Before 1981 the only alcohol available to drink in Britain was either wine or bitter. Drinking culture was deeply ingrained into the psychoemployment of communities, with working men’s clubs and wine bars dominating the cobbled highstreets of yesterday. As cheap air travel became available tourists would bring back stories of drinking a wide variety of booze abroad and occasionally had the cheek to bring it back home to slurp as a post-pub pick-me-up. At the same time groups of young men, often university students, would bemoan a lack of public drinking venues suited for themselves. Lager had been around for centuries, though with the rise of home brewing and soldiers returning from Germany, it was becoming a cool new product that eighties hipsters wanted to be seen drinking. Hofmeister was one of the first lagers widely drank across England. It’s advertising, that of a bear leaving a forest so it can play darts at a pub, was orchestrated specifically to latch onto the notion of groups of young men hanging out together. And following a bear. This was the birth of lad culture and a precursor to the further babying of adults.
Following lager came binge drinking, the illegal rave scene, MDMA, Playstation 1, The Matrix, Superhero films and Internet pornography, all of which lead to a perfect chronological storm of international infantilization. Of course women are often infantilized though externally rather than internally. They are encouraged to shape body hair, consider long term fantasies and enjoy listening to the word ‘awesome’. They are put into the role of foster mother for an entire generation of men acting like children. The reasons why this is go beyond lager marketing in the early eighties, and part of the fault falls at the feet of the film industry recreating popular films which the current generation watched as children. This, along with a general reflection on the latter half of the twentieth century, creates a sense of deep nostalgia brought about partly due to a wish to escape the present and also encouraged by post-modern parents. Time is no longer a two dimensional line of events but a crystal refracting past and present, fact and fiction, through digital recording media. Photography in the past was done by artists and hobbyists up until the invention of cheaper cameras which were easy to use. This, along with film development able to be done on the high street, lead to a tendency to record the growth of children more than anything else since the late seventies. It is from the perspective of a parent holding a camera we reflect on our own childhood and so this carries on into digital photography and camera phones. Everything is recorded and in recording the present is already thought of as the past. Almost immediately after a photo is taken it is looked upon and judged, discarded if not fitting the narrative one wishes to construct for their future. In doing this we live in a constant state of nostalgia, of trying to remember a time in which things were good, yet as the template for this started as children it would go on into adult lives like an echo that sounds every time your image is captured onto a jpg.
Overparenting. Imagine the child of a parental set earning sixty to eighty thousand bucks a year. The adults have grown through the post-modern times and decided that, through extensive regret, that their children should be a certain way. The child is then supervised throughout their burgeoning teenagehood in after school clubs and to reach academia targets, all the while with their parents looking out for them and even sticking up for them in social quandaries. This leads the pre-forever baby to attend university in which they’ve never experienced a ketamine overdose or had internal sex! This continues throughout their higher education, usually with the assistance of parents continuing to keep track of their child up until graduation in which they reach the workplace totally unprepared for the adult world of work. Of course this in itself has become infantilized through health and safety legislature in which every eventuality has been preconceived and so the forever babies live in a world in which nothing can really go wrong. The removal of lethal danger has lead to peons seeking out perceived risky activity through violence and sex during the weekend period, similar to ‘break time’ at school, further compounding the pre-pubescent beliefs of the average man aged 18-45. Hours spent whacking away at a playstation controller or exercising for the sake of exercise has lead to millions of men stuck in a state of continual childhood.
But to what end is the end of this beginning? Social media, especially Facebook, is now awash with forever babies updating everyone on their own child’s progress. Previously having a child was a benchmark into achieving biological maturity. Nowadays it’s a way to dress up a baby as Dark Vader and take some lol pics for potential miscreants to fawn over. Rearing a child is the forced conclusion for forever babies to say that they are an adult, yet they themselves will rear an entire generation of fools caught in the fractal-like pattern of babydom. This will continue until the entire world wears nappies and ingrates are forced to watch remakes of Dino The Last Dinosaur, Thundercats and Dangermouse until their eyes are smoking holes in the head and their tongue lays fat in the mouth, dribbling blood onto bibs made from recycled plastic.
Like many articles of this ilk, authors tend to bemoan the gentle fall of civilization yet offer no alternatives. Yet I offer a definitive alternative in which all of mankind can be saved from a constant state of regression, that which is of the highest importance; autoaccelerationism. Force yourself into states of economic and emotional hardship. One has the capacity to smash through the computer screen, the television, the windshield, the workplace and so one should. It might make others feel ill at ease that they could voluntarily take a hammer to their front teeth, yet I recommend that you should embrace these moments of madness. As children are not mad. They are children and act childlike. Predictable. It is the rancid, rotten egos of adulthood which drive people insane and so great personal sacrifices should be made for no other reason than the alternative is as good as never leaving the womb in the first place! Embrace chaos, the patterns flames make on metal, the eternal death structure brought about by your DNA, the implosions of suburbs, eating raw chicken, commandeering bicycles and so on. Rather zoom towards the end that clutch onto the beginning.
