Definitions For An Accelerated Culture

Lifted without permission from Generation X by Douglas Coupland.
You are encouraged to get your own hardcopy from your local bookstore.

Definition X

McJob:

A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Poverty Jet Set:

A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties.

Historical Underdosing:

To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

Historical Overdosing:

To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

Historical Slumming:

The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages--locations were time appears to have been frozen many years back--so as to experience relief when one returns back to " the present."

Brazilification:

The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Vaccinated Time Travel:

To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Decade Blending:

In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decaeds to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1790s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).

Veal-Fattening Pen:

Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

Emotional Ketchup Burst:

The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst fort all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends--most of whom thought things were fine.

Bleeding Ponytail:

An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days.

Boomer Envy:

Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate deaths.

Clique Maintenance:

The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: " Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain."

Consensus Terrorism:

The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

Sick Building Migration:

The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome.

Recurving:

Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

Ozmosis:

The inability of one's job to live up to one's self-image.

Power Mist:

The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Overboarding:

Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrealted to one's previous life interestes; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs....

Earth Tones:

A youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking humor.

Ethnomagnetism:

The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: " You wouldn't understand it there, mother--they hug where I live now.

Mid-Twenties Breakdown:

A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Successophobia:

The fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to.

Safety Net-ism

The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

Divorce Assumption:

A form of Safety Net-ism, thebelief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.

Ant-Sabbatical:

A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

Legislated Nostalgia:

To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess: " How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?"

Now denial:

To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is tha past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.

Bambification:

The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

Disease For Kisses (Hyperkarma):

A deeply rooted beleif that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

Spectacularism:

A fascination with extreme situations.

Lessness:

A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: " I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho."

Status Substitution:

Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: " Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW."

Survivulousness:

The tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth. " I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell."

Platonic Shadow:

A nonsexual friendship with a member of the opposite sex.

Mental Ground Zero:

The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently a shopping mall.

Cult Of Aloneness

The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

Celebrity Schadenfreude:

Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths.

The Emperor's New Mall:

The popular notion that shopping malls exist on the insides only and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that the large, cement block thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.

Poorchondria

Hypochondria derived from not having medical insurance.

Personal Tabu:

A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one toope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums.

Architectural Indigestion:

The almost obsessive need to live in a 'cool' architectual environment. Frequently related objects of fetish include framed black-and-white art photography (Diane Arbus a favorite); simplistic pine furniture; matte black high-tech items such as TVs, stereos, and telephones; low-wattage ambient lighting; a lamp, chair, or table that alludes to the 1950s; cut flowers with complex names.

Japanese Minimalism:

The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people.

Bread And Circuits:

The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny--no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues, and in many cases dangerous.

Voter's Block:

The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

Armanism:

After Giorgio Armoani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless and (more importantly) controlled ethos of Italian culture. Like Japanese Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control.

Poor Buoyancy:

The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

Musical Hairsplitting:

The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: " The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska."

101-ism:

The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.

Yuppie Wannabe's:

An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drings.

Ultra Short Term Nostalgia:

Homesickness for the extremely recent past: " God, things seemed so much better in the world last week."

Rebellion Postponement:

The tendency in one's youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes.

Conspicuous Minimalism:

A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The nonownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.

Cafe Minimalism:

To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practive any of its tenets.

O'propriation:

The inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and/or comic effect: " Kathleen's Favorite Dead Celebrity party was tons o' fun" or " Dave really thinks of himself as a zany, nutty, wacky, and madcap guy, doesn't he?"

Air Family:

Describes the false sense of community experienced among coworkers in an office environment.

Squirming:

Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures. Karen died a thousand deaths as her father made a big show of tasting a recently manufactured bottle of wine before allowing it to be poured as the family sat in Steak Hut.

Recreational Slumming:

The practice of participating in recreational activities of a class one perceives as lower than one's own: " Karen! Donald! Let's go bowling tonight! And don't worry about shoes...apparently you can rent them."

Conversational Slumming:

The self conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor. A major spin-off activity of Recreational Slumming.

Occupational Slumming:

Taking a job well beneath one's skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and.or avoiding possible failure in one's true occupation.

" Sometimes I have a real problem remembering if a celebrity is dead or not. But then I realize it doesn't really matter."

-Dagmar Bellinghausen