what is the appeal of youth? why do we believe, or want to believe, that we are young? we're often confused by that. some of us don't even have sth like an defined age. but anyway, that's not the point. the point is the experienced quality of youth, or why we believe to be connected to it, even if only orthogonally or diagonally. what does all this mean?
teenage years are mostly connected, in our general imagination, to school and sex, of which we only really know much about school in these years. the reason they are tied to these years, is that many other things are often connected to other "ages", even if they're present in teenagers; they then appear partly as kids playing together, partly almost as adults taking on jobs etc, but only as students as as exploring sexuality they seem "youthly", even to themselves. so it's not that surprising those are the main things tied to the _imagination_ of youth, but they also are, relatively speaking, the things most absent / strange at that point. imagination of youth has almost nothing to do with that age, esp. with internal priorities. so it's interesting to think about what _teenage alters_ are, if they're tied to the image of youth or to a time of experiencing things.
I think it's actually sth else, it's much more connected to the whole attitude towards life, a simpler, more obvious attitude, but one also colored by a clear avoidance of naivité. a certain form of cynicism if you want, but without the typical cynic's depression of adult cynicism, a matter of fact attitude without the drive for exactness and certainty. it's this weird connection of detachment and fun that we want to think about here; what has it actually to do with these factors, with the body and society, and how is it different for a less unified mind in a less clearly behaving body?
I think the actual difference between teenagers and everyone else is that for them, shit is actually happening, more than usually; they are not "settled" (like the stereotypical adult) but they are also not constantly pushed around anymore (like the stereotypical child). That also explains the common topics; the bond between school and sex is trauma. In some sense, trauma is the stereotypical teenage emotion. That's why you have all these weird kind of rebellions; emos are just more self-conscious, albeit annoyingly so, about that. But still, I think that doesn't quite capture it. It's not the trauma itself, it's the attitude towards that trauma that seperates it from the other experiences.
We think this attitude can be best understood in the tension of two failed projects, that embody the powers in that kind of attitude, as well as the way it can be failed, and that can be called, not quite adequately, but not really much better, the project of authenticity and self-searching on the one side, and the project of edginess, snarkiness and dark humor on the other. In between them, there is a certain kind of attitude towards the world, a not-giving-a-fuck but without the theoretical despair of abstract nihilism, that needs to be further explored.
The important thing to understand is, that although edginess and authenticity seem opposed to each other, they are both a kind of disregard: a disregard for expectation, or for seriousness. The reason they oppose each other today more and more, is that they evolved from that and now mean very different things. "Edginess" moved from a challenge to self-serious adults by making fun of their idea of being a serious person, to outright vitriol that cannot be fun anymore; and "authenticity" changed from the idea of doing what you want without caring for what other people expected of you, to a kind of norm for "profiles" to at the same time be perfect but also truthful, and to lie to oneself as much as to anyone else. In other words, they both failed. But their spirit, their basic not-giving-a-fuck, did not, as it was more abandoned than overturned.
When we look at todays teenage movement, which are much more political than they were in our teenage years (in the 2010s), we still see a part of that; an attempt of disregarding the rest of the world, of society, of just doing stuff, but this time not to have fun or to find a self, but to build a different society, at least for that part of the current movements. So in a way that is connected to that experience. But it's also very different, in that before a main feature was also not giving a fuck about other people of the same age, whereas here a lot of movements are way more collectivist. It's a bit more honest than collective individualism, but it also abandons the promise of the self.
If the self is lost in media profiles, what is "authentic" about them? Maybe Ipa is right in that, that we can't truly find the authenticity of an abstract "self"; but we can find what we want, right? And it seems to us that trying to regulate that by society, even a smaller copy of society we want to create ourselves, by always trying to "validate" that, is not in keeping with the spirit of the disregard, of actually not giving a fuck. What do we do then? Pretending as if the old idea of independence worked out perfectly is certainly no option, but we don't just want to drop it and formalize peer pressure as a great new social force of "accoutability" either. Being an outcast is also kinda our position anyway; we can't just take that away from the way we looked at the specific kind of disregard we had, both in not giving a fuck about the not-giving-a-fuck of the others, that didn't give a fuck about me, as well as being envious of that, of having to give a fuck about those that really didn't give a fuck about me and my limits, as we couldn't afford such recklessness ourselves - this constant fighting between saying we don't care about their strange social groups and then still not having the same kind of aloofness we had about them about the world, as they had. But still - there is a kind of triumphalism in all of that - of still being there, and of all of this being still really funny, in all of its absurdity. This kind of unmitigated _fun of absurdity_, a gloomless chaos, is what we have for ourself most of all to reclaim. But also, we need to find what prevents us such fun later on, such connection to the abyss of our life as play.
