Princeton professor and essayist Christy Wampole weeps for the millennial generation. In her collection The Other Serious, she discusses America’s cultural reliance on irony to get through work and school days, muses on the rapid rise and fall of hipsterdom as a fashion trend and state of mind, laments the lack of conversation between young and old people in America and pities the overly serious states in which many people conduct their lives. Her essays are a beautifully written series of polite reality checks arranged to highlight how deeply American youth is entrenched in consumer culture.
In “The Great American Irony Binge,” Wampole diagnoses today’s espresso-sipping, Apple-worshipping, tight-jeaned and handlebar-mustached facetious youth with chronic boredom and hopelessness, positing that a lack of any clear life direction and the Sisyphean nature of the U.S. college experience has caused them to chisel broken facades and congregate to strengthen the radiance of their collective “It’s cool, man, everything’s cool” attitude. In “Toward a Sterile Future,” she wonders whether our perpetual quest to streamline every aspect of human life with consumer technology puts us at risk to become complacent. She imagines a future in which there is no such thing as an artisan and people are one more cloud-based service away from becoming the machines on which they rely for daily function. She segues this into an assertion that human interactions feel weird because people are usually enshrouded in the snuggie of online anonymity when conversing. Face-to-face interactions are becoming rarer and rarer, to the point where they are beginning to feel surreal. In “On Awkwardness,” Wampole suggests that simply embracing the weirdness and remembering that we are all individuals with different values and experiences could lead towards a new social enlightenment.
Wampole offers gentle criticism while never disparaging any group or individual, and does so with a style that embraces the beauty of simplicity. Splashes of effervescence and relevant cultural references make her essays incredibly engaging, and her arguments foster creative evaluation in the best way possible. Perhaps the best way to summarize The Other Serious is with this quote from the titular essay: "I want to understand what has forced half the population into an unbearably heavy seriousness and the other half into an unbearably light, confettilike eruption of irony."
