RHIAN SASSEEN

Today has been a long day. You leave work, that thankless retail day job; you return home; you open your laptop screen. You trawl your RSS feeds, searching for news, for entertainment, for anything: distraction. You are overeducated, lovelorn, a little insecure; you are in your twenties. When the New York Times writes of you, it is laughable; when the Huffington Post notices, it is absurd. You, you, you: you exit your windows. You close your laptop. You are exhausted.

- But it was never really about “you,” was it?

A pox upon the second person, the point of view seemingly favored by so many Millennial bloggers – or perhaps simply promoted in particular by one blog, a purported voice of the Millennials. I am talking, irritatingly enough, of Thought Catalog, a blog that likes to think of itself as “in some small way…the future of journalism,” though if meandering personal accounts of breaking up with one’s college girlfriend or top ten lists liberally peppered with the word “twentysomething” are the genre’s future, maybe it really is time to let it die. No matter: for a true dose of narcissism, check out any of the posts that use the second person, that mark of self-obsession disguised as authorial immediacy.

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