{"id":435,"date":"2009-02-16T10:45:42","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T10:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/02\/the-most-spoiled-generation-ever.html"},"modified":"2009-02-16T10:45:42","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T10:45:42","slug":"the-most-spoiled-generation-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/02\/the-most-spoiled-generation-ever.html","title":{"rendered":"The Most Spoiled Generation Ever?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is this generation the most spoiled generation ever? That’s what Louis CK claims – quite hilariously and poignantly – in this interview on Conan O’Brien:
\nEverything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy<\/a>
\nDid you watch it? Sorry for not being able to embed the video, and thanks to One City reader and friend Sarah for sending the link.
\nFollowing up on my post last week on the bailout, executives, the economy, etc., I have some thoughts.
\nMy first thought is that the video reminds me of Andrew Boyd’s tongue-in-cheek advice in Life’s Little Deconstruction Book that the way to get by in the contemporary world is to “Need what recently didn’t exist.”
\nBut is there anything special about our (broad) generation that is different from others? Doesn’t everyone measure happiness relative not to any true satiation, but relative to what we had ten minutes ago? It occurs to me – following up on last week’s income and wealth discussion – that economists have never bothered to adequately define happiness in any way, shape or form, which seemed to be part of making that discussion thread so vague and hypothetical, because the way we speak of happiness in economic terms is so vague and hypothetical. The fact that economic theories spend so little time discussing what is happiness (and what is unhappiness) always struck me as crazy, especially when you read someone like Bill McKibben’s work, where he claims that no demonstrable link has been made between wealth and personal contentment (beyond the ability to satisfy basic human necessities).
\nSo maybe our generation is particularly spoiled and short-sighted, more than others. I don’t really know. Sometimes I feel like I am. What do you think?
\nAlso, if our search for fulfillment is really just an ever-accelerating scramble to “need what recently didn’t exist,” then maybe we shouldn’t be working so hard to get this particular economy back on track. If our happiness is all about insatiable and spoiled desire, and we have no happiness anyway, won’t a “healthy” economy just mean the rape of the planet and the rape of each other?
\nI recently went to a lecture by Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray, in which he proclaimed, somewhat judgmentally (I felt), that it was a really good thing the human race is stuck on planet Earth, because that way we can only ruin one planet. If we could travel through space, he said, we would rape and pillage the galaxy’s resources, too. Although I didn’t like the way he made his point (Louis CK uses humor, which is almost always a better doorway for painful ideas to be shared), I’m not always sure he’s wrong.
\nAnd btw, I’m pretty pissed that the blog software wouldn’t let me embed the Louis CK video directly. WTF??? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is this generation the most spoiled generation ever? That’s what Louis CK claims – quite hilariously and poignantly – in this interview on Conan O’Brien: Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy Did you watch it? Sorry for not being able to embed the video, and thanks to One City reader and friend Sarah for sending the link.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Most Spoiled Generation Ever? - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/02\/the-most-spoiled-generation-ever.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Most Spoiled Generation Ever? - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is this generation the most spoiled generation ever? That’s what Louis CK claims – quite hilariously and poignantly – in this interview on Conan O’Brien: Everything’s Amazing, Nobody’s Happy Did you watch it? 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His writing has been featured in numerous print and online publications. He is the founding director of the Interdependence Project and the host of the I.D. Project\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s popular weekly podcast (available on iTunes). He is currently on the part-time faculty of Eugene Lang College at New School University in NYC, where he teaches Buddhism. 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