If you’re lucky / crazy / hardworking enough to take six months off work to go backpacking in South East Asia, I’d suggest you don’t add Generation X to your travel reading list. Unless, that is, you don’t mind having your behaviour, dreams, pretensions—pretty much your whole life—slung up on a metaphorical meat hook by Douglas Coupland, who will then proceed to examine it with his perspicacious eye and skewer it with his sharp pen.
Generation X is full of new terms (i.e. neologisms), coined or seized on by Coupland in order to describe the predicament of Generation X. These neologisms, along with their definitions, are printed separately from the narrative at the bottom of various pages scattered throughout the book. And they’re pretty damn spot on.
Here are some Couplandisms that are as relevant to today’s backpackers as they were when Generation X was published in 1991:
Anti-Sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intention.
Mid-Twenties Breakdown: A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one’s aloneness in the world. Often marks the induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people names Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties.
Expatriate Solipsism: When arriving in a foreign travel destination one had hoped was undiscovered, only to find many people just like oneself; the peeved refusal to talk to said people because they had ruined one’s elitist travel fantasy.
Virgin Runway: A travel destination chosen in the hopes that no one else has ever chosen it.
Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training or traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.
Native Aping: Pretending to be a native when visiting a foreign destination.
Terminal Wanderlust: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, the move continually in hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.
Re-reading the full list of Couplandisms from Generation X for this post has reminded me how relevant they are to the Milliennials of today. I have a feeling Coupland’s addressed this point in his more recent works – I need to get my read on. So many words! So little time!
Colin's Commonplace 