#adulting for almost twenty years
On three generations being denied adulthood, and a chat with an LA artist on why people need to be bolder with their style.
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🗣️ BARCELONA!! I have something for you: to celebrate the launch of Culture Slop, Nicolas Cevallos and I are doing an event at Terranova on
July 22(DATE BEING TWEAKED!!). Pop by after work, as we’ll be having a convo on SLOP with mar vallverdú, with drinks and free issues of the magazine: RSVP here!!!🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week we’re joined by ad and podcast dude Rashad Rastam of WEAR MANY HATS, who joins Ben Dietz and I to talk NYC’s ongoing moment, Erling Haaland’s World Cup supremacy, and why Bryan Johnson needs to live a little. Listen on Substack or Spotify!
Lindsey Graham dies at 71
Good morning!!! Decades are happening in weeks! Cue the Russia conspiracies!!!!
U.S., Iran trade dozens more strikes
Anyway
French far-right Le Pen cleared to run for president
Reform UK’s Farage says he’ll quit
We knew Le Pen was going to walk free then run for president, thus pushing EU politics closer to the US. On the other hand, Farage stepping down to re-win a seat is an interesting test. Also to keep an eye on: Will Meloni go the way of Marjorie Taylor Greene? Are EU car camera laws and German sick leave stuff also expressions of rising conservatism? Will Spain’s drawing 1.2M applications for amnesty inspire local xenophobia (Just look on TikTok.), pushing popularity of far right parties? I’m pondering a lot of things, yes I am.
Platner ends U.S. Senate campaign
Why Didn’t Platner’s Red Flags Matter?
9 candidates who could replace Platner
Grab the clown wig. Why the fuck did he run at all? The pride of men — and hopefully someone with solid, progressive values steps in. Won’t be Patrick Dempsey though! Now to speculate who will vie for Mitch McNotalive’s seat…
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo fatally shot by ICE
Migrants say he did not ram officers
“not a lack of video evidence”
Mexico: criminal charges over deaths linked to ICE
Another ICE murder, which has not gotten the attention of white victims. Mexico may take legal action, which is an interesting tactic that may not do much (but we can dream).
Body After Electric Forest Found in Woods
Body of 18-year-old Nolan Wells found
Similarly: as has been noted, a constellation of deaths of Black persons in America seems to suggest something more than “accidents” or “suicides.”
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here
Claude, ChatGPT Are Getting Too Expensive
Chatter about tokens and costs of AI have been swirling for weeks, which will soon crash into consumer costs as we discussed on Tuesday. Tech is in the process of decapitating itself, it seems. What will replace it? My money stays on sustainable industries as things like Meta data centers contaminate water in places like Wyoming. On Meta: their recent AI training on your Instagram went very massively viral Friday, forcing them to pull the feature. Bullying works!!
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“There’s Fab Five Freddy and Basquiat,” Madonna lists on the track Confessions II “Danceteria.” “Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf,” she continues, “Everyone came from Shafrazi…There’s Maripol and a guy named Fred, see these guys spinning on their heads. There’s Rock Steady Crew and Crazy Legs…Nile Rodgers and David Byrne, B-52s had money to burn, Lounge Lizards had so much style.” This may sound like a listicle, references in the style of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix)” — but it’s very different: the title is the tip as it’s a former nightclub, which turns the song into a setting for her to revisit the culture she came from in the 1980s, the list a mapping her contemporaries. She is talking about the culture she helped make, that she is partly responsible for the visuals and sounds of modern life, graffiti artists in conversation with the origins of rap who were dialoguing with queer history which was based in avant garde adjacent performing/performance art all in New York. She was in the room where the greats were, not as a bystander but as a participant. At 67, Confessions II is more than “some dance album” sequel but a retrospective in her chosen form — in lyrics, in song — that eschews the commercialization of Broadway or film and instead is a “back to my roots” effort. An unlikely success, but a reminder that she’s Madonna, bitch. It is a statement of her influence and power but also her mortality and resilience, that you and her are more alike than you think, especially when compared to the wider landscape of overly commercialized pop “artists.” She’s interesting — and Confessions II is of interest — because she has lived. She did it all herself, representing the decreasing ranks of working class artists and those who are of-a-culture. Age defines her not, even if her knees aren’t what they used to be. Thus, the deluge of thought about her age and endless cool. Young people could never, etc.
