OK, so it's forty years after the social and sexual revolution, we've internalised our freedoms from the constraints of religion and its sexual mores, the middle class has risen up and pacified the world via suburbia and boredom, we're (mostly) pleasantly wealthy, freed from the shackles of ideological thinking post-cold war, post-christianity, and the only time we hit the streets is if we go to war in a country a long way away. Back here, it's peacetime; it's always peacetime, prosperity, the battle of ideas replaced by the battle of the bulge. We, the young of wealthy Australia, are the humans best positioned to live fully, in a geographical and historical sense.

So, why are we characterised by cynicism? How is it that a bleak view of the world is the new default? Sure, the traditional big pictures are boring and soul destroying - politics is uninteresting, insipid men attacking other equally bland men over things that don't matter, religion is a refuge for kiddy-sex addicts and hidebound dogmatists and work is a forty-year ride to oblivion in a nursing home. The old ways are boring, but the new as yet undiscovered. And so cynicism becomes the status quo; pessimism tempered with biting humor. What a yawn. I'd like to think cynicism was left behind at high school, when we were shuttled through the system, before we were able to think for ourselves, but it's still common, and it's still boring me to tears.

It's as if people are terrified of being earnest, scared of caring about anything. Cynicism is almost an ideology, in that it simpifies your thinking for you. Death? War? No surprise there. Budgets? Spirituality? Boredom. Everything has a base motive. Maybe it's just a final accomodation of the implications of darwinian thought, perhaps just a watered down nihilism for people without the stomach to embrace the void. Whatever it is, it really, really shits me.

More specific examples? I find it interesting that celebrities are the new weather - the talking point we all have in common, regardless of class/sex/age. Sport as well, in Australia at least. Perhaps we hold to these things because they are real, and they are now, now, now, no thought of past or future, no need to attach these things to metanarratives. But if you're postmodernly njoying banalities as a way to pass time, you're attributing meaning to something you know is meaningless. And perhaps life has no, or little, meaning. I don't know. But cynicism, disillusionment, these things are, must be, waypoints, not endpoints.