Is This "The Age of the Comedown"? Some Millennials Think So

Over at Splice
Today, millennial Nicky Smith announces that the future is only
so bright because of the likely nuclear flash that’s going to
happen before 2100. He’s responding to novelist Bret Easton Ellis’
recent Vanity Fair jeremiad against millennials as “Generation
Wuss.” Ellis is right, says Smith. “Millennials are
over-sensitive, narcissistic, unrealistic and anxious. No mystery
why: we grew up in the midst of an unprecedented end-of-the-century
party in the Western World.”

Smith
continues:

What Ellis cannot comprehend is the unspoken certainty amongst
people my age that the world will not make it to 2100. There is
just absolutely no way—climate change, earthquakes, massive
expulsions of methane, radioactive fallout, dramatic terrorist
attacks—and the human experiment is nearing its end. It’s not
pessimism, but it’s easy to forget that the Cuban Missile Crisis
was only 52 years ago next month. That’s a blip of human history,
and it only takes one loon, or a group of organized and legitimate
loons and psychopaths in positions of power to orchestrate mass
death or total annihilation. Let’s assume we all behave ourselves
and refrain from blowing or mutating everything away: there’s a
consensus in the scientific community that climate change is at too
advanced a stage to stall, and its effects will be irreversible and
make coastal cities uninhabitable very, very soon.

Ellis is 50; he’s in the September of his years. He’ll most
likely be fine, and he doesn’t have to worry about what the air in
Los Angeles will be like in 2067. When pressed, Boomers blow it off
as sophomoric fatalism and go on about the sanctity and durability
of life. They can’t help it—that was their world, their narrative.
We’re living in the Age of the Comedown, and very soon everyone
will be feeling it worse than they could’ve ever imagined.

As someone who turned 50 a year ago, I prefer to
think of Ellis as being in the June of his years (if not
late May).

But wow, what a Debbie Downer Young Goodman Smith is! Doesn’t he
read Reason.com enough to know that we not only survived the Cuban
Missile Crisis but we won the Cold War to boot (for god’s sake, the
25th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall is coming up
this fall); ISIS and assorted Islamist-themed jackasses need to be
taken out, but they’re not an existential threat to the civilized
world. 

Climate change isn’t the bugaboo he seems to think,
either. To paraphrase Reason‘s Science Correspondent
Ronald Bailey, it’s happening; humans are involved; and we’ll
figure out how to cope with anything that gets thrown our way, just
like we’ve been doing for thousands of years. The air in Los
Angeles today is vastly cleaner than it was in 1967 and there’s
absolutely no reason to believe it will be dirty again in 2067.
Indeed, the air in Bejing, which is dirtier than it was 40 years
ago due to the sort of economic production that has lifted millions
of Chinese up from subsistence, will be cleaner in 2067 than it is
now.

As the parent of millennials myself—and the
younger brother of a sibling who graduated college in the grim year
of 1981—I feel sympathy for young adults these days due to economic
malaise and looming fiscal issues. But if the past is prologue and
if the political class does the bare minimum to rein in
entitlements and the like (yes, a big if), even the
near-future will be upbeat. When I graduated college just four
years after my brother, things had already turned the corner.

While it will take a lot of effort to make sure that politicians
give in to the Libertarian Moment and start enacting the sort of
common-sense reforms to right the ship of state and allow economic
markets to get cranking again, there’s every reason to believe
things are going to be all right. For god’s sake, the Libertarian
Moment is so happening that conservative-types are
hauling out Hitler arguments to combat it. In the meantime,
Nicky Smith, take a moment to talk to your elders about how shitty
things were for them at various times back in the day.

For a different perspective on millennials, check out
Reason.com’s incredible
landing page dedicated to the subject.