Aging has become a cultural preoccupation. It’s the plastic surgery and the peptides, but more that our growing older is a reminder that we are human during a time when the powers that be (tech, Hollywood, the working world) demand becoming a flattened beautiful image that never fatigues, that can be lit up for a work call with no notice, at any hour. There is no work-life balance anymore but instead small windows of being “off” that are broken when a phone unlocks, with an email, by entering any space with a screen. This balance is being further challenged as tools like Meta glasses and Palantir software and Flock cameras and various AI whatever force you to become a manager of a barren techno empire you have no ownership of. This is adulthood? This is culture? I guess.
Madonna represents a counter balance, a 67 year old who defies Boomerism to show what an interesting life looks like: that is what people are reacting to, that her aging while keeping cool is a direct undoing of someone like Bryan Johnson’s anti-death crusade or the Kardashian’s constant agelessness. If youth is the only thing you have that makes you interesting then…Sorry: you aren’t interesting. Her breakout at a big age also proves something that has been felt for years and years: adulthood no longer exists, especially not for anyone younger than her — and especially no one Millennial and below. Confessions II carries many critiques of “how young people are” now and how adults act now, pointing out that the majority of the young are obsessed with boring lives where nothing happens: the much meme’d line “ It’s not okay. I don’t fuck with it.” from “Everything” is a direct jab at people who no longer go out, of calcified cultural conservatism. She’s right, but this isn’t to say she does a good job addressing the economic context of such a situation (although “The Test” comes close).
You know this but, increasingly, less of us are able to grow up because “growing up” is no longer financially feasible. The house, the kids, the wealth accumulation: these are more rare than common, given the disabling of upward mobility as the economy and industries have boxed too many of us out. Millennials were the first canaries, as we enter our third decade of adulthood, as “avocado toast” luxuries have evolved into an economy of toys for adults, from the empire of Funko Pop to the investment in Disney adults to the recent launch of Play-Doh flowers for not-kids. Millennials have consistently been blocked out of what “was” adulthood, jogging backwards to find joy as we indulge mass arrested development, eyes wide with hope because many of us haven’t gotten to start living as adults yet. “Millennials gotta be the most unserious generation ever,” a popular TikTok from May goes. “We are still so childlike…I’m never gonna grow up and, I’m realizing that most Millennials I know, it’s the same thing. We all can’t believe we’re the age that we are.” This is perhaps why spending has become our culture. “Millennials often justified [conspicuous consumption] as a coping mechanism for being priced out of cars, homes, and children,” W. David Marx wrote in 2025’s Blank Space, connecting this practice to the generationally defining trend of “adulting.” “Basic household chores required a rebranding of their own,” he continued, pointing toward this notion’s opposite: hustling. Millennials swing from one extreme to the other, lost and found but lost and found in our big ages.
Gen Z, then, is a flipping of the same mirror, obsessed with maintaining a youth they’re not enjoying, all in the hopes of stopping the clock so they can become an adult “later,” when the economy and jobs and industries and the climate — Everything! — are fixed, to launch into adulthood at the proper place and time. This is resulting not in a deepening of Millennial kidification but an adultification, a playacting adulthood and dwelling in the adulthoods of the past while not actually living as adults in the present, thus creating a blank culture that veers into conservatism: China’s backwards-looking Dreamcore uses Y2K aesthetics to address uncertainty; South Korea’s “dopamine sites” role-play economic freedom and control; prediction markets and gambling in America hinge upon betting on life so you can afford to live it; the global dominance of short term financing is the debt crisis of a generation. Boasting sobriety and maxxing wellness whilst unwell, the culture of Gen Z has largely been a space to fast track adulthood as a means to power grab — which will come back to haunt many: see the appeal of tradwives, a growing horror show of (a few) viral teens giving up their lives to be taken advantage of by trad sons, young men wanting obedient women. A generation “playing house” as culture, seeking to be unwrinkled and unblemished with kids and a picket fence as they prepare to be rewarded with exactly that by fulfilling the goals of the bygone promises of adulthood.
