youth literature. noun 1. literature created by youth, for whoever.

I am currently trying to get my shit together, and the likelihood of it ever happening is feeling increasingly elusive as I try to plan and work at the same time. Meanwhile I’m reading The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis¹, which isn’t helping.

He’s going on about the ‘prosperity scandal’ and the mythologies that have propped up the misconception that neoconservative, free-market orthodoxies have increased the nation’s wealth in the last thirty years. Instead of managing the nation’s economy, these policies have thrown caution to the wind at a time when Australia has been fortunate enough to be buffeted upwards by globalisation².

On some level Australia’s mind boggling economic ineptitude and short-sightedness makes me feel better about my own financial mismanagement. Especially when I remember how I like to make concessions for my life, based on reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago.

By mashing Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return and Parmenides’ Theory of Opposites³ , Kundera’s concept of lightness might mitigate our bungling through life: if we are not burdened by the responsibility of having lived and learned from this life before, we are light – but our lives are meaningless, without weight; if we are burdened with this responsibility, our lives are weighty – but the repetition somehow gives them meaning, something to do with cycles⁴.

I’d say that we’re making it up as we go along, so as long as we endeavour to learn from our mistakes, our lives might be meaningless, but at least they’ll be pleasant. And by really bastardising it I came up with something like consolation: just as I have no experience of this life prior to my birth, I also have no experience of living in an economic environment that might have encouraged me to think long-term about my finances.

I had my parents of course, and they’re great with money, but I disregarded a lot of what they said. My bad. And anyway, I’m talking about how I might have turned out if I had grown up immersed in a successful, carefully regulated mixed-market economy – such as …⁵ Maybe I’d be able to make rent without living off beans and noodles for the following two weeks.

Seriously, I wonder about how a nation’s psyche might manifest as characteristics in whole portions of generations of citizens. People my age – teenagers growing up from 1996 to 2007 – were raised to believe that the prosperity we enjoyed would continue forever.

It didn’t, and the prospect of getting my shit together in this climate is all the more troublesome because of the pervasive feeling that I am pushing shit up hill.

Because we have both⁶ relied extensively on unexpected economic windfalls to give the impression of progress. We’ve worked hard, sure, but I’ve also been a lucky boy in a lucky country. Just as Australia has ridden the sheep’s back, then the miner’s back and now ‘the debtor-citizen’s back’⁷, I have coasted on the back of my parents’ success, on the back of a generation of false economic pretenses perpetrated by the Whitlam government through to the K Rudd, a bunch of noobs acting out on ideology rather than reason or good common sense.

And just like Australia, I have hit a brick wall after this unbridled, rapid and sometimes inexplicable propulsion through a false personal economy. About all that I’ve gleaned from living in this economy is an understanding of the ‘bubble’ concept: when the luck ran out and I needed to scrape myself up, I got my head around the bubble.

I feel like I’m back at the starting grid, but the race hasn’t stopped. Mark Davis’s Australia is at a similar point, from where it must learn from the failure of two eras of political consensus and move forward with a new vision. Get its shit together, basically.

1. whose blog is unfortunately not working [↩]
2. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 255 [↩]
3. which, the deeper I dig, seems to not exist – being, instead, a theory that Heraclitus presented and Parmenides rebuked [↩]
4. my intuition makes it more difficult to grasp weight than to grasp lightness – the fleeting, meaninglessness of a quick fling with life, a chromosome glitch and nothing more, that makes more sense to me [↩]
5. do these exist? [↩]
6. Australia and I [↩]
7. Mark Davis, Land of Plenty, p. 262 [↩]