2018

XKCD finally catches up to the current year!

This comic demonstrates something about the decadence of modernity that I had not previously grasped. It should be obvious that comic books and associated nerd crap started going wrong in the 1980s, when people stopped growing out of it. This gave rise to the well-known Comic Book Guy manchild demographic, made up of disaffected adults who had never learned to think in a mature way. Over the following couple decades, the millennials developed, steeped in a culture which appears to have actually lost the capacity to grow up. I had wondered for a while what was going to happen to the millennials as they themselves grew older. XKCD No. 2018 demonstrates that they will respond by clinging in panic to the trappings of nostalgia with an ever-more-tenacious grip. Only those blessed few whose cultural memory includes more than the imaginations of Stan Lee and George Lucas, it appears, will be able to grow into fully-formed adults as Paul writes in 1 Cor 13:11.