"Contemporary" Makes Less and Less Sense — Here Are 15 New Ways to Look at It | 100 Big Questions About Life

Is "contemporary" the biggest meme of the contemporary era?

If any buzzword in life today manages all three at once — rich in meaning, as all-purpose as a tin of balm, and impossible for anyone to define — "contemporary" is probably in the top three.

"Contemporary" started out meaning simply "the age we are living in," one of those words that seem to have always been lying around in everyday life, requiring no effort to understand and hardly a new coinage. You have run into it plenty of times at QDaily Research Lab. But search your memory a little and you may notice that for a long time it kept rather solemn company — "contemporary art," "contemporary writers" — and only in the last few years has it entered our daily vocabulary, with a meaning that is now oddly hard to describe. Today's "contemporary" is less a summary of a stretch of time than shorthand for "what a tangled, impossible-to-explain, everything-at-once age this is." Which is to say that "contemporary," like "hardcore" or "traffic," has turned into a spectacle, a meme with a note of mockery and deconstruction in it. What it really wants to say is: "There, look at the world. That's how it is."

What We Talk About When We Talk About "the Contemporary"

At the end of 2018, QDaily Research Lab asked readers, "What small thing this year gave you the feeling that an era was starting or ending?" The answers that drew the most agreement included "realizing the biggest stars are now younger than I am," "never having to carry cash," "the death of Jin Yong," and "getting used to paying for video subscriptions." Between them they cover the typical impressions people hold of "the contemporary":

• A way of life summed up by words like globalization, fragmentation, and urbanization — the clearest example being the "cloud spaces" of cafés and airports, which look about the same anywhere on earth;
• Ordinary people who love technology and embrace the internet, are frightened by technology's dark side, and stay stuck to their phones and social media anyway;
• Fashionable feelings whose specialty is dramatizing the smallest of first-world problems (see social anxiety, FOMO, bad-news fatigue);
• And the "age of X" symbolized by celebrities, influencers, products, and big companies — the sharing age, the idol age, the instant-messaging age, and the rest.

Stack these together and you get the brave new world in front of you, plus a "sense of the times" you can neither see nor touch but that keeps making you stop and think.

Still, what exactly is so special about this contemporary era, the one labeled with shopping sprees, nitpickers arguing everywhere, the influencer economy, information anxiety? Do those of us living inside it, wearing the honorary titles of millennial, Gen Z, digital nomad, drifting generation, really differ so much in temperament that we deserve to be sorted this finely?

No — we ask the question not to deny that "the contemporary" is special. From hippies to rappers, from television to the phone, from newspapers to Instagram, every generation has its own fads, its own symbols, its own pull, and the changes are real. We only want to point out that whenever a generation gets hold of the microphone, it makes a habit of noticing and stressing how unlike anyone else it is, of believing that "the best times are behind us," that "young people these days," and that "no generation has had it as hard as ours."

Seen that way, the so-called "new era" is a bit like a machine stuck on replay, and the distance between it and the era before it may be shorter than we think. When you notice the surface signs — rebellion against tradition, endless reminiscing about the past, fatigue with the perfectly ordinary — and then consider the human reason and feeling underneath, you find that most of the time they are neither fashionable nor new. Some of them recur; some are permanent experiences that everyone has.

The British science-fiction writer Douglas Adams once proposed three laws of technology: "Anything already in the world when I was born is ordinary, part of the natural order of things. Anything invented between my fifteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays is a revolutionary product that will change the world. Anything invented after I turn thirty-five is heresy against the natural order." That goes some way toward explaining why "the age of X" keeps getting more frequent and less valuable. Now and then time really is cut cleanly by something we call a milestone, a trigger, an anniversary. Far more often, "an era" is only a shortcut for "I want one word that covers everything I can see" — a net that information weaves around us, one that keeps making us feel honored to be inside it.

Since "the contemporary" has already been fitted with so many personas and labels — the word itself is now a label — we may as well try a few new ones on it. They might at least sound more fun than "the age of traffic":

The Avocado Age

Cherries have not been around long enough, and kale's name is too much of a mouthful. What other fruit has won this much love, been called "a symbol of global trade," and swept from North America across Asia? Americans eat 7.5 pounds of avocado a year, the USDA says — more than peaches, pears, plums, prunes, and nectarines combined. At this rate there is no reason to go on calling the middle class the middle class. It should be the avocado class.

The Sweet Sparkling Wine Age

The era of "either you never touch a drop or you drink yourself under the table" is over. For young people who like low-alcohol drinks, the new fashion is "off work, at home, pouring myself one." You can read that as contemporary people being more relaxed, or more self-loving, or lonelier, or more careful about the line between one person and another. Whatever the reason, the sweet fizzy stuff won.

The "Pink Is Always the Limited Edition" Age

Whatever the product, people buy the black one or the white one for the specs, the experience, the performance. People buy the pink one for a single reason: it is pink. Pink stopped being a women's color long ago; it is now the thing everyone wants and cannot have. Otherwise, why would so many people fight through the crowd and stand in line for a pink cat-paw cup and pink limited-edition sneakers?

The "There's No Problem a Cat Can't Solve" Age

People have supposedly kept cats since ancient Egypt, but the cat has only become the spiritual totem of contemporary life in the past few years. A cat is a sense of belonging in an empty apartment, the office's unofficial staff-morale officer, the source of happiness for millions who keep cats only through a screen. Even Netflix's recent Love, Death & Robots casts the cat as the villain running everything from behind the curtain. All is illusion; only the cat is real.

