Our culture has been tossing around words like pretentious and emo to de-value unique works that are meant to stimulate thought or touch the soul. This is dangerous because it numbs our freedom to explore things and share the creations of our dreams. There is less innovation in the younger generation, and the passion for teaching, reaching out, and contacting people is dissipating. When this happens, a culture become artistically stagnant. You can see this happening across all the mediums; popular films and books are getting more generic (think of the overwhelming amount of re-makes and trilogies), popular music has nothing to say (is Indie really popular?), and the old mediums like painting and poetry have become virtually extinct. We are sinking into an abyss of programmed art, the type of art that advertisers use to manipulate us out of thinking for ourselves.
The decline of artistic integrity has larger implications than the decline of national and individual glory alone. As a society we are producing very few original works; it appears that both the education system and the media have bought on to this cockamamie trend of recycling the products that drive our economy, and therefore the stories that entertain us as well. It's like we're stuck in Lala land, with no sense of direction or purpose. Even more dangerous is the degradation of emotional acceptance: when a word like emotion is stripped of substance and mocked about, shortened to emo as if it were a criminal offense, you know that it is a society that rejects what it means to be human, that it rejects passion, honesty, communion, and something as universal as looking one in the eye. It’s helped us snuggle into that programmed Lala land- the internet- where we get to sit on our butts all day and watch what everyone is doing from afar, further benumbing us to the fruits of the real world.
Maybe these are just thoughts that result from a perennial outcast’s coming of age, a rejection of the mainstream parade via the maturation of a past inheritance. Granted, there is a difference between sounding whiney and emotional; but if there were such a difference, why not simply call it whiney rather than demote it to emo? And what about a word like pretentious? Everyone is pretentious. If you've thought of something, odds are someone else has too. The idea is to express something that has elements of other things yet retains its distinction by coming from the heart and not selling out. Selling out is something to truly be castigated for, but even then, there are some artists who are still able to show an extraordinary amount of talent despite catering to the bigwigs of capital entertainment.
In conclusion, there is a conspiracy that uses peer acceptance to destroy the elements of individuality and promote the evils of recurrent consumerism. Don’t buy into it. Don’t be another pill-popping clone; be yourself, and real people will love you for it.
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