new slang.

a moment of clarity.

words.

"So it’s always gone with the rich and powerful, and with capitalism as a whole. But in 2015, there’s a key difference. Millennials are the first generation for whom capitalism can’t promise a brighter future. The American Dream has always worked as a narrative because there’s always been someone — and preferably several prominent people — who lived it. Its allure was always that, hey, it could be you that hits the jackpot. This allowed capitalism to be narrated as meritocracy, despite the fact that the odds have always been stacked in the favor of those already winning. But in 2015, what does capitalism offer the generation that stands to inherit it? A warming planet, political instability, a mountain of debt, crumbling infrastructure, and an abiding sense that their parents’ generation has already had the best of everything. What’s the point of having a fancy house in Los Angeles if you can’t water the lawn?

There’s a growing and ever-more-visible divide between the world capitalism wants us to think we live in and the one we do live in. Politicians continue to lecture us on hard work as a virtue, despite the fact that an economy centered around work becomes ever less viable and more unnecessary as the population grows but the work necessary to sustain it decreases.

...in 2015, we went about our business in the Potemkin village of capitalism, and we did our best to carry on as if nothing was wrong, and if that‘s not the height of absurdity, then what is? We lived with a sort of latent, low-level despair over our chances of ever changing that system, at least until it had sailed itself — and everyone who whose lives depended on it — into the rocks..."

FLAVORWIRE: 2015 in Culture: Pounded in the Butt by Late Capitalist Absurdism