going beyond posting
pictures of what they did last night or what they ate for lunch. Rather than giving you details that you don’t
care about, they’re just hitting you over the head with pictures of themselves
drenched in milk for no logical reason.
In that sense, milking is a commentary on the excesses of the ego and
the role that we’ve decided to allow social media to play in our culture. It’s the Millennials saying that they
understand the absurdity of certain aspects of their own popular culture.
So maybe milking is the
Millennial Generation’s way of showing the rest of the world that they’re in on
the joke. Or maybe they’ve just realized
that anything is more interesting than a picture of what they had for
lunch. Either way, it’s still really
stupid.
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