It seems Gen Alpha already has it worst, as they they’re imitating the early adulthood of their elder siblings while reacting to the kidifcation of their parents all while being denied a childhood: from graduation creep to Sephora kids to adult fashion as kid fashion, what was once “for kids” has been replaced with a grotesque teenage young adulthood. We see this to the point of a constant jittering, toys replaced with “fidget” devices, life management (“mukbang” positions eating as entertainment, “unboxing” turns mail into a moment) as “fun.” Clicking buttons that do not work, slathering oils across pores that have yet to open, constantly multi-tasking on screens, there is a mimesis of youth mimicking young adults who pretend to be adults resulting in an echo of an echo of an echo. “Satisfaction” becomes a thesis statement for a generation, as if stakeholders craving growth, baby venture capitalists itching for that next scratch to make them purr. “It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures of information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear,” Ben Lerner writes of Gen A’s satisfaction seeking in 2026’s Transcription. “Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, additive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?” Playacting as culture, make believe life as life: the trickling down from the mountaintop has now flooded the plains.
I’m reminded of conversations about modern wood not being as strong compared to the centuries of wood that came before. Why isn’t new wood good? Thanks to over-farming and mass production, trees are denied the space to grow and flourish. Thus, weaker wood — and an inability to use wood to properly, of wood worthy of creating. Millennials and below have a similar quality. When we look to our elders, to someone with as vibrant a life and work as Madonna, the contrast is clear: she stands upon a remarkable life where culture and opportunity was tangible instead of having to settle for recreations of the past that distract from the present. Behind her trails three (Four?) generations whose access, understanding, and interests are depreciating in value, less for a lack of desire but more that the system has failed for so long that it’s a silly fact of life instead of something anyone is seeking an urgency to fix. Culture has flattened in the process, young people lacking the robust communities that birthed the names mentioned in “Danceteria” because everything became monetized, capitalized, broadcast and debased. Hustle and pretend we will, ultimately revealing we exchanged the vibrance of life for business exchanges and transactions of little value other than the symbolic. Cultural recession not by choice but due to the forced change of landscape. There will never be another Madonna nor will there be a younger generation’s Confession II because most of us are here at the bottom, trying to distract ourselves from that truth. “But Famesick!” someone points out. “Lena!” Sure! Sure. The rich, it seems, are granted such experiences: they get to live to tell. Their tales are worthy of elevation. Their lifestyle “is culture,” an image defining the present and that those playacting adulthood are trying to recreate from sand. A future where there is nothing to confess as all we have are mumbles of what could have and should and would have happened if everything had been different.
The End of Reading Is Here
“is this bad?”
Viral think piece of the week, about the rise in illiteracy, which we’ve seen covered as recently as Love Island as literacy test to college students with 10 year old reading levels to Trend Report™ stories like the recent TikTok literacy trend through mapping this issue in adults and kids in 2023. Need more proof of this? Look at “polyester relationships” and “sent me into Bolivia.“ PICK UP A FUCKING BOOK NOW!!!!!!!!!!! BE MORE LIKE THIS GUY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MSG Kept a List of Gay Celebs
Waymo called the cops on teen riders
Two stories continuing surveillance summer, revealing just how much you are being watched these days. Concerning, tying into ICE social monitoring and all the Flock shit. Also: despite these problems, MSG is having quite a year between this and the Taylor wedding and Hacks.
White House’s vision for Museum of American History
Memo Smithsonian leader sent to staff
The battle between the White House and the Smithsonian is a big story to watch as it threatens to warp American history.
ESPN’s Matt Miller Investigated For Alleged Fraud
“He was involved in a car accident”
Sports story of the week, about the ESPN draft analyst who was scamming people — and may have faked a car accident!
We Are in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’
“We’re losing recipes”
AI flyers make you look cheap and tacky!! This ties into a Trend Report: Trend Report™ dive into the appeal of ugliness as a salve for the overly optimized, a thought that is proven by the second link. Never change, Atlanta!!
