Recent GCAS affiliate, Euan Bookless, shares some of his musings on the influence pop culture has on the younger generations in the west while demonstrating those connections to our existential quarter-life crises.

I recently met a young man at a party - James. He’d moved to London with his partner, who was on a career path that made sense to her. Having accepted a job three years ago, she had since been skipping up the ladder within her chosen field with all the incumbent benefits of the professional environment. An intelligent and energetic graduate (and boyfriend), James had moved with her to the capital and found a job to tide him over. When we spoke, he had progressed within his organization and yet found himself completely lost, ruminating endlessly on his quarter-life crisis.

James had drive, energy, and brains but he simply did not know where to put them. All night he lamented to me over the silent pandemic locking down millennials in offices and warehouses, shops and sites all over the world; the malaise at the heart of the quarter-life crisis; the disney-delusion. That is to say, the romantic fantasy that life’s journey is simple and clear cut; that there is an undeniable direction to it all.

I hasten to add that the use of the term Disney is not to say that the entertainment giant is alone in this discussion; it is not. Despite the shared cultural heritage that Disney has produced, the TV and film industry more broadly is the subject of criticism and a little poetic license is at play.

James, like myself and countless other millennials across the world, has grown up in the era of globalization, during the zenith of mass media and cultural export. We were raised on arguably the finest of Disney’s animated movies and came of age in the midst of the great rise of social media. Our generation has been relentlessly fed certain aspirational notions that do not translate to the lived experience of the many. The narrative that pervades all of these sources is one of success and passion and, moreover, the idea that we can each follow some sort of predestined path, grounded in our passions and made realizable by hard work.
We were surrounded in our younger years by rose-tinted stories of heroes and heroines, adventures and endeavors of devotion, and in our latter years by the unrealistic life portrayals of social media; all the while witness to the death throes of the boomer-golden-era, where jobs were a-plenty and opportunity abundant. The world was pitched to us as a place where the individual must seize their “one true passion” and turn it into their life’s story. Unfortunately, the majority of us do not have “one true passion”, one mission, unlike the protagonists of our youth. Rather, just like James, most of us are filled with existential angst as to where we are going, or where we should go, in life. According to LinkedIn, up to 75% of 25 to 33-year-olds have endured a quarter-life crisis(1). This is a startlingly high statistic, but it becomes understandable when we look at the pervasiveness of these over-simplified life narratives.

Simba just can’t wait to be King; Woody must find his way back to Andy; Mulan is destined to be a warrior; villains must be banished, damsels saved, true love’s first kiss realized. Whilst these kinds of stories are of course wonderful for children (myself included), they slowly distort our expectations of reality when presented in such a prolific manner.

This reductive narrative conditions us to see our lives and the world around us through the lens of cinematic license, creating a false notion that it should be easy to know which path to take. We need only look at how the prejudicial narratives we have been inhaling for a century have conditioned cultural bigotry to see how much power narrative messaging has on a populous.

To give three brief examples, one may look to the infamous Reefer Madness (1936) which successfully and racially associated cannabis and criminality with the African-American population; the (often not so) casual misogyny of everything from the Carry On films to Austin Powers and the structural sexism that has gone unchallenged for so long; or the complete overhaul of the horrific reality of the “conquering of the New World” in the “great” American Western and the ridiculous, wildly misguided ideas that people hold onto over, for example, Thanksgiving. Messages, subtle or otherwise, in film, TV and media, effect us and slowly soak into our conceptions of the world in which we live. In doing so, they subtly influence our ideas of self and selfhood, and breed a sense of dissatisfaction at best and complete disenfranchisement at worst, in those of us who do not recognise ourselves in the narrative.

That said, TV and film are by no means the only source of the problem. Social media - the “Disney” of our adult lives - also has a major role to play and though the problems therein are well documented, it is worth noting that a sort of existential airbrushing (nowadays prolific, as individuals promote their personal brand, journey or story) feeds into exactly the same falsity as the over-simplified narrative of TV and film. That is to say, we see only the good moments, the cherry-picked moments, the moments that fit into an existing story. All too often we do not see the rest; the struggles, the tears, the messy bits, the long nights and the self-doubt. Just as is the case with TV and film, the narrative herein is reductive and creates a sort of collective delusion that life is as simple as a timeline would have us believe.

Stepping back, it is clear there is often a message regarding a solid work-ethic present in many of these sources which is useful. Mulan, Moana, Hercules, Rocky - Disney and popular cinema more broadly is laden with narratives that glorify perseverance and vision, where the main character never gives up (often, on their dreams).

It’s true; hard work, particularly for the post-WWII-golden-era generation, is a necessity. However, the fundamental assumption precluding this message is toxic. For most of us, following our dreams would be more akin to eating LSD like jelly beans than the hero’s journey. For most of us, there is not a single, all consuming passion that overarches our lives, less still a passion that is realisable as a viable ends-meeter in a world order lurching from crisis to crisis at an ever more alarming rate.

Rather, we are far more often dumbfounded by our own aimless-ness. There are either too many or too few options to choose from, and we are rendered stationary by the choice or lack-thereof, the clock slowly ticking. The majority of us are self-conscious, embarrassed, and find ourselves wanting in comparison to the prepackaged success models of those who have already made it. Even if we were to believe that we can do anything we set our minds to, how can we know what to set our minds to or how can we devote the necessary time required to do so when living pay check to pay check? This paralysis of choice breeds anxiety in a world where aspirational boasting and virtue signalling pervade every corner of our media experience. All too often we forget that the majority of us started out at the beginning, that we are all constantly making mistakes, besot with doubt and self-consciousness.

In fact, the people who succeed are not necessarily those for whom a goal was self-evident from the beginning, rather those who tame self-inhibiting tendencies (or those too arrogant to have had to deal with them in the first place).

The truth is that believing in yourself and following your dreams, actually means conquering this paralysis. It means taking some risks that will surely expose oneself to criticism or to failure. Crucially it means, without a predetermined passion to hold on to, testing the water in multiple domains, dipping one’s toe in multiple ponds to see how they feel. It means actively searching.

As I get older, victim to the same affliction as James and innumerable millennials, I realize that potential criticism, embarrassment or even failure is a small price to pay in the attempt to pass this existential anxiety.

The narrative of our lives is not akin to its cinematic cousin - there is no arc. Life is a sprawling, meandering dirt road, full of bumps and puddles. It is often ugly and sometimes beautiful - though only in comparison. For those of us with the luxury of choice, the proverbial search remains complicated and scary, but it begins with realizing the myth with which the picture of the world is often painted and then taking a step in any direction. It could be a place, a job, a course, a sport; perhaps, it’s finally putting pen to paper and writing an article about the very reason you still haven’t written an article. The important thing is breaking the paralysis and accepting the inherent possibility of failure, knowing that you will never give up on trying. James may be lost, but it is his dependency on a compass that obscures his path.

(1) https://news.linkedin.com/2017/11/new-linkedin-research-shows-75-percent-of-25-33-year-olds-have-e

Cover photo images by Ante Hamersmit and Kin Li

The Disney Delusion and the Quarter-Life Crisis by Euan Bookless