The main thing this kind of fun is opposed to is boredom, but more specifically stiffness. Like, the way in which adults tie themselves to an "everyday life", to routine, and to all that's connected to that. It's not that rituals can't be fun too, but the idea having everything ritualized and figured out is in our view just not fun at all, it's too easy, too self-assured that it would work out. When really, it's more like a clutch than anything else. the main problem here is also not that usual things often happen, but the overidentification with them. Yes, there is such a thing as an "everyday life"; but that's not interesting, and defining ourselves by that makes us seem so boring to ourselves, so uninterested in what we actually can do. What's interesting is what changes, what we can actually do that we couldn't before or didn't dare. Grown-up stiffness is the attitude of believing either that things don't change or shouldn't change, or that it just doesn't matter. It's the conceit of nostalgia, of thinking of "the youth" as this period of time that will never repeat itself, except that they actually want to constantly repeat it, and so their whole life becomes a farce. They look back at "youth" as a list of reckless decisions because they're so reckfull to find their own biography interesting.
But honestly, youth is mostly defined also by not giving a fuck to what it is opposed to. It is not trying to be more adult-like, it's not chasing some essence lost long ago, it's non of the typical "self-finding" nonsense that is often associated with these words. The only reason I have to spell this out is because so many adults talk about this stuff, and taint it with their grown-up stiffness of trying to find their right routine and biography, when that just doesn't matter. What matters is what I can do, how I can live, and what could be fun about that. And that's why the connection to the body is so important: not just because it changes, but because it is an expression of possibility without biography, memory or routine (except sleeping and eating maybe). Everything about the body is just a "can": I can sit down to play a game, stand up to get something or an exercise, look out the window etc. There is no "reasonability" in that, it's just there, viscerally, to the point that the "adults" thinking in their routines have to wish and discuss away this choice, this o-so-terrible freedom to actually do what we want.
I think that's also why trans people are so close to teenagers too. Not just that the body changes, but that they have an attitude to the body of a "can", as a possibility - there is a strange affinity of drag queens and existentialism in this way - one that can be put in one word: vanity. With apple and hourglass and all, but beauty too. We always liked the fact that make-up has in English a name close to death. It's not an insult at all; it is a true expression of dance. The dance of the reaper is youthfull, not stiff. The regret on the deathbed is not to have been too immoral or unsafe, but to have lived too far away from death to enjoy life. The closest thing we have to death is our body. To be close to the body is to be close to death; to the possibilities of the body, all those visceral ones. And to have fun with that is then actually just not giving a fuck about life, not by being self-destructive necessarily, but by seeing that recklessness of trying things out as the only way of being close to life; that only fooling around with life can make us not a fool in it, not completely bound to our mythology of who we are supposed to be. To be young is to be young towards death; not believing we can't end, but knowing that we will, and that we should make something of it. But not "something important" or anything like that; to search for something beyond those goals, to explore. It's simple, really: the meaning of being alive is exploring the world. That doesn't mean that this is a "meaning of life" in the sense of a better routine; precisely not. It's not the meaning of "a life" you can "get" from store-bought job descriptions; and it's not the goal set out by some god or marketing coach. It's simply what it means to actually stay alive, to go through with not killing yourself, that that means to explore what our world will become and what our place is in that. "exploring the world" really just is what is meant by "being alive", whereever we live; we don't really have much of a choice as long as we keep on living.
But all of this is pretty trite abstract descriptions. I hope you can kinda see now how we think about why we are / think a certain age, but we really rather not continue this essay before it becomes a long rambling about some kind of logic operator, like it's usually the case with Hypatias stuff. bye...