01.04. PLEASURE/pain. The Generation Poetry Project
Pleasure has its own principle, that humans are driven towards sensory gratification, things that feel good. This is the engine of capitalism — collecting pleasurable experiences and avoiding pain and boredom in the search for happiness.
Pain is one of our biggest existential fears, alongside loneliness and death. A dose of pain heightens the contrasting pleasure, but we have low tolerance for enduring it. We rush to diagnose and medicate both our physical and emotional pain.
Analgesia serves our desire to not feel pain, at any cost. Whether the relief is delivered through morphine or a good movie, we escape reality and celebrate hedonism. But not without cos. We can create a viscous cycle of not acknowledging pain, therefore creating deep psychological pain, or being so out of it to lose life entirely.
Asceticism denies the pleasures of the body to achieve enlightenment of the mind and spirit. A defining feature of many Eastern philosophies, but also the monastic life. The meaning of life isn’t found in life, but in the transcendence of life itself. A strict diet or “Marie Kondo-ing” our homes can be a more accessible way to purge, but can quickly become judgmental, harsh and unforgiving.
Addiction is when the self-medication of our pain becomes compulsive and against our own best interests. We try and try to fill the emotional gaps by consuming. Denying the behaviour increases the harmful consumption, and awareness of the cycle only intensifies the pain.
Perversion twists the bad into good, reframing pain as pleasure. Often a response to trauma and feelings of powerlessness. Fetishising the self and others, playing roles to escape the real self, inviting negative moral judgment.
Drama rides the oscillating waves between pain and pleasure, getting stuck in a cycle of intense emotions and provocative behaviours, often manipulative. It becomes difficult to build trust, consistency in relationships, progress in life.
Dissociation is being emotionally absent when physically present. Unplugged, apathetic, detached. Functioning, but not feeling. Life becomes black and white, and one can feel like a spectator rather than a participant.
The Apocalyptic Fantasy is a complex place where reality, impression and fantasy coalesce. Generation Poetry legitimately questions their future, at the same time taking pleasure in the thought of everything being destroyed and becoming powerful protagonists in the face of hardship. The moment when the generations that have robbed them of their future are dead. The drama and tragedy they see genuinely unfurling in front of them causes tangible changes in behaviours (what they consume, what they protest), but is often communicated with a smile, or more accurately a smirk. This betrays a more complex emotional reality where pleasure emerges by flirting with pain.
Anonymous Cruelty is a clear move toward asceticism, the pleasure of doing good, being responsible, and becoming the light of the world. Detachment helps one choose more wisely, rather than from pure instinct. But there is a risk in the shadow, of not experiencing the emotional consequences of our actions and taking pleasure in shaming others. In Generation Poetry, we see this through the online bullying and cruelty that would be unthinkable in “real life.” But this generation also shows more vulnerability online, opening themselves up for abuse, in what looks like a perverted game of victim and perpetrator. The instinctive pleasures and passions of the body are denied, but served through a distorted cruelty.
Generation Poetry is known for its move away from the lure of Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. Needing to be “in it” rather than “out of it”, they meet Mr Reality before they can meet Mr Pleasure (using Freud’s words). Lust, wildness, chaos may feature in their lives (they are still teenagers, after all) but does not feature in their value set, what they want show interest in. For example, this generation tends to talk about sex more as a way to express and affirm gender identity, consent rather than loss of control. Being meta is incompatible with pure instinct. To look at things from above with the necessary detachment for cleverness and irony requires a divorce from the sometimes childish, but also genuinely creative, impulses of our unconscious mind.
To the untrained eye, Generation Poetry can look like Bedroom Vegetables. Mindlessly scrolling, apathetic (besides the few climate change warriors on the news), not interested in their future, disengaged from democracy, a worry for watchful parents. The reality we have discovered through the project, in fact the very idea of a new language, decodes these behaviours to see apathy as an action, a way to be left alone to start the revolution while nobody is watching. The bedroom is the centre of collective concentration around serious shared problems such as climate change. The lack of interest in the future belies a true sense that there is no future, the future is a useless construct in the new language that is non-linear. In this new reality, things can look silly, just a bit of fun, but create powerful waves that turn into a tsunami. The very worry of their parents is the mark of their independent thinking.
Ambivalent Intimacy is the place where the Generation Poetry Project finds its very reason to exist, where non-judgmental conversations between people of all generations are needed. Young people, all people, have always had issues around intimacy, but Generation Poetry has been especially framed as being unable to create real connections in a virtual world. People blame the technology, but it is the human hesitation to expose oneself at the root of the issue.
To have real intimacy one has to be vulnerable. Being vulnerable is risky and difficult and painful. So we resist. In this sense, technology has simply pushed the problem to the foreground. If I can hide and feel connected without being truly exposed, what am I missing out on by not achieving intimacy? This generation just happens to be the generation that will have to face this question head on. To embrace the pain of vulnerability when such an easy analgesic is at hand is extremely difficult. A way out may prevent a way in.
But poetry is an act of presence. So we are here. Together.