Teaching college students can be depressing. It’s the end of the semester and I am already hearing a shocking array of excuses for why work is not being handed in and class not being attended (my favorites so far have included a severed thumb, a dead rabbit and a dream involving a paint factory) and I am starting to refer students to the MP-YP scene in Boogie Nights. They seem at times like a generation mired in excuses.

And yes they can often seem a generation mired in itself as well. Several times, in my memoir class, I have had students (usually the same ones) ask me of the reading we are doing: Why should I care about this person? The person in question being Nabokov and Paula Fox and most recently, Robert Graves, whose autobiography, Goodbye To All That, left some of them gobsmacked. Graves was, after all, describing events of almost one hundred years ago. But hearing that something “doesn’t speak to my experience” is depressing in a college setting (where I thought you went to learn about others’ experiences), especially when coming from aspiring writers (who are supposed to be curious about all manner of experience). Forget about the fact that the aftershocks of WWI are still being felt today: in the Balkans, the Middle East, the arts, psychology…

So I asked those students to come up with some ideas for what might be their WWI; what event could have the same effect on their generation that the Great War did on the Lost Generation? And the answers were surprising. Yes, at least one mentioned 9.11 and the events that followed, the endless war. But more mentioned some form of global apocalypse (climate change, vanishing resources) while the number two candidate for chief concern/generation shaping event was…isolation.

This might surprise any parent of a teenager (and most of my students are just leaving Teendom) who think this is a different kind of lost generation — lost in iPods, cell phones, laptops. The good news, I guess, is that many are aware of it and hate that the ideal of unification, of some shared experience, has been lost to forms of endless self-expression and self-reference. The feeling I had was that the two concerns — apocalypse now and ostrich defense — were related and some are dying to lift their heads up, even if they are afraid of smelling the smoke.