ehsan gill

Look at you all. You’re a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the spluttering engine of the most banal form of capitalism. No seasons in your lives - merely industrial production cycles that rule you far better than any tyrant. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well all be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be

Coupland, 2010: 136

At his best know one but Douglas Coupland is able to articulate the impasse of personal progress and the narratives of purposelessness at the tail end of postmodern consumption. I remember reading his eponymous Generation X at the end of college and to this day I remember its 101isms fondly. However, At his worst Coupland is an amalgam of cool postmodern clichés. Each one of them wonderfully insightful but strung together without the bones of character or plot they become very hard to read. In fact they become the outcry of a naval gazing 16 year old just about to attend university. This above is from his latest Player One. And unfortunately I have to say that this book may well be the latter, cool quotes stung together with missed opportunities. Or it could be that i’m not just 16 anymore and therefore no longer in his target market.