“ But still, my feeling is that if you’re not self-obsessed you’re probably boring. Not that you can always tell the self-obsessed. The best sort of self-obsessed person isn’t outwardly so. But they’re doing something more public than not, making sure people know that they’re doing it, or will know about it sooner or later. I guarantee that the applicants for The Real World — I guarantee that if you put all these tapes in a time capsule and opened it in twenty years, you’d find that these are the people who are, in one way or another, running the world — at the very least, they’ll be the most visible segment of the demographic. Because we’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think about how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible. And thus, there is a lot of talking about it all — surely the cultural output of this time will reflect that — there’ll be a lot of talking, whole movies full of talking, talking about talking, ruminating about talking about wondering, about our place, our wants and obligations — the blathering of the belle epoque, you know. Environmentally reinforced solipsism.
— Dave Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (via jennabrom)