The Summer Everyone Wanted a Good Night
Had no idea the Black Eyed Peas’ “I’ve Gotta Feeling” was composed of so many samples? Talk about a legitimate song of the summer.
How Lizzo Became Pops Great Flops
Lizzo answers her critics
Like Katy Perry, the flopping of Lizzo is fascinating. The first story is a viral Atlantic story on her fall — and the loss of stars and our obsession with failures. The second is a clear-the-record story from The Guardian, which maps the moment from her view and how cruelty is trendy. Is being chopped a path to piety? This feels like a big deal that will get minimized as being a Khia, etc.!
“dull not to”
I’m adopting this advice from Tilda Swinton, folding into something my former boss at MTV told me: try everything once to try it, try everything twice to see if you like it. It served me welll!
“My dogs Art”
The literal framing isn’t great, but love the idea of framing your dog’s destroyed favorite toys 🥹
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I can’t tell you exactly when Pau S. Pescador and I first met, but I think we can approximate it to the early-mid-2010s, likely from running Los Angeles, I’m Yours, covering her work art and films as she was (And very much still is!) a key figure in contemporary LA queer art. Her works in photography and video and performance — and the blurring between and beyond these forms — document her life and identity, typically with the help of commercial objects that not only reflect the city but the cultures that produce porcelain Disney characters and Marvel character masks and emoji hand puppets. She abstracts herself and these objects, turning them into collage of her life within a layer of references, constant assemblages of one’s image via the items that make our world. If everyone is performing within capitalism, what do our props say about us? This is just a small part of what her work is trying to address.
With a showing of her latest work now up at Tyler Park Presents in Crenshaw, Pau’s most recent work explores the body as a site of politics, how visibility as a trans individual places them within larger worldviews and values. This all sounds (and can be) heavy, but Pau is one to invite in humor and pleasure into such investigations, constructing representations through things like giant baby heads and scary clown masks — as one does! Aren’t we all giant silly babies behind scary clown masks? Such is the modern experience in times like these.
To catch up with her and hear about this new body of work, I sent her a note and we got an interview going about the trends she’s into and her show Amor Prohibido. She, too, has Madonna on the mind but also the power of dogs, why she wants more people to take risks, and why commercial objects are less “things” but more physicalized entertainment in the post-monocultural era.
Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
The third act. This is the best thing that has come out of the remake/sequel moment of fan classics. I think about this with Madonna releasing a new album and while it’s just ok with some good moments, it is great to see “older” women getting to be part of the cultural dialogue. Seeing more females in their 60s and being sexy is just empowering. I need and want more. I remember you discussing on your podcast the rise of older models on the runway and I am here for this. Give actresses like Geena Davis a feature film, hell she can play a banana for two hours straight, I will watch! Hell, have Salma Hayek release a polka album. Isn’t it time for Julia Roberts to release a workout video.What’s a trend you hope never dies?
I think this was influenced by leaving town for the 4th of July and being in a small city (Cambria, CA) full of dogs as everyone was getting out of LA from the fireworks… so…the emotional support pet. I think we really need this to go harder. I want to see people having their pets everywhere. Grocery stores are full of emotional support hamsters. The President (not this stupid US one, but others) holding their dog during press conferences. Rami Youssef was just on Ziwe and he was holding his dog throughout the conversation and it was so tender. I want to see people with their emotional support log or broom at high end dining.What’s a trend you are so over?
I am exhausted of everyone dressing the same and not taking risks. When one does it appears so loud and noticeable. In LA — it’s women in beige fancy workout gear full makeup and men in skating attire. I am tired of effortless and performative causal. Let’s be loud, dramatic, STAND OUT. The best part of watching fashion runway shows and seeing people in bold attire and imagining seeing them in the world. I constantly find myself editing myself down and wondering if I really want that level of attention that day and it prohibits me from leaning on how I want to express myself.What does our relationship to (commercial) objects say about us now?
