The Selfie and Serendipity’s Extinction

In my day, we went to coffeeshops

It took two minutes to walk to the local cafe from my mother’s house, so when I was a teen in the 1990s I simply walked, grabbed a cappuccino, and sat on one of the old couches. I was shy, but I still got into plenty of conversations with a bunch of people. I ran into two ex-girlfriends there; I learned how to play Magic the Gathering there. I also heard a lot of bad poetry (and some good) performances, met some local artists, and even had a brief but intense relationship with a Catholic girl that ended in a betrothal and a very messy breakup.

In other words, I had a life.

It wasn’t glamorous or interesting, and it was by no means different from what most lower middle-class suburban American kids could expect. It wasn’t even all that different from what my parents experienced; while the social concerns differed (overpopulation and social injustice were their concerns; HIV and lack of good jobs were mine), the process was the same.

I can’t go to coffeeshops anymore, at least not in the United States. They depress me.

To see so many young people on their computers, not talking to people sitting right next to each other, is to see the social alienation that has become a part of Millennial culture.

A lot of their social interaction is online, and this is where the selfie comes in. As self-representation, the selfie is taken and distributed on the internet, so the image of the individual is seen by many more people than my image was in my social network of the 90's—the coffeeshop. By its nature, the selfie is a much more controlled image and a projection of the self to other people in their own physical spaces—to be viewed on their own screens in their own homes.

This allows Millennials to represent themselves on their own terms in a two-dimensional space, but it disallows one thing that is increasingly disappearing: serendipity.

Many will dismiss me as an old man who is out of touch. Xkcd loves the internet age—the ability to never be bored and never have to talk to people you don’t like. And certainly, Millennials are having plenty of sex and making plenty of friends.

But the fondest memories I have of my youth aren’t the sex or even the multitude of friends I had. One of the best memories of my youth comes from a night in 2000, shortly after the very bad breakup mentioned above. I went to a house party full of people I barely knew and ended up staying up until 2 a.m. with four guys, just bullshitting and cracking jokes. The chemistry of these people combined with the stories we had to tell each other was magical; I’ve only experienced that two other times in my life—and never online.

It was totally unplanned, unexpected, and immensely enjoyable. I laughed so hard that I got winded as tears rolled down my cheeks. I ended up remaining friends with that group for about a year, until I moved away from my home town.