langoliers coming to eat our computers nom nom nom
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With the Langoliers story (popular from the 1995 miniseries), had a feeling Stephen King was writing about what it feels like when you turn 40 and your reality appears to drift and decay (the past to be eaten by Langoliers), because a younger generation is now defining the mainstream; they are now the iconoclasts.
And yup, I looked it up, he was 41 at the time of writing. His personal notes about the story betray nothing of course; but true artists never admit to anything.
@lritter also it’s not clear he has much control over his own subtexts
@regehr@mastodon.social @lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place It's honestly unclear to me whether King has any idea what he's doing. Not in the sense he's a bad writer - by any metric I can think of that would be a stupid claim to make. But in the sense that he always gives the impression of not really understanding what's going on in his own writing process. That said: many, many people have found his book on writing helpful and I've never been published so...
And if generational theory still holds (although recently I have my doubts), then how we deal with this is very much subject to when we were born.
Gen x would simply resignate because it's the most realistic thing to do: if you can't beat 'em...
Millennials however, according to prophecy¹, would fight for control by presenting itself as youthful. Their How Do You Do Fellow Kids mimicry would actually work. Up to a point.
¹) Strauss & Howe, "Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation"
The issue with Strauss & Howe is that they could describe the future only in terms of the past they were observing, so they read conservative; and they made things considerably more difficult by exposing and intervening.
I keep wondering if their cyclical time model has collapsed to a point and everything is now happening at the same time.
Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis, High; Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist - you can now be of any archetype, live in any of the four periods simultaneously.
@lritter i think it worked because every generation experienced the same events and history timeline ...but now that changed imho
