Douglas Coupland - Generation X (1991)

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Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.

Douglas Coupland
Vaccinated Time Travel: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

Douglas Coupland
Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

Douglas Coupland
Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

Douglas Coupland
As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

Douglas Coupland
All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

Douglas Coupland
Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Douglas Coupland
Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them.

Douglas Coupland
I'd take a helicopter up and throw microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell.

Douglas Coupland
Decade Blending: In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).

Douglas Coupland
Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.

Douglas Coupland
McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Douglas Coupland
This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

Douglas Coupland
Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.

Douglas Coupland
You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-today comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

Douglas Coupland
Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

Douglas Coupland
STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

Douglas Coupland
It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

Douglas Coupland
Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

Douglas Coupland
ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother-they hug where I live now.'

Douglas Coupland
Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.

Douglas Coupland
PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: 'Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel.

Douglas Coupland
… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?

Douglas Coupland
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

Douglas Coupland
The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.

Douglas Coupland