Pretentious Tumblrs (or How To Spot Culture Collapsing)

Let me be frank here: I hate the average 'hip' person in my age bracket, and want nothing to do with them at all to the point I may aswell be autistic. The obsession with celebrities and the mimicry of others to maintain a 'cooler' status than everyone else has gotten to the point that people in their 20s worship their peers as minor celebrities, and attempt to copy them in any way possible to stay on top of the popularity game. It's created a war of parasitism on all sides, where to be a popular and trendy hipster is to be a vacuous ghost who doesn't really believe or have an interest in anything. You don't need to go much farther than Tumblr to see the extent of the damage this sort of status quo for our youth has done to popular culture.

Typical Tumblr user

The average contents of a Tumblr users website is identical to the next - they're all a complete waste of space. Typically, you have music videos and lyrics from bands you've never heard of, abstract graffiti and art, pictures of girls with their hair swept to the side, self-important notes about the user's daily life, references to nerdy things and films from the 80's, funny images the user found somewhere else, pictures of fashionable and/or moody people - a cesspit of narcissism with no rhyme or reason to any of it being there. This isn't the main issue, though; my main problem with Tumblr comes in the form of its 'Reblog' button, allowing users to repost whatever obscure rubbish they've come across on other users pages in an attempt to be unique and get the jump on everyone else. A Tumblr user is actively encouraged to spread the most 'unique' stuff they come across, rather than creating any thing of merit on their own instead.

This state of affairs truly does frighten me: our new generation is the first in decades to come up with literally nothing new to make a unique statement for itself: everything is recycled and popular due to its 'vintage' quality from simply existing in the past 30 years. In that sense nothing 'new' is being made: how will our generation be fondly remembered if we have nothing to show for it? Can you even remember the last time you went to the cinema and there weren't any sequels or remakes now showing?

To write a song that blazes the charts in modern pop music, does it even have to be about anything or does a series of random buzzwords about nothing do the job just fine?

People can't possibly be so limited that every possible idea has been mined and retreads is the only possible way to survive, but it's really starting to look that way. I can't be the only one who wishes people would be comfortable as who they are rather than what their peers like - I'd find the blank-slate 'cool kids' who scutter around like vermin nowadays a lot more tolerable that way.