America's latest tragic generation is enough to make you weep. Forget those lucky sods who, in their 20s, were blessed with facing the 1930s' Depression: the golden age of mass unemployment. Forget the charmed generation packed off to adventure, to a Doors' soundtrack, in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. Forget the young adult black males of every ghetto and every generation who face the thrilling challenges of imprisonment and early death. A darker plague bedevils today's twentysomethings.
After all, what's mere destitution, despair, dismemberment, disease, hunger or the prospect of violent death in your 20s beside the current plague of pitiless ... whisper it ... ennui? Life is cruel indeed. Young adult Americans, particularly graduates, are tormented by that unspeakable tyrant: success. Bored and embittered by success - too much education, too many jobs, too much money - the first tragic generation of the 21st century knows suffering of a kind those whingers in the trenches of the first World War could scarcely imagine.
Such abject misery ... and we know it's true because America's empress of dysfunction media, Oprah Winfrey, has said so. "Disconnected is the code word for this generation," said Oprah. (No, I don't know what it means either but I presume she is suggesting that "disconnected" describes, in some way, the tragic generation in question.) Heart-breaking, isn't it? Maybe schoolkids in wonderfully unsuccessful countries could collect stamps and silver paper like we used to do for the black babies.
Still, at least some form of domestic help is at hand for the 39 million Americans in their 20s. It comes in the form of the latest self-help paperback - Quarterlife Crisis: the unique challenges of life in your twenties. Written by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner, a pair of successful twentysomethings, they describe their book as an exposΘ of an "epidemic" of ennui among young, middle-class Americans. Clearly, the agony of coming of age at a time of full employment is both contagious and excruciating.
"The transition to the real world has never been tougher," Robbins assured Winfrey while a studio audience of "disconnecteds" nodded, mumbled and applauded in agreement. How Robbins or her audience could know, seeing as, like everybody else (apart, of course, from film stars, telly totties and dee-jays) their 20s occur only once in their lives, doesn't seem to have occurred to them. The darkest age is now. (There's also the question of the "real world" - like life is unreal for infants, children, students, retirees, geriatrics - everybody without a job? No wonder this crowd are depressed, if nothing other than work is "real".) Anyway, Quarterlife Crisis, brave beyond measure, reveals the full horror.
"Some twentysomethings," it says, "worry that the knowledge that they can leave their jobs at any time and still get another one might be something they could take advantage of - and raise their standards too high in the process." Chilling, eh? Spoiled for choice and forgotten too - nobody's building a Vietnam War-style memorial monument to the generation blighted by success. A good thing that Quarterlife Crisis maintains a website offering "all the resources you need to get a life".
Mind you, surfing the net in search of a life suggests a certain desperation. It also suggests confusion between the idea of a "life" and a "lifestyle". Older Americans, who clearly don't understand, have greeted Quarterlife Crisis with hilarity and scorn. But most alarmingly, a media culture which thrives on hyped trauma, real and imagined, has reacted with understanding nods and a bizarre reverence. Sure, the book is not the first example of nonsense as a bestseller, but its sheer narcissism tells us much about this age: if you want to get a life, get a crisis.
Nobody, so far as I know, has suggested that inserting a new period of crisis between adolescence and the traditional mid-life crisis is primarily a marketing ploy. However, with almost 40 million Americans in their 20s, it would, no doubt, be a publishing oversight not to offer them their own crisis. In the same way that pop music has looted children's pockets by offering them manufactured boy and girl bands, publishers have manufactured a market for ennui-struck twentysomethings.
Of course, if the ennui were genuine, those allegedly struck by it would have little or no interest in reading the book by Robbins and Wilner. It would be treated with the uninterest it claims characterises the generation it addresses. Instead, however, marketing, with the aid of Oprah Winfrey and a media culture which manufactures trauma, has assaulted a generation by pretending to speak for it. Even worse, the cynicism of this assault is such that it is one of the forces Quarterlife Crisis pretends it is exposing.
What is most alarming about the nonsense is the sense of totalitarianism it evokes. OK, whingeing wealthy twentysomethings are deeply unattractive in their own right even if, in fairness, the early years of work and career-building can be uniquely obnoxious. But if young Americans are unable to see that the existence of Quarterlife Crisis is part of the problem and not the solution, the rot will continue. Strains of the myopia will infest Ireland too where, not too long ago, a "jobs' crisis" meant a shortage not a surplus of opportunity.
Although "crisis" is a vile abuse of language to describe the condition afflicting the American twentysomethings, it might, albeit with prudent reservations, be argued that they are in the foothills of disillusionment with a corporatised world. The Himalayan peaks of such disillusion are the anti-capitalism protests which greet meetings of the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. Not that young graduates paralysed with ennui could be bothered with all that.
But when a system can profitably market routine disenchantment as a "crisis", it's clear that the hype and lies which underpin advertising increasingly underpin living itself. "Advertising," Ralph Butler has asserted in its defence, "promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status". Forgetting, for the moment, the obscenity of that "divine discontent" (advertising destroys adjectives anyway) what kind of discontent does it promote when people don't need to improve their economic status? Insatiable to the core, it seems it encourages psychic plunder when material needs are met.
"History will see advertising as one of the great evils of our time," said Malcolm Muggeridge. "It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that." It's true. In targeting a particular age group, Quarterlife Crisis is exploitative. In massaging narcissism and glorifying it with the term "crisis", it is dangerous junk.
What next? A Oneeighthlife Crisis aimed at 10-year-olds? Don't bet against it.
It's sad that marketing has so ravenously undermined the concept of self-help. Some self-help groups, most notably the well-established ones focused on addictions to drink, drugs and gambling, have genuinely helped many people. But the promotion of non-existent "crises" undermines the valuable ones as well as the airheaded junk, exemplified by Quarterlife Crisis. Then again, it's always been inevitable that marketing would exploit human vulnerability, in whatever form it manifests itself.
In consumer culture, it's true that people always have and always will need products to survive. Fair enough, but it's increasingly true that products need people to survive. So, supply and demand is manipulated to shift rubbish and we live with that. But stimulating people's desire for possessions is different in kind to filling their heads with cod-psychology and vacuous anecdotes. Robbins and Wilner do not skimp on the anecdotes. In truth, they offer little else.
Here's one: Jeff, a 24-year-old from Delaware went out to buy a dog. He intended to get one that, like him, was "big and brawny". However, he ended up buying a little dog that looked at him in a cute way. "Jeff uses this experience to continuously remind himself that things don't always happen as planned," say the authors. So, continuously reminding himself that things don't always happen as planned, Jeff is allegedly better able to cope with the horrendous crisis of being 24.
Wouldn't such tripe make you feel sorry for the dog? Maybe America's graduate twentysomethings do form a tragic generation, after all. Subjected to a culture which satisfies all their material needs and a large proportion of their material desires, the cost may be a sense of meaning. Still, if they insist on seeking meaning through reading codswallop and surfing the net, it's hard to feel sympathy for them. Maybe it's generational but it seems to me that the narcissism of the likes of Friends, Ally McBeal and most things Hollywood, which today's twentysomethings were raised on, has released a contagion.
Jeff and his bored contemporaries should remind themselves that there's no such thing as a free lunch and that, in the real world, things don't ever happen as they do in Friends.
Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in your Twenties: by Alexandra Robins and Abby Wilner is published by J.P.Tarcher, at £10 in UK