Today my novel, The Lost Generation (available here), turns a year old today.
It is a dark comedy about millennials, the group of people I feel suffering the most in our so-called modern society. Politicians everywhere have fucked us with their awful “leadership,” our boomer parents fucked us by telling us our dreams can come true, employers have fucked us with poor pay and exploitative treatment, there’s no sign of any of it stopping, and we will most likely be on the receiving end of said fuckery for the rest of our lifetimes until climate change comes to foot the bill and kill us all. If you’re a millennial you should stock up on Vaseline now while you can, because it doesn’t take a genius to see things are going to continue to get worse. Inflation is going up and wages are remaining the same: it’s the usual stuff.
I don’t write any of that to complain, I’m just painting a picture about where the novel is coming from: I am a member of the least successful generation in human history currently on a downward spiral. Things are bad for so many of my contemporaries, and with climate change only getting worse every year it’s almost ridiculous that anyone younger than 35 would have any optimism left about the future. Unless we somehow make it out and miraculously become famous or something, we’re all slaves to capitalism and shitty jobs in a world in which money won’t even mean anything in 2030. Anyone with half a brain can see this is all leading to a very grim future.
So that being said: I wanted to write a novel that charts the progress of a group of young people growing up under these circumstances. How the hell did we end up in this predicament? The Lost Generation covers the period of time from 1999, when we first meet the main characters, to 2020, when covid strikes and ruins everything further than it already was. It tells our story in a way that is hopefully funny and insightful.
I didn’t write it because I expected it to sell a million copies or anything ridiculous like that. Nothing I do is for the purpose of becoming rich and popular. That would obviously be nice, because I’d love to move out of my parents’ house and get married to a nice blonde wife that looks like Farrah Fawcett in 1976. But that’s not how life works obviously. In fact, I once read that the average book in America only sells 500 copies. Most people in this society are simply too busy and overworked to read anything these days (and some are also just too plain stupid to pick up a book). Not to mention, I’m an absolute nobody and it would take a whole lot of convincing to get someone to buy a book written by someone who isn’t a “real” author like J.K. Rowling or Ottessa Moshfegh. I’m independently published, which means that nobody who is a “higher-up” published my work, I’m just some crazy guy who published it myself.
I wrote it for the purpose of self-expression and understanding why I am in the situation I am currently in. I wanted to narrativize my life in a way that is hopefully humorous. Some people get lucky, and some don’t. It’s that simple. As much as I’d like to, I don’t even blame boomers: most of them are not malicious people, they just happened to be born during the greatest economic time in history in which they got to do better than their parents and their own children. We are now paying for their sins, but it’s not any of their faults. It’s just how the dice happened to land. If I were born a boomer I might be just as selfish as they once were.
I hope The Lost Generation articulates these sentiments clearly: no one is at fault other than the obscenely powerful who do nothing to help anyone but themselves. I am proud of it and still glad I wrote it. In the future I hope long after I’m dead it’s useful to at least one person out there who wanted to understand what things were like for my generation.
Once again: it’s available here. Good day to you all.
P.S. October 31st (a couple days ago), was also the 6 year anniversary of another novel I wrote, Absolute Anhedonia. You can check that out here.