Press A to Feel Again

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Why did I, a 34 year old man, build a fan page to a fictional dog from a childhood favorite videogame?

We came of age watching the traditional scaffolding of adult life—career stability, home ownership, retirement plans—burn to the ground. Most of us were too busy trying to figure out who we were supposed to be to notice that the "supposed to be" part had already been reduced to ashes, blowing away in an unnervingly warm wind. The future we'd been promised wasn't just postponed; it was evaporating.

In response, we took Gen X's "whatever" attitude—that blunt instrument of almost cute (in retrospect) disaffection—and did what every generation does with its inherited tools: we refined it. What started as teenage eye-rolling evolved into something more precise, more devastating. We transformed casual disillusionment into a laser beam of studied indifference, cutting through everything with surgical precision. We became hopelessly, inevitably, comprehensively ironic. Not because we wanted to, necessarily, but because it seemed like the only sensible response to a world that increasingly refused to make any sense at all.

The problem with irony is that it’s like a linguistic parasite that eventually replaces its host. What started as a generational in-joke - a shared vocabulary of eye rolls, as ifs, and air quotes - has now metastasized into our primary mode of engaging with the world. It became our defense mechanism, our filter, our way of processing a reality that did not conform to any of the promises we’d been fed, like a general sense that life would continue functioning in roughly the same manner it had for our parents.

There is something here that’s been nagging at me lately: What if this whole posture - this reflexive cynicism, this compulsive need to distance ourselves from anything that might make us appear uncool or unsophisticated to an invisible peanut gallery of our imagined peers - is just conformity with extra steps? What if our desperate attempts to avoid being lame have become the absolute fucking lamest thing about us?

Consider this: We’re the generation that came into adulthood alongside social media, which means we’re also the generation that had to figure out how to be ourselves while simultaneously performing “ourselves” for an endless digital audience, an unfortunate reality every poor soul after us has dealt with for a longer percentage of their existences. We developed our identities in parallel with our increasingly pervasive online personas, and somewhere along the way, the boundary between the two blurred. I believe this is true for any of us, not just our contemporaries who went on to find careers or varying levels of success in their online lives - the act of sharing a moment from your life, no matter how banal, is inherently an act of marketing - you’re packaging up the “me” brand in a strange little ritual previously reserved for advertising agencies, and posting an idea of what your life is like, without any hope or technology capable (yet) of sharing the real thing.

This only becomes more true the more popular someone becomes online, and the greater of a following they develop: Real life brand deals start to coalesce, teams start to form, and suddenly your podunk country cooking blog is a small company with multiple employees and a break room, and you’re having to act a certain way in front of the northwestern Nike Sales Team, a way that might have represented you years ago when all of this started, but isn’t necessarily aligned with the you that wants to flourish now. (I’m not above any of this, by the way, my entire adult life has been spent engaging with and feeding this exact machine to much lesser degrees of monetary success, and I don’t really know how I feel about that. Bad, mostly.)

When, along this arc, did we decide that everything had to be either a critique or a guilty pleasure? When did we collectively agree that enjoying something that isn’t of your scene / circle’s zeitgeist - truly, unironically enjoying it - was somehow intellectually suspect? Our “postmodern” (cringe) condition isn’t just about questioning inherited norms, it’s about the exhausting obligation to question and overanalyze everything, all of the time, forever. Why do you like watching “Gilligan’s Island”, with its clearly harmful stereotypes? Do you denounce it? Do you unabashedly celebrate its negative aspects? Why do you enjoy this children’s cartoon? What’s going on with you?

I hate it, but I want to talk about that word - postmodern - a little bit more - though discussing postmodernism is itself such a postmodern cliche (as is calling attention to this fact) that we’re already several layers deep in the exact thing we’re trying to examine and break away from. It’s been an unstable term since its modern usage came into vogue in the 1950s/60s - an umbrella term so large as to be atmospheric. It’s an invisible all-encompassing mass that shapes everything we think and do, while somehow remaining impossible to define precisely. Ask ten different people from just as many backgrounds what postmodernism means and you’ll get twenty different answers, each equally as qualified as the last.

What we can (maybe) agree on: at its core, postmodernism is about questioning everything. It’s about dismantling our inherited assumptions of a Thing, and examining (and re-examining) the parts of its whole. Noble enough in theory - except somewhere in the process, we seem to have all gotten together and decided that “questioning everything” meant “finding what’s wrong with everything.” We became cultural pathologists, constantly performing autopsies on the things we used to love. We forget these things were once alive, once brought us joy, once meant something beyond their flaws, beyond their presumed target audience (another marketing term we seem to have adopted into our daily vocabulary for no discernible reason other than to make ourselves easier to advertise to).

