Monthly Muse: 3/2025
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the March 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
In a fascinating podcast episode from last year,
and Shay Woulahan observed that the 2020s have been witness to a resurgence of cultural tropes from the 1980s. While dominant Millennial culture espoused the rhetoric of pop social justice, group identity, and victimhood, many Zoomers have rejected the earlier generation’s consensus in favor of a more mercenary individualism. The youth cultural zeitgeist in America is now reminiscent of what aptly described in a classic 1992 essay as the “goin’-for-mine materialism” that germinated in the mid- to late-1970s and came into its own in the 1980s. The revival of this 1980s ethos has taken the Millennial cultural establishment by surprise.With the DOGE-ified Donald Trump’s populist class appeal now largely a relic of the past, generational divides in American politics have taken on greater importance. Trump, who rose to prominence as an embodiment of the cutthroat 1980s mentality, has considerably more cultural resonance with Gen Zs than Millennials. (If the “Lost Generation” moniker wasn’t already taken, perhaps it could be applied to Gen X, whose role in all of this is difficult to pinpoint).
Despite the cultural divide between Millennials and Zoomers and its clear impact on American politics, I do wonder if the 1980s zeitgeist ever really went away. The “return of the repressed” 1980s cultural vibe is, in one sense, a reaction to the ideological excesses of Millennial elites. In another sense, however, the 1980s ethos was already a constituent part of dominant Millennial culture, expressed quite openly in archetypes like the “girlboss” feminist, whose self-serving dominance and arrogance was praised by an otherwise self-effacing generation.
Zoomer proclivities toward Trump, the manosphere, and various other redpill ideologies can, in this second sense, be understood as nothing more than a re-masculinization of the 1980s “goin’-for-mine materialism” which had been briefly feminized (but never substantively rejected) under Millennial cultural hegemony.
Provocation
“There is a revolution going on in America/the World; a shifting in the winds/vibrations, as disruptive as an actual earth-tremor, but it is happening in our hearts… The seeds of this revolution were planted hundreds of years ago; in slave ships, in cotton fields, in tepees, in the souls of brave men. The seeds were watered, nurtured and bloom now in our hands as we rock our babies. It is mid-winter in America; a man-made season of shattered dreams and shocked citizens, fumbling and frustrated beneath the crush of greed of corporate monsters and economic manipulators gone wild. There are bitter winds born in the knowledge of secret plans hatched by Western Money Men that backfired and grew out of control to eat its own. We must support ourselves and stand fast together even as pressure disperses our enemies and bangs at our doors. We must all do what we can for each other to weather this blizzard.”
—Gil Scott-Heron (1975)