I think we are in a moment where people want to express themselves, but also be be part of a cultural dialogue I think in era where the collective cultural moment isn’t coming from say people watching things on TV at the same time as we used to with cable tv, we have commercial internet trends instead of say Labubu, the Stanley Cup or even the unboxing trend videos. It’s like having this object but in my own favorite color is enough to express you personality. It’s sorta this generation “Keeping up with the Jones.”What has your camera been drawn to most lately?
I currently have a solo show in LA at Tyler Park Presents and both in this work, but in my daily life I am really thinking about the documentation of myself in the larger world or documenting the larger world because I am in it. I think at this moment, and not just in the states, there is so much political pressure for trans people, both negatively and an extra pressure on the positive. I think the placement of my own body in the world feels loaded and I see how people react towards me. Filming myself in it for me has helped me wrap my brain and take ownership of this level of visibility.
Follow Pau on Instagram and, if you’re in Los Angeles, her show is on view at Tyler Park Presents through July 18.
“my president pedo”
“joins Senate”
“there goes that dream”
“Tell me a vegetable”
“waking McConnell”
“off the phone with Mitch”
“You’re laughing”
“gonna feel real stupid”
“a cover up”
“Spoken To McConnell”
”they wheeled Diane”
The best of the Mitch McConnell memes…
”HAHAHAHA”
”big frankenstein scar”
”poppers while on viagra”
“according to his Grindr”
”reagan’s attention”
”nvm”
”you were a SENATOR”
”lindsey graham and charlie kirk”
…which were quickly followed by Lindsey Graham memes and the overlap of the two!
“John Oliver has officially landed”
“John Oliver concludes his run”
“He was born to do this”
John Oliver on General Hospital was one of the more inspired celebrity items of the year, feeling like when Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell made a Lifetime movie.
“Me ever since”
“having so much fun”
“full Cafe experience”
“warming up to me”
The woman play-acting a coffee shop at home is the character of the week.
“you don’t know what they said”
This feeling is true and, when you live in a country of not-your-native-tongue, this becomes your whole life 🥴
“What’s the point of thongs?”
Mother of the year, but also daughter of the year because her questions are good.
“sauce across the board”
Who wants to have a game night? Bring your own sauce!
“Waking my mom”
…and here’s a post at the intersection of mothers and board games.
“this gif”
We may never know if this .gif is real or not.
“dude got roasted”
A reminder that we need to shame these tech losers when encountering them in public! Don’t let their hip gyrations or diddling fingers get you!
“#fifa”
The closest thing to a Robocop animal porn you’ll find.
And, finally, a reason to potentially eat raw frozen shrimp.
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Maybe a bit of a stretch, but I wonder if older gens subconsciously gatekeeping resources to build culture is a fucked up way of calcifying their own relevance. Mainstream art from 30 years ago is still impressive because there was money for it, and artists who were lucky enough to come up then get to have rich, ambitious bodies of work that have aged well because industries were happy to foot the bill for creative freedom. But if labels, studios, magazines, etc were on their last legs by the time most millennials graduated, then there's no way younger gens could compete with the art they were raised on, or build on it enough to make it look conservative by comparison. (Like sometimes I think it's weird Trent Reznor gets to still be considered cool when he's a former streaming executive who scores Disney movies and openly cries to Dua Lipa?) If the weirdos who could challenge the legacies of older gens can't even afford to play the game, those gens can, in a way, stay young by way of how their art still feels fresh and edgy, or even just how non-famous people of those gens got to do and see much more. Gen Xers love to reminisce too, but the stark difference between them and millennials is that many of them got to enjoy bigger, wilder youths for a longer stretch of time before choosing to settle into the kinds of homes and jobs that should be available to us, talking about that kind of life like it's normal (which it should be) but not seeming curious about how much visibly harder younger gens have to work to get, like, a third there. (I've noticed they love to talk about how hard they worked too, something that came up repeatedly in an interview I recently transcribed with a '90s music video director who said his rent in LA in 1993 was $175.) I really think we should be furious at Gen X! I think kidultification is proof they're scared!!
“Polyester relationships” sent me into Bolivia 😫🫠😂