The sell out generation

Gen Z not only doesn't understand the concept of selling out, but have embraced it

As the resident old man yelling at clouds, my criticisms of Gen Z are endless, though not insincere. Sure, like all older generations, I think the younger generations are Doing It Wrong. I am aware I am doing the stereotype. But I’m right.

I caught the tail end of Generation X, and came of age in the 90s. When I was young, the idea of “selling out” was shameful and shamed. When a band did it, you lost respect for them, you didn’t say, “Wow, you’ve really got to respect their business acumen.” When The Beatles' song, "Revolution," was used in a Nike ad (without the band’s blessing) in 1987, people freaked out: “When rock idealism met cold-eyed greed,” The Chicago Tribune described it.

It seems this sentiment no longer exists. It’s not just that millennials and Gen Z don’t see a problem with selling out, but they celebrate it.

A woman who commodifies her body and sexuality for profit on OnlyFans is not selling her soul, she’s make smart financial decisions. The influencer who creates a fake life and persona online for brand deals simply has a talent for content creation, and is taking advantage of the market. Speaking of, “content creation” is a thing. Just content. Any content. The point only being that it gets clicks.

Nothing that seems humiliating and soul-killing to me, from selling myself online to strange men to having to create a narrated reel every time I go out for dinner or go on vacation, is a second thought to the younger generations. It’s almost natural to them, though of course none of it is natural, if we take “natural” to mean real, genuine, or authentic. It’s all contrived. It’s all an illusion. It’s all forced and fake — offering nothing but wasted minutes of your life.

To Gen Z, there is no distinction between someone like Taylor Swift, for example, a woman with a well-off, connected father who got her into the music business, where she was packaged and sold as a product to millions of (frankly insane) fans, and someone like Kurt Cobain or Kathleen Hanna or Lauryn Hill, who became famous because they were talented and people liked their music.

In the 60s and 70s, people like Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin similarly just… worked their way up. They played music they loved and were good at it. The Beatles quit touring because their fans had become so rabid they felt it took away from the music, ffs. Can you imagine?

People my age will recall the movie Reality Bites, wherein Lelaina (Winona Ryder) struggled to choose between the brooding musician, Troy (Ethan Hawke) and the much mocked corporate sellout, Michael (Ben Stiller). So opposed to “selling out,” Lelaina won’t even take a job at The Gap. The embarrassing villain, of inarguably poor character, was always the sellout in the 80s and 90s.

Today, this seems a foreign concept.

The revered are Twitch streamers and TikTok creators who got rich by offering nothing of worth, permanence, or substance to the world. They fed the machine what it demanded and were rewarded for being good cogs.

I remember beginning to see the message that it was important to “brand” oneself, maybe ten or fifteen years ago. I found the concept distasteful and antiethical to everything I am and do. But today, I see few like me out there in the ether. I’m told I “have to” go on TikTok in order to be successful (no thank you). I am treated as dumb for not attempting to capitalize on and monetize everything I do. It’s the way of the world, today, I’m told, so why not take the opportunity?

Well, to start, because I don’t want to. I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and hate what I do, what I put out there in the world, and what I appear to stand for. I have self-respect, is how I see it. I value my character. Though I question this constantly.

Why is everyone else making more money than me? Why can’t I get into the algorithm? What am I missing?

I often wonder if I am a total failure in my “career,” whatever that is… Usually the conclusion I come to is that my success is great, in that I am doing almost exactly what I want to be doing and am happy in my life, despite making less money than most.

Obviously I didn’t become a writer because I thought I’d get rich. I got into podcasting through doing community radio (a volunteer endeavour, always), the dream being to get a gig at CBC radio one day (lol). Getting rich has never been a value or goal for me, a thing I’m realizing comes in large part from growing up working class, so assuming I would never not be working class (the idea of buying a house seemed so foreign to me I never even attempted to work towards it), but also having politicized money — rich people were unethical, I thought.

I mostly still think that’s true, though of course not for every single individual. I don’t think, say, Joe Rogan or JK Rowling are bad or unethical people. Rather, the opposite. But Rogan never aimed to get rich and famous from his podcast — he was just doing a thing with his friends that he enjoyed doing, and it took off. He is very good at what he does, and, in my opinion, has been intentional in staying down to earth, authentic, open-minded, and truly interested in people and the world around him. Rowling, famously, was a poor, single mother who escaped an abusive relationship, plugging away at Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in cafes while her baby napped. She of course hoped the book would be published, but I very much doubt she thought it would make her wealthy. Few write books under that delusion.

The reality remains, though, that it is usually the rich who get rich, not the poor. And the rich, it must be acknowledged, have different values than the working class. Rob Henderson discusses these differences, discovered when he managed to access Yale, in his book, Troubled: A memoir of foster care, family, and social class. Things like seeing social interactions as networking opportunities, choosing friends and relationships based on status and connections rather than simply on enjoying spending time with a person, and signalling virtue through political views (regardless of whether one genuinely believes the views) are behaviours common to the privileged. I’ve always felt more comfortable with working class people, and I think that’s in large part because you can just be yourself around the working class. No one is using you for status or connections, and there is no pressure to fit in. You aren’t accessing an elite clique, protected from the plebs in order to maintain it’s exclusive status. Anyone can hang with the poor. Not everyone can hang with the rich.

That’s ok, though. I mean really, why would you want to.

Ok, well I don’t want to. I acknowledge that many do. Celebrity status seems the dream echelon for Gen Z. And it’s not just about the money. The thrill of going viral, getting thousands of likes on your Instagram post, or gaining special access to exclusive events and parties seems equally if not more valuable to the young folk than financial success.

Imagine clamouring for access. It’s all so embarrassing. But we now live in a no shame culture. Be proud of your fetishes, your fat body, your mental illnesses, your uselessness, your ass spread across the internet, your embarrassing TikTok dances, and your willingness to shill for corporations who see you as little more than monetizable data. The younger generations are proud to sell out — so much so that they don’t even understand the concept.

Twenty years after writing the screenplay for Reality Bites, Helen Childress observed:

Now, there is no such thing as selling out. I have two daughters who are actually really close to the age of the characters now, and I showed the movie to them. I said, ‘It’s about selling out,’ and they were like, ‘What is that?’ 

She attempted an explanation, saying, “That’s when you exploit something that’s important to you for commercial gain, or for the benefit of a corporation.” Childress’ daughters responded by saying, “What, you mean like a sponsored post?’” 

Yeah, like a sponsored post. But also when you choose profit or status over ethics, attention over integrity, lies over truth, and a viral post over your own self-worth.

I don’t know how to undo what’s been done to this culture. It feels like social media has incentivized everything bad and nothing good. Maybe it will all implode and we’ll have to go back to making mixtapes for our friends, privately in our bedrooms, or journaling at the cafe without ever intending for those words to be read. If the grid goes down, your filters won’t disguise your uncontoured face, and your blubbering tears will only be seen by the humans closest to you, if you have managed to forge those connections at all.

Call me a luddite or a grouch — maybe stupid (I could own a house by now, after all!) — but I think I was right not to post my ass on OnlyFans. I’d rather like myself and rent.