Take any piece of media from your childhood, and then type it into Google. Search “Fern Gully” or “Power Rangers” (both things I didn’t care for but many people I know did so I’m including them here for some sort of vague posterity), and watch as the internet dissects it for problematic elements (perceived or actual), while throngs of commenters either rush to defend its most indefensible aspects (reactionary assholes) or compete to prove they were the first to notice its failures (very cool guys). The reasonable middle ground - “This was a product of its time that brought joy to many while reflecting some regrettable cultural attitudes that we’ve thankfully moved past, but we should not forget” - has become almost impossible to stake out. We’re trapped in a binary where everything must be either celebrated uncritically or condemned absolutely.

The internet’s tendency towards polarization doesn’t help. Nuanced positions don’t get retweets (or Re-X’s or whatever). “This thing is complicated and I have mixed feelings about it!” has never gone viral. As for media outside of this purview, you run into an ancillary issue: the conversation centers around if it is okay to enjoy media aimed at your / the youth, something where the common idea is “you should have grown out of this by now”. You risk running the lines between seeming overzealously “into” whatever it is you’re discussing (like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons), or lackadaisical and unforgivably ironic in your enjoyment of this thing, in a way somehow more annoying than just impudently liking it: These people are like a Schrodinger experiment involving the worst type of hipsters, someone who really likes the thing in question, but only in a safe space of fellow Thing-Enjoyers; they will quickly turn around and skewer both the Thing and the Thing-Enjoyers to anyone outside of that circle (like a social climbing Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons).

This is where our (my) cynicism comes in - not as philosophical position but as a reflex, a knee-jerk response to a world that seems increasingly fucked up and absurd. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that cynicism equals intelligence, that seeing the worst in everything means seeing everything clearly. “I’m just being honest,” we say, as if honesty requires us to focus exclusively on what’s broken, what’s failing, what we should leave behind.

But here’s the thing about cynicism: it’s fucking easy, man. It’s fast food - immediately satisfying but ultimately empty, and in the long run, probably pretty bad for you. Real engagement, real criticism, real analysis requires something much harder: the willingness to see the beauty despite the flaw, the problem and the possibility. It requires us to be vulnerable enough to admit that yes, we genuinely love this thing, even while we acknowledge it’s imperfections, or in this case, that we societally are expected to have outgrown it, whatever ‘it’ is.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we abandon critical thinking or analysis; we should be highly critical of anything we allow to change our perceptions; I’m suggesting we stop using them as armor against genuine engagement with the world. Who cares if you blatantly love Richard Scarry’s Busy Town as a 45-year-old and want to spend your time building a scale model of Lowly Worm’s Apple Car complete with working leaf-style rotary blades? Go for it, weirdo - I guarantee you that if you’re enjoying yourself in a deeper, more meaningful way, that very energy will foster a strong connection with another person or community, if you should choose to share it, and isn’t that all we’re here for anyways? (Side note, it’s kind of weird that his name was ‘Lowly Worm’. Feels fetishistic in a way that I’m not so sure about.)

So here’s what I did: I built a K.K. Slider fanpage. It’s admittedly amateur and haphazardly coded, but that’s kind of the point. It’s not a portfolio piece meant to garner me a career boost. It’s not a commentary on digital nostalgia, or a meta-critique on anything at all. It’s just a place where you can listen to K.K. Slider songs and look at their album art, because I didn’t find a good place for that online beforehand. I love these games, I love this music (by real life composer Kazumi Totaka, not a low poly 3D dog), and I love the entire package - the world it presents, the cozy feelings it produces, the hazy memories of late sleepovers and early Saturdays inextricably wrapped in all of it.

I did it not despite being a 34-year-old man, but because I am a 34-year-old man who’s tired of pretending that joy needs to be justified, that pleasure must be qualified, that everything we love has to be wrapped in seven layers of ironic distance. (I can’t escape it - there is of course something deeply ironic about writing a lengthy, self-aware (?) essay about the problems with irony and self-awareness. I’m aware of this. I am also aware that I am aware of this.)

Maybe the most radical act available to us isn’t criticism, or deconstruction, or stating the “guilty pleasure”, or even resistance. Maybe it’s simply allowing ourselves to love what we love, without any sort of qualification or apology. Without feeling negative about feeling positive. Maybe the real counter-cultural move is to step out from behind the protective shield of irony and risk being seen as exactly who we are. Maybe you should make a Polly Pocket website.

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