When I started this series, I did not yet know about the worldwide computer fallout.
I had been living offline, in what I considered the first steps of this project to living as if in the 20th century.
Or to at least to be a digital minimalist, and to be mindful about checking the news.

Today’s computer crash had been going on for hours, before I noticed it.

But it does make it a good day to start this project in the footsteps of the movie Fight Club, which features Project Mayhem;
Independent cells of activists, all attaching capitalist institutions in a series of bombings.
It’s how the movie Fight Club ends.

And today, with another global meltdown, is when our new story of Fight Club begins.
How this diary, begins.

What will follow, is what I wrote for you, prior.
Before I knew there was a computer meltdown today.
Before I knew the Universe, God or fate;
Has all of our reborn-nihilist backs.

“The things you own end up owning you.”

Welcome to Fight Club.

~Suzanne Beenackers
Gen X diarist

 

Live Like Tyler

Gen X Diary 2024 07 19 episode 1

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How can I be anything but humble, when 25 years later all I have for you is:

“We need to go back to Fight Club.
This is what we need to hear and there is nothing anyone of us can add to its message that would not be redundant, conflicting, or flat out misleading.”

I’m guessing all Generation X-ers, born between 1965 and 1980, who loved that movie, will look around realizing they failed Fight Club’s message.
They had a chance against 21st century’s new consumerism trickery, where our need for online social likability and our obsession with what other people are doing has reached appalling levels;
Yet did we live up that wisdom?

Can we honestly say we used Fight Club’s message?
That we are the ones not installing all those apps on our phones?
The ones not scrolling?
Using social media and online opportunities to create freedom, even if it is just for ourselves;
Or do we let it cage us?
Exactly like the IKEA catalog had the character of Jack enslaved, every time he came home after a day at work and needed to compulsively buy furniture to alleviate the restlessness of his soul.

Is our current state anything else than a testimony that despite having the exact right age in 1999, to receive the message when it was there
– that young professionals are stepping onto the dangerous wheel of working meaningless jobs in order to earn money to buy stuff they do not need –
we learned nothing.

The answer is No.
It is nothing else.
Our current state of owning more than in 1999 and engaging more in meaningless social structures, is the testimony that we indeed learned nothing.

So there is that side of realizing that I and all others who felt the truth of the message of Fight Club at a visceral level, did shockingly little with it.

But there is also another side to how I feel, which I would label;
Accomplished.
Happy.
Expectant.
Because this Gen X diary, as modest as I feel its beginnings are right now, it is the result of having thought about “this” for a very long time.
Where “this” stands for a very broad question of what the fuck went wrong.
And “long” for at least about four, five years.

And the pieces of the puzzle I had did indeed look similar to what this diary will be about, which is to implement Fight Club’s wisdom into the 2024 reality and live accordingly.
These earlier elements of what ultimately has become this project, were:
-toying with the idea of living a 20th century life.
-an understanding I had to be in the Now.
-creating my own concept of Space-time consciousness, the ability to “hold” blocks of time, and in an actual 3D space. 

But living a 2024 life inspired by principles of the movie Fight Club, has all those elements in them.
But better.

Because the three elements mentioned are all executional. They’re all an operationalization of a bigger truth.
When the movie Fight Club brings me back to the bigger truth I have been hunting for in all those years. 

It is, of course, the message, the bigger truth, of Freedom.

“I am free in all the ways that you are not.”
Fight Club’s Tyler Durden tells Jack.

The question I need to start asking myself, is not:
“Is this something I could have done in the 20th century?”
It is not:
“Am I in the Now, when I do this?”
Not:
“Am I holding space-time in the 3D?”

It is simple, it is unchanging, and it is the same question that should have been at the top of every young professional’s mind in 1999, and every Gen X-er grappling with 2024 life.

The question to live life well is:
“Does this liberate me?”

Because the message of Fight Club in 1999, was one word.

Freedom.

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Suzanne L. Beenackers
20th century Rock Star Writer

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“Live Like Tyler”
is the first Gen X diary entry. 

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