Contemporary strivers lack the tools that people in the past used to differentiate themselves from their peers: They live in a post-virtue, post-religion, post-aristocracy age. They lack the skills or inspiration to create something of genuine worth. They have been conditioned to find all but the most conventional and compromised politics worthy of contempt. They are denied even the cold comfort of identification with career, as they cope with the deadening tedium and meaninglessness of work by calling attention to it over and over again, as if acknowledging it will elevate them above it.
Into this vacuum comes a relief that is profoundly rational in context: the self as consumer and critic.
– Freddie DeBoer, “The Resentment Machine”
Excerpted from The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 1: Precarity ($2)