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Comment by treerock | Hacker News Reader

I get the impression, reading certain writers, that they live in some parallel universe very different from my own. Just about every paragraph here had me saying 'what?'.

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Try reading Generation X [1] by the same guy, I'm still trying to make sense of the book after 2 weeks of finishing it :P

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Acc...

20+ years later it's hard to have a context on Generation X and how perfectly it captured that moment in time. (American Psycho was published the same year - how's that for context!). Post-Regan, Post-yuppie (well, almost), Pre-grunge, mostly pre-internet...

Generation X, McJob etc are all parts of the lexicon now. Fight Club always felt to me like a kind of follow-up to Generation X.

It's the weakness in Couplands whole "capture the zeitgeist" storytelling. 150 years on, Great Expectations is still relateable. Generation X, not so much. I still love the book though :-)

Don't fret. Everything that comes out of DC's head makes most ppl say, 'what?'.

Not everything, surely. Microserfs?

Same. e.g. has there been a revolution in skin and dental care?

> Teenagers seem to no longer have acne or cavities

Any particular examples we can address?

``Nowadays, if you bump into someone you haven’t seen in a while and their behaviour is weird, you say hello, depart and think, “Well, they seemed a bit medsy, didn’t they?” And then you move on.''

What?

``Throw in Ritalin and concentration drugs such as Adderall and moods quickly become very, very niche: Wellbutrin + online binge shopping; Effexor + Facebook + three scotches; Adderall plus Celexa and sitting at your desk dispiritedly checking for new emails every two-and-a-half minutes. These all sound beyond mundane'' (italics mine)

What??

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