“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

I’m a “Gen-X”, the term adopted from the Canadian author, Douglas Coupland’s, culminating 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. While mentioning Billy Idol’s punk band of the late 1970s, “Generation-X”, the book’s title is actually drawn from the book, “Class”, a 1983 work by the cultural historian and university professor, Paul Fussell. An irreverent sociological commentary on American class structure, Fussell referred to an “X” category of those disinterested in the usual traditions of status, money, and social climbing.

Likewise, according to the pundits, as an adolescent and young adult during the 1980s and 90s, I grew to maturity in an atmosphere of cynical, disaffected slackers with MTV-era social-tribal identities delineated by musical genres such as rap, punk, metal, and later grunge.

Gen-Xers witnessed the last gasps of Soviet communism, the globalization of US labor, the L.A. riots, Beavis and Butt-head, and Kurt Cobain’s suicide. We heard the sounds of dial-up Internet and Nirvana, while the analogue grit of vinyl records and tapes was replaced by the sterile digital perfection of CDs.  CompuServ and AOL reflected an emerging virtual universe in piles of their iridescent mirrored discs.  And the quick dopamine fix of video-games was added to the inventory of recreational drugs.
We were the “forgotten generation”.

But Kurt Cobain and a dead-at-47 multi-millionaire, Rodney King, notwithstanding, the statistics show a generation that mostly turned out fairly… average. Despite the disaffected pessimism, most Gen-Xers went on to become the likes of Amazon employees, solar installers, software engineers and derivatives brokers, and to somehow find a way onto the consumer merry-go-round of homes and families in the burbs.

A few of us even found our way out.

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This is one of these ideas that mostly came together over a series of morning runs, and that will likewise warrant several articles. But after looking back through my writings here, it’s caused me to notice a recurring theme and to add another “category” to the right:
“Existentialism”.

A brief, if superficial version of the existential perspective is that our lives as individuals are primarily the products of our choices from among possibilities, and that how we each live our own lives is fundamentally determined by the expression of one’s will. From the Christian spiritual Søren Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, to a nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power”, it reflects a counterpoint to the realities of the human condition, death, and a universe indifferent to our sufferings.

The general attitude is nothing new, reflected in the ideas of a wide range of philosophers and writers going back to Socrates and the Stoics, through Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, José Ortega y Gasset, Victor Frankl, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Counter to naive criticisms, existentialist thought doesn’t imply that people choose to find themselves in hardship or terrible situations.  It expresses only that the individual has a choice where to direct attentions, and that nothing fixes our purpose in life but we ourselves.
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What had initially started me thinking about this was the name “Jordan Peterson” having been brought up by others in four different conversations over the last year. Very briefly, Jordan Bernt Peterson is a controversial Canadian academic, psychologist and author who began receiving public attention in 2016 for his views on free-speech rights in Canada. He’s since been labeled an “extremist conservative” in much popular media, with YouTube apparently removing many of his videos and interviews on the grounds that they contain “disinformation”.  The Canadian regulator for clinical psychologists has also ordered Peterson to attend a program on public comments, which Peterson has challenged in court as ideologically-motivated “re-education”.

Despite the controversy, Peterson’s name was always mentioned in a positive context, and with some patterns.  The first three times were all by young (20s and 30s), well-educated, East and South Asian women who credited him as inspiring constructively life-changing personal decisions. One of these women even stated that Peterson literally, “saved her life”. And the fourth, most recent instance involved a business manager who commented that he wished some of his employees could figure out how to take charge of their own lives.  I wouldn’t classify any of these people as “extremist conservative”.

This piqued my interest and compelled reading some of Peterson’s writings, starting with his first book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief”, written 1999. The text is a readable, if academic cross-examination of psychology, mythology, religion, literature, philosophy, and even brain research, intended to resolve a basis for social systems of belief and meaning.

