At one point, I had a totally different thesis topic than the one I landed on for my graduate research. It involved the intersection of (1) the emergence of the Anthropocene as a cultural concept and (2) the rise of non-religious Millennials in the U.S.
As someone who likes to be able to tie my personal trajectory to my professional/intellectual ambitions (to “get it how I live”, so to speak), I recently uncovered the following from an Anthropocene blog I was trying to start around the same time:
It was with the religious divination of a naturalistic pantheist—and the trademark impetuousness of a secular teenage environmental writer—that I first started writing about the environment and society. As a freshman at the Missouri School of Journalism, I thought I was hot shit for getting paid to write a weekly column on the topic for the student newspaper, The Maneater. Naturally, this started with a call-to-action for a youth climate change movement, followed by some waxing counterintuitive of eco-modernist principles, and ended with a denouncement of neoliberalism as a systemic driver of social and environmental inequality.
Throughout the rest of that first year in college, I spent a lot of time volunteering with environmental organizations, even heading up leadership positions and writing for free (something I had sworn I’d never do). This sort of activism gave me a distinct sense of purpose — but the lifestyle made me feel insular, out-of-touch, and ultimately proved to be as unsustainable as the order I was rallying against.
So when I broke down mid-way through the second semester of my freshman year, I knew I had a lot more to learn about the world. There was much more to life, politics and culture than the black-and-white, growth-vs-progress, rational-vs-irrational battle I had tied myself to in my earliest and most impassioned writing. I still had to learn what I stood for, and I wasn’t comfortable writing anything opinionated until I had a better sense of what the hell was going on.
Four years later, I’ve picked up a degree in strategic communication from the Missouri School of Journalism, minors in political science and religious studies, and a stupid collection of internships characteristic of an overly ambitious Millennial. I’ve also decided to pursue a master’s in strategic communication at MU as part of their 4+1 program.
For my thesis, I’m focusing on two cultural phenomena that hit uncannily close to home:
- The emergence of the Anthropocene as a cultural concept
- The rise of nonreligious Millennials in the U.S.
I’m basically curious as to how nonreligious Millennials conceptualize the idea of the Anthropocene, how their conceptualizations relate to modern notions, and whether there is any way to combat a sense of existential nihilism that may characterize their perceptions. I see there being a lot of implications for this research, but that’s a blog post for a later date (and I’ll link to it eventually).
There’s naturally a lot more to my story than that—including some insight into why I’m pursuing advertising as a profession—but for the purposes of this obligatory ‘About Me’ blog post, I think this suffices.