The Millennial depression of the little yellow man
Somewhere, at the heart of the cyber-world, lies the beleaguered yellow-faced man programme, twitching, unable to externalise the emptiness inside as he is forced through every emotion there is; perpetually at the mercy of every fatuous text; every asinine, attention-seeking Facebook post; every dolorous cry for help; every ‘literal-lol’ moment, as he lies on the conveyor belt in the abattoir of humanity that processes real human relational complexities into ephemeral, consumable moments.
He rolls under his promethean punishment, as he is propelled at lightning speed through an array of pubescent, superlative ‘feels’ every second of every day of every week of every month of every year… and I wonder what he did to warrant such a curse…
What psychological condition would we even find him in?
I am the little yellow man. I feel the emotions of everyone around me in extremis. I have no emotions of my own.
Vaccinations were the great victory of the last century. We wiped out smallpox. We have nearly eradicated polio. And now, in the age of narcissism we have inoculated a generation against emotion… and, insodoing, have created a contagion for depression.
Last week, Bill Maher lambasted the group of (largely millennial) Liberals who were “in a contest to call out fat-shaming” while “a mad-man talked his way into the white house”. We have a way of not seeing the wood for the trees, our generation. For how many of us was it on the local scale? While our generation competed with stylised hysteria for who had the most drama in their life, our classmate quietly went home and cut herself.
How we got here
We live, according to Andrew Fellows, in that age of narcissism. This is not, of course, a clinical diagnosis: it is a classical one. The story of Narcissus, roughly told, is that he was cursed by his long-suffering mother to know what it was like to love someone who never gave anything in return, and, because Taylor Swift wasn’t around in those days, the gods saw fit instead to curse him with self-love. He fell in love with his own reflection in a pool, and lay staring at it. When he went to kiss it, it rippled away, so he stared, with inconsolable longing, starving himself, until, emaciated, he collapsed into the pool and died. (The Greeks didn’t really do happy stories)
We have created a world of mirrors — every face is a surface for me to find something out about myself. The journey from self-centredness to self-obsession is complete. ‘You laugh so I’m funny; you frown so I’m a wretch’ has now become, ‘you smile so I’m happy; you cry and I’m brought low’.
And yet, though most of our ‘drama’ wouldn’t even be classed as such by channel 4, sometimes big things do happen — this is when the superlative instinct kicks in: As those around us experience life and drama, they threaten to become the protagonists in our story. Like Peter Pan’s wayward, attention-seeking shadow, those who were supposed to image us set off on their own narrative. So we one-up, and one-up, and one-up, ever filling with anxiety, until we lose the irony in expressing ourselves with an emoji.
We compete with one another to have felt the most, thereby rendering ourselves unable to feel anything at all — like Simon Amstell running with attempted spontaneity through the Paris streets, wondering if it will all one day make a good memory. We reflect and exaggerate, reflect and exaggerate — rendering ourselves into little yellow-faced men.
The more we try to express ourselves, the less true our expression becomes. And everything we look at, rather than shaping us, morphs instead to fit our pre-existing concept of reality.
How far have we sunk?
And where does this take our culture as a whole? In my final year of school I stumbled upon the most truly baffling and vile plaque that neither my complaints nor the finest Colgate dentists could remove, and have never been able to put it out of my mind, nearly a decade on.
The person who put up that sickening plaque was not, I hope, enamoured with the concept of women and girls, in the moral vacuum of the middle ages, having been abused in a cornmarket brothel. I presume rather that something rewired in their brain: the concepts became mirrors —
“Sex happened here; all my experience of sex is romantic; therefore this place is romantic.”
The word ‘romance’, of course, once reduced to ‘sex has happened’ may be equally applied to the love story of Cupid & Psyche as it may be scrawled in sharpie on the walls of Paisley McDonalds’ bathrooms. Yet this is the delusion borne from Narcissus. That this sign could stay up in the centre of one of the protest capitals of British universities.
Another brick in the wall
And while we paste our emojis on the outside of the door, inside, we switch off. And the more we glaze over, the more reflective our faces become.
Switching off is the ultimate way of blocking reality out. Of course, as a defence mechanism, it is built on the assumption that pain is external, and salvation is found within. Fellows also points out that The Pink Floyd album, ‘The Wall’ tells this precise story — every painful experience is ‘another brick in the wall’ as he blocks everyone out, rendering himself ‘comfortably numb’…as he begins to destroy himself.
Switching off is our insane medicine: we treat malaise with inertia, correct our apathy by just-not-caring. It’s like the great IT technician in the sky was told that we had no power, and yet still responded “Have you tried turning it off then on again?”.
We are all Narcissus now
Christopher Larsch describes narcissists as having a tendency “to be bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy, looking for emotional titillation without involvement.” And the whole Narcissus story started cus he wouldn’t call his mum —go on, tell me he’s not a millennial.
At Where Culture Goes To Die, we say that we must kill the thing we love before it kills us. Narcissus found out that extreme self-love is the epitome of unrequited love. The only trick can be to keep blinking…refocus. That’s not your reflection — its a person. They’re smiling because they’re happy, weeping because they’re mourning. If we don’t begin to relate, we’ll have destroyed ourselves.
Because hardly any of us are waving, but drowning.
We believe that we ourselves are reflections, and as with any such thing, we fade to disappearance as distance grows between image-bearers and the imager. We are Narcissus in the story — we are also the pool — in Oscar Wilde’s telling, the pool mourns Narcissus’ death because it used to be able to see it’s own reflection in Narcissus’ eyes.
In semiotics any ‘sign’ is dyadic — requiring a symbol plus a signifier. When we killed God, we thought we were killing a projection of ourselves that threatened our way of life…we may actually have simply snuffed out the origin of our echo of infinite reflections. Our faces, mirroring one another, exaggerate beyond recognition of what was once human. Until we all will look like this:
If man means something, anything at all, then we need to start looking beyond the reflection for some kind of signifier. We need to switch back on.