Skipping details, Peterson concludes in Maps of Meaning that humans conceive meaning in life by perceiving the world in a dichotomy of what is versus what better state could be. We then apply this to moral and ethical judgments such as “good” versus “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, benevolence or tyranny…  And over thousands of years, successful societies have developed around values, traditions, mythologies and beliefs that, more-or-less, bind themselves together around these ideals of improving our condition.

From further readings, I glean that Peterson isn’t apparently a particularly religious individual. Nevertheless, he concludes that it isn’t wise for societies to toss out old traditions without first considering whether they serve a beneficial social function. So while perhaps dispensing with the stoning of unruly children, it might be wise to preserve the tradition of punishing theft. And in that context, I suppose Peterson nowadays qualifies as a social conservative.

Peterson’s later, “12 Rules of Life”, is a more straightforward, self-improvement tome. It doesn’t contain anything especially controversial, suggesting things such as presenting yourself to others in a positive manner, choosing good friends, organizing your life, pursuing the meaningful, listening to others, and having some fun. But the undertone is clearly one of individual choice.

This caused me to return to the words of the third young woman that had mentioned Jordan Peterson, who distilled what she saw as his overall message with surprising clarity.  According to her:
1) Live with intent and have a direction.
2) Learn to communicate and do so clearly.
3) Organize your own life and be in control of it.
4) Accept change and move toward what you want.
5) Compare yourself only to yourself and set your own goals.

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I can’t speak for Jordan Peterson’s personal character or beliefs. But I understood how being given the existential permission to take charge of her own decisions had indeed, “saved her life”.  Her words reminded me of something from my own college days.

Sitting in the back of a classroom on the 6th floor of the university sciences building, the professor had rather oddly approached me and asked how things were going?   Thinking he was maybe looking for some academic benefits, I rather abruptly responded that everything was “fine”.
Actually, I was struggling terribly.

Many East and South Asian students tend to do better in school for a simple reason – social pressure.  Cultural standards can set high expectations for children – perfect scores, scholarships, acceptance to the right schools, high-status careers.  But affection can also become capital reserved for those who honor their families through hard work and success. Anything less can equate to shame and guilt.  And regardless, respect is a one-way street – parents get it from their children, but rarely express it return.

Leaving the sciences building a little later, the spot where they’d cleaned up the latest suicide was still visible.  By the time I finished university, there had been 11 suicides of Asian students, mostly women, 8 of whom had jumped from that same building.

Curt Cobain and Rodney King… everything can amount to nothing, if we come to see it that way. But looking back through a life tempered by a long perspective of the human condition, death, and a universe indifferent to our sufferings, better I think to compare one’s self to one’s self, and maybe to sort through a few of those old traditions.

Further reading, should you feel so inclined:

Azerrad, M. (2021, September 22). My Time with Kurt Cobain. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-time-with-kurt-cobain

Coupland, D. (1991). Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA22446845

Friedersdorf, C. (2021, June 21). Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Actually Saying? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/

Fussell, P. (1983). CLASS: A guide through the American Status System. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA2044280X

Gollom, M. (2023, January 14). Jordan Peterson is being disciplined for his tweets. Why some say that raises free speech issues. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jordan-peterson-college-psychologists-tweets-1.6711524

Lynskey, D. (2021, July 21). How dangerous is Jordan B Peterson, the rightwing professor who “hit a hornets” nest’? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest

Mun, R. U., & Hertzog, N. B. (2019). The influence of Parental and Self-Expectations on Asian American women who entered college early. Gifted Child Quarterly, 63(2), 120–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0016986218823559

Peterson, J. B. (2002). Maps of meaning. In Routledge eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203902851

Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to chaos. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB28311325

Staff. (2022, November 30). Burdened with Worry: How the Pressure to Succeed Can Affect Asian American Students | Counseling@NYU. NYU-MAC. https://counseling.steinhardt.nyu.edu/blog/asian-americans-burdened-with-worry/

Staff, C. (2012, August 23). Rodney King died of accidental drowning, had multiple drugs in system, autopsy says. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rodney-king-died-of-accidental-drowning-had-multiple-drugs-in-system-autopsy-says/