GillianLanyon.com

The postwar plenitude of the 1950s was marked by a new form of middle-class striving we called “keeping up with the Joneses,” and it involved making sure your car was newer, lawn greener, and kitchen bigger than your neighbours’. But as the anti-consumerist values of the counterculture become absorbed into the mainstream, conspicuous rebellion — a.k.a. cool — became the dominant status hierarchy in urban North America for the next 40 years. But cool died out a decade or so ago, when the fraudulent nature of its political posturing was exposed by the seamless transition of hippies into yuppies and the failure of the anti-globalization movement to advance any agenda beyond “let’s break stuff.” Into this cultural vacuum stepped the authenticity-seekers, who simply doubled down on the political aspirations of the counterculture. Where cool was about non-conformity and the rejection of mass society, authenticity set itself up as a root-and-branch rejection of the social, economic, and political infrastructure of the modern world. But it is not hard to see how everything that might serve as a source of authenticity could be put to work in a status competition. When it comes to shopping locally, how local is local enough? If we want to live a low-impact, environmentally conscious lifestyle, how far do we need to go? Living an authentic life turns out to be a positional good that gets its value from the force of what Veblen called an “invidious” comparison — i.e. designed to create resentment. You can only be authentic as long as most of the people around you are not, which has its own built-in radicalizing dynamic. You start out getting an organic-vegetable delivery service once a month, and the next thing you know everyone is growing chickens in their attics, bragging about their trips to Bhutan and helicopter-parenting their 100-mile children. The upshot is that something that started out as a relatively innocent attempt at doing things that are not only pleasurable but also good for society and good for the planet has been revealed as nothing more than a consumer-driven hoax. On the one hand, those of us who are status-conscious can relax, knowing that we have one less thing to be anxious about. But if our culture’s past is any guide to its future, something else will come along soon enough. In fact, it probably already has.