Can't See the Starbucks for all the Trees

Or so some would say. People have always romanticized nature- they long to be on a sailing ship letting the salty air blow through their hair; or sprawled out on a large, flat rock at the top of some mountain, staring at the clouds in the sky. We talk about what a shame it is that we aren't there, that we don't appreciate the wonders of the natural world, the one we lived in before we paved over it and built a mini-mall.

If nature is so great, then why are you still in the city? Why don't you move out, build a small cabin, live off the land, eating berries and fish? It seems so simple. And it is, if you put the slightest amount of effort into achieving it. Not every natural habitat is gone. Though humans tend to wish for the impossible, in this case, our love for the idea is based on the fact that we could achieve such a wonder. But we don't.

Douglas Coupland knows why. He thinks about it quite a bit. It is a defining characteristic of his very existence. Born into a lonely suburb of Vancouver, raised on Star Trek, Schoolhouse Rock, and McDonalds, his existence is an example of a life quite uneventful and for many of us, quite ordinary. What makes us special, what gives our society a reason to exist has become almost an obsession with him. While he finds nature appealing, he has a reason to stay in the modern world, and by extension, so does his fellow man. The reason we are still here, in the world of Burger King, Kinko's, and Microsoft, is very simple. We like it here. We prefer the modern world, and a person can speak of the bliss that comes from walking down a pearly beach next to a cobalt ocean, hand-in-hand with his significant other. But he'd much rather be walking through Central Park, over paved walkways and asphalt roads, under leafy boughs and a starless sky. He'd rather be there because afterwards, he knows he can walk two blocks to the nearest Starbucks and order a tall latte. This is a world of convenience.

Coupland speaks of convenience in his essay "The Past Sucks." However, the world longed for in this piece is not nature, but rather the past, what once was. The romance of Old Paris or Pre-Colonial America, they are as longed for and as distant as the natural world we imagine in our dreams. He asks us if we'd really want to go back. He considers the fact that they, the society of past times, didn't have Prozac, TV remote controls, or even transatlantic flights. You couldn't fly to Paris if you wanted to. We are happier for what we have now, in the present, and want more. As Coupland says in this writing, "The future is invariably better than yesterday." What is to come is always more exciting that what is, after all, with the passage of time comes progress and usually, the term 'progress' has come to signify something better.

Is progress always better? The H-bomb tells us no. For every achievement we make, every step forward, there is always something negative about progress. These make our society wish we had never come this far, that we had stayed in the trees with the other primates. In his essay "Pillow Mint," Coupland steps forward and states: "Comfort isn't progress." Modern society can seem very cold sometimes.

Therefore, Coupland believes that meaning must be attached to objects. We have linked our existence to them, and without a meaning, life becomes frozen and empty. An empty void lacks purpose. How many times has it been said that Generation X, those youths born between 1965-1985, lack a direction in which to go? Douglas Coupland was born into this age subset, and he does not perceive his life to be empty. He takes initiative, and finds purpose in his comfortable and enjoyed existence. The ordinary things that permeate and define his life are studied, dissected, explained. For example, a method of conveyance has meaning, an object like the subway, a street, or a bridge. In his essay "Lions Gate Bridge" he writes about a bridge in Canada that he had driven over many times. This object has become the structure of his mind, the passage through which all his ideas and dreams travel through. It is a thing of beauty that others want to tear down to build another more utilitarian structure. To him, the meaning becomes that of an outpost, the last construction of purpose and meaning before one enters the wasteland. Here in this example, the barren is a lack of beauty. He takes an object of steel and concrete and creates a meaning for it, like the meaning we need to give our own lives.

Minute details are all metaphors for something else in our lives: other examples would include the idea of the commute as a metaphor for life, or the hotel room as heaven. In "Hubs" he goes into the idea of refueling stops and layovers as nothing places, as voids that technically don't exist. A common saying among people is that life is a journey, not a destination. Therefore life is not a place, much like these hubs, which are not destinations themselves. They are steps on the pilgrimage to our objective: just as we travel through life toward death. At the end of his dissertation on hubs, Coupland talks about "kissing the nothingness," or embracing the void. The meaning comes across as 'enjoy life.' In his eyes, they are all the same statement: to accept the hub as a place, is to accept life as our reality, which must be cherished and enjoyed before it slips away.

If life is slipping away, where does it go? Is it a moving walkway in an airport, heading toward the ghostly white terminals that take us to the plane? The similarity of the boarding tunnels to the heavenly white shaft that takes us to the afterlife is more than a coincidence. Someone had to design and construct the airplane gate, and both tunnels take us somewhere far away. Coupland considers this, now he must contemplate where we are going once we have boarded the plane.

Once we have boarded this aircraft, a 747 as the metaphor for living, where does it go? Where will life take us? For the young, they can only get older. Youth must end. There is a line between life and death, and there is one between childhood and maturity. The latter usually entails responsibility. And increased wisdom. Knowledge gained as one ages is valued, just as we value nature and comfort. If the wise truly understand more, hopefully they know the answers to the questions we ask about our society. They should know why we have not left it behind for the wilderness.

So, if Coupland understands so much about society and it's trappings, is he wise? He may not say it, hindered by modesty, but he will say that progress has been made in his persona, he is a better person than he was yesterday. This is apparent in the "The German Reporter," when he meets the aforementioned journalist. The German reporter is a mirror image of Douglas Coupland circa ten years ago, and the difference is as striking as when we think about the medical technology of Ye Merry Olde Englande compared to Los Angeles, 1998.

We are grateful for the advances we have made technologically, as a society. Does this pride extend to the finer points, like salad forks and Gameboys? Speaking to Generation X as someone who has 'been there' and seen it, learned from experience, Coupland makes his key point in his essay "James Rosenquist's F-111," where the painting of the same name is stripped and dissected for value. The piece is a representation of various images aligned side by side on the canvas, a long horizontal panel. It includes pictures of a light bulb, a Firestone tire, and an Air Force jet. This painting is a representation of what he believes, in the intrinsic value of our pop culture icons, the value of the minor and sometimes insignificant material objects of our lives. Art is studied, interpreted and valued: the use of these generic, everyday images in a piece of 'distinguished art' sends a message to him: 'love culture.' All of us should appreciate the society that shaped the development of Generation X. Don't bemoan the passing of nature. Because we were not born into the natural world, and will never truly be a part of it. We know deep in our hearts, where we belong. Running away from our society is not happiness; there is always the lingering sense of what we are avoiding and what we have lost. So we must find happiness here, in the modern world. We must find ourselves in our natural habitat. Welcome to the 21st century.

Blythe, Will. "Doing Laundry at the End of History." Esquire (March 1994): 170-171