I wonder sometimes if young people today admit to naivete. It seems very uncool to be innocent these days. Kurt Cobain maybe summed it up best when he said he was always busy acting like he wasn’t naive. Like he’d seen it all, like he was there first.
I think that speaks for a generation. You can’t be gullible anymore, God forbid. You have to know what’s cool and what’s not and prove that in what you wear and drive and love
Of course, there’s the really complicated aspects to consider, like your best friend who keeps walking blindly into disastrous relationships with men who throw down her heart and stomp that sucker flat. This is pretty pathological, and I think speaks of a deep self-destructive alienation, not guilelessness at all.
We are all of us vulnerable to this kind of personal heave-ho based on the level of denial we are in about reality – reality in this sense meaning how we really are behind our masks, and how we see the true state of our upside-down society. And this we will never see unless we undertake some profound self-analysis.
Removing the Rose-Colored Glasses: The Dangers of Social Alienation, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.