What happens when a generation obsessed with information becomes nihilistic and all that information becomes perceived as meaningless? Rather than an overload, the information is beginning to bore people, and once it does that, it will stop being shared. So far, it's been the source of our culture. What happens to it next when that runs dry? Society has become too connected to become truly individualistic again as it did in the 90s, and besides, originality has itself lost its originality.
From the excess of novelties, people will focus more on quality rather than quantity, but which will they determine to be valuable when there is every possibility to choose from, and no universal values that place one above another? Indifference seems to be the new norm, and indifference goes beyond even boredom, it's boredom with the state of being bored, and as such even more neutral. The boredom that drove people to seek novelty ended up with our culture being filled with randomness, reflecting our disorientation, and with it seems like the only change that could come next in our culture is that there will be less of it.
Minimalism seems to have reached its peak, being inherently limited in how much it can grow because it abhors growth: it's the equivalent of the dadaist movement that preceded Modernism, focused on destruction of what there was rather than on the creation of something new. However, Modernism then became a culture focused on the creation of anything new, and minimalism is a counterreaction that wishes to destroy just that industrialism, trying to make its creation as light as possible: it's a self-destructive culture, almost more of a counterculture than a culture in its own right. In this, minimalism seems to have or be about to reach its peak, without ever having given a new character to our lifestyle, so what happens now?
Throughout the modern era there has always been a theme in our culture that determined what people talked about — now, there isn't one. Through the Internet, everyone is given their own voice, and as people run out of common themes they haven't gotten bored of, to the point that they look for the smallest possible details to nitpick ("what color is this dress?) everyone begins to speak about different themes.
Perhaps the future of our culture is that there will be no more culture, leaving us naked in our interactions with each other, either to shut up or speak only about what's on our own minds, and even that fact is becoming old-fashioned as a theme: angst is so 2000s, and as of 2015 even boredom is getting old. Everything is getting normalized, to the point that people can talk about anything without being any more likely to shock anyone than they are to really interest anyone, no matter how original it is — or would've been at one point.
Without any single mood of our culture left to discuss, the only thing left to do, then, is to actually express ourselves, but over the decades we've increasingly become so focused on our culture that we no longer even know what we feel ourselves, if we're still even capable of feeling much of anything in particular. Ultimately, however, that's what all culture originates from at some point, and that's why it had to meet its end.
Inasmuch as we still have a culture, it's made up of a few narcissists that never get bored of hearing themselves talk, mostly on the Internet, but even they're bound to get bored when they realize no one is still listening. We used to envy their confidence if only because we lacked it ourselves in our boredom, but by now, most people have become too bored with hearing what other people think of them on the Internet to care about that either.
With the death of culture, and with a lower labor participation rate than at any time since the countercultural 70s, in its stead may come a time of authenticity, an authenticity that will arise not from our culture as much as an absence of any other options. No one can say what that authenticity will look like, as it will be different for everyone, but we can say something about how it will happen. In all likelihood, in the absence of a culture people will at first try to attune their interactions to the personality of the other person, eventually to find out that the Internet generation has become so indiscriminate in its consumption of information that it no longer has a well-defined personality and pretty much anything goes. Perhaps this may cause a new period of experimentation with individuality, but it will no longer emerge from a need for individuality. What, then, will it emerge from, when all our impulses are already sated?
We've become so neutral that we don't even care to want that to change anymore, and so those of us strong enough not to become depressed will embrace the void that we've become, reveling in the feeling of confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, vagueness. Perhaps once people catch up to this, this will eventually become a new culture in itself, manifesting in values of spontaneity, openness and unicity. Perhaps to some extent this has already come to expression in the rise of such vague social identities as pansexuality. The information overload of the Internet has left us blurred with overexposure, making it hard to define our boundaries.
