Peter Suderman doesn’t seem at all excited about the lifestyles of the young and ridiculous and whose tone sounds, well, a bit like that of the redoubtable Fr. Jape:

It doesn’t change much from there on out: The screen-dream fantasy won’t be Garden State, but you’ll still be dressing like your college aged nieces and nephews. You probably won’t have kids, but if you do, you’ll raise them as accessories while spending all your time bitching about them on anonymous internet message boards, always status conscious, always inferior. And then someday, you’ll forget about them entirely as they sneak away to their own impossible, secretly depressing glamour fantasy in the neon sprawl of the city, hoping one day to star in a reality show of their own, and maybe date a Gen-Y yuppie who reminds them of someone from a movie.

Someone more splenetic than I might suggest that all of these abominable trends have something to do with a certain relaxed attitude towards cultural and moral authority, a worship of the self and an overvaluing of choice as a good in itself, but I, for one, am glad to welcome Mr. Suderman to the camp of so-called cultural pessimists.  After all, as every good pessimist knows, we aren’t really pessimists–we are realists.