Punctuation of being

I WAS busy fanning myself as I faced the whirring fan to get rid of the godforsaken heat of summer. Papers had been shoved into pigeonholes or politely handed over to instructors during class. I kicked off my flats and prepared for an afternoon of mind-numbing channel-surfing in our dorm room. There was nothing much on cable TV during those days except for a new lifestyle channel called “FYI.”

I stopped surfing and watched as a young Singaporean man demonstrated how to pack wires, gadgets, socks, shirts and a plethora of other things into a single backpack for traveling. “Well,” I thought, “I should take note of that.” And I marveled as he found new use for zip-lock bags as cable pouches, and stuffed socks in shoes to save space. Then he held up a chalk board with the words: “Entrepreneur-Photographer-Traveler-Mountaineer”. A video montage of him on various adventures shot with a GoPro. “Proudly hyphenated!” he concluded.

Fast-forward a few days. My friends and I were sitting at a square table in Selena’s, melting in the comfort of sour sinigang and two cups of rice, when a confident young woman emerged on screen. “I’m a Foodie. SLASH. Blogger. SLASH. Teacher. SLASH. Trendsetter. SLASH. SUPERWOMAN.” With every slash she was transported to a separate screen, perpetually in motion. Then, she took a dollop of pink yoghurt to her lips as a celebration for “The way we live today.” A soap opera continued playing.

As I put the sour spoonful into my mouth, I thought, “How do we live today?” Then I was lost again in tamarind soup and sweet pork fat.

But whenever I chance upon these commercials and the SLASH-woman, I can’t help but think what problem or obsession our generation has with punctuation. It’s an obsession with the auxiliary and compartmentalization and segmentation reflected in the comma-slash-hyphen-colon trend of the media. Bury me in 35 hashtags and the barrage of the complicated life that we live.

Whatever happened to the simple declarative? It seems as if a fear of the finite has been instilled in young people. The constraint of the black-and-white pixel of a period incites terror at its finality, at the abrupt halt that it signifies when a sentence has reached its completion. We always feel the need to attach an addendum, to prevent the period from claiming fruition until we are satisfied with each and every segment separated by the comma-slash-hyphen-colon.

Our generation promises an exciting new trend—the ability to be more than just being, to have a life outside of the basic need for the continuation of life. It promises the experience of it with the comma-slash-hyphen-colon-ization of our lives, compartmentalized and segmented into specific consumer groups to sell lifestyles that fit our desire to be more than just meat. These days, anyone can be an adequate anything if he or she follows the right blog and buys the right things at the right store. Just swipe that Mastercard. Oh, you have Am Ex? Even better!

Call me a pessimist because that’s what I am, but self-actualization should not promote the system that propagates “commodification.” It should not support a system that turns our destiny into parts and pieces sold for us to assemble. The middle class, in our blind effort to follow the bourgeoisie, has fallen further into the spiral of consumer and labor degradation. Our quest for the experience of life has resulted in an added pressure to the labor force to manufacture the products that fuel our lifestyles. And even we, the office workers, the corporate slaves, have become devalued based on our inability to be multifaceted.

But to revolt against plurality is to be backward. To insist on a single way to be is incompatible with the mandate of evolution, the mandate of progress, and entropy. Complexity is inevitable. For the most part, this commodification of the means to self-actualization was not a creation of the consumer culture. It was a reflection of the evolving needs and values of our generation and can be rooted in the postmodern way of thinking that has influenced us in the past 100 years.

It is convenient to refer to a metanarrative—the continuing proliferation of various religions attests to this—but the growth of global communications is forcing us to interact with more than one version of the truth.

Thus, our generation faces a dilemma: to continue toward the fulfillment of our dreams, a comma-slash-hyphen-colon life and support our own commodification, or to deviate from this path and live a life of singular existence. I’m sure philosophers will find an answer to the question, but as for us, we have the SLASH-woman and the hyphenated man to tell us what to think, how to act, and what to consume. So that we may be in harmony with the way we live today: proudly hyphenated.

Renz Marie R. Nollase, 20, is a communication arts student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.