The "Why Are There More and More Disposable Things?" Age

A joke stops being funny after one telling. Friends unfollow each other in both directions over a single disagreement. An idol's scandal breaks and the fans are gone the same afternoon. You check in at the influencer café once and never go back. Collins Dictionary picked "single-use" as its 2018 word of the year, and when you look around at the instant aphorisms, disposable truths, and one-and-done TV dramas, you have to admit they are right: this is a "throw-away society" in the fullest sense.

The "So Much Talking Online That Talking in Person Feels Strange" Age

Talking face to face used to be ordinary, but the art of it is no longer a live subject — however thick the stream of comments running through your head, there is no way to sync it onto your face. Using the slang, the stickers, and the punctuation correctly, with exactly the right number of "haha"s, is the language class everyone now has to take. Some say real offline contact is about to become this era's luxury good. And so what? Isn't that exactly what those of us with social anxiety wanted?

The "You Can Have My WeChat, But Not My Douban" Age

Yes, social platforms come with their own border controls. These days we can sort even the word "friend" into 17 kinds, and a friendship with the same person moves at a different pace on each platform. Who doesn't have a few friends they would die for online and fall into a strange silence with after three sentences of small talk offline, or a few they added because it might come in handy and muted a week later because they couldn't take it? That is not hypocrisy. That is holding to a principle.

The "Headphones Are the Force Field Humans Were Born With" Age

If you have the "something feels wrong everywhere if I leave home without headphones" symptom, or the "nobody beats me while my own soundtrack is playing" complex, congratulations: you have arrived in the rare sweet period when a blank face has replaced a smile as the standard equipment for going outside. This era welcomes you.

The "Lifestyle ≈ Philosophy of Unwinding" Age

The good-life trio from Scandinavia and Japan has been shouted about for years. Minimalism, whose founding rule is that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, has not been fully worked out yet, and danshari, whose secret teaching is "let it go," is already gaining on it. Ready-to-eat life philosophies put out a new version on strange logic every few months, from pyt, which promises to restart your life, down to ASMR, which promises five minutes of calm. The louder anxiety gets in contemporary daily life, the more popular the placebos that claim to cure it.

The Secondhand Life Age

The glorious result — or the byproduct — of information flooding daily life: every problem you run into has a template waiting online. How to dress plainly but well, where to eat cheaply and well, which headphones are worth the money, whether to take a job or sit the graduate exam, whether to buy bitcoin. You just take the answer as given. What the world is like, what living feels like, how to live most sensibly: someone has laid out the whole solution for you. You no longer have to go looking for life's answers yourself. The search engine has them.

The "Every Emotion Needs a Name" Age

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London say that once an emotion has a name you feel it more often, and its effect on you feels more manageable. Contemporary people, bless them, have taken the lesson thoroughly to heart. The identical little joys and little irritations are out of fashion; the pettiest feelings now come with more elegant names: "fear of better options syndrome," "blank-time anxiety," "multitasking compulsion," "answer dependency," and the summit of pettiness, "Whisker fatigue" (meaning: when a cat pushes its face into the bowl, the feeling of its whiskers brushing the rim makes it tense, so it paws the food onto the floor to eat, picks fights with other cats, or frets its way through dinner). Truly, no creature is more self-absorbed than the contemporary human.

The "Social Media Needs Reining In" Age

Being glued to the phone is a sin; getting your endless appetite for information under control is the highest form of political correctness. Everyone shouts that "scrolling Weibo is exhausting" and "put WeChat down and do something else," and not one person actually leaves. There is a hot topic at every hour, a feed with no bottom, and game mechanics engineered for pleasure. "Everyone uses it, what am I supposed to do," we sigh, while our thumb expertly taps a friendly like on someone's nine-photo Moments post.

The "The Internet Age Is Already Passé" Age

Twenty years ago it was still "the internet's prehistory." Now, if someone brings up "the internet age," it sounds as if they are about to reminisce about BBSs, floppy disks, and MSN. "Year One" and "the next big wave" are not only inaccurate; the speed at which they come and go is now measured in days. "The contemporary" may be an illusion, but the sense that the times are turning over faster and faster is entirely real.

The "The Best Era Has Already Passed" Age

The older TV dramas were better. The cartoons of your childhood looked better. Women in that era were more beautiful. "When the arty young want to go back to the age of Hemingway and Picasso, the Hemingways want to go back to the age of Byron and Hugo, and the Byrons always want the Renaissance — the golden age is always in the past." The line explains childhood, homesickness, and music, and it seems to explain why we keep looking back. Scientists, after all, have said that nostalgia is at bottom a form of unhappiness.

The "Bet You Wouldn't Dare Live It Again" Age

The phrase comes from the New York Times, but the feeling it describes is not unfamiliar. Heraclitus said no one steps into the same river twice, and "the contemporary" works the same way: the moment you say the word, a small part of it is already past tense. On one side, life seems to flatten out a little more every year. On the other, something happens to you and the sense of taking a critical hit from contemporary life rises up out of nowhere. In that moment you may be as close as you will ever get to what "contemporary life" actually is: some things have changed, and some things never will.

Cover image and illustrations: Zheng Shuya