John Campbell has an interesting advertisment for his show (Campbell Live) on Monday night. Basically, it involves shots of the Big Day Out, with his voice questioning if 'Generations X and Y' aren't 'The Lost Generation'.

It's a shame that John and his team are eighty years late! The Lost Generation were the people who came of age during and just after World War One. It particularly refers to the expatriates - a group of American artists and writers living in Europe at the time. People like Earnest Hemmingway, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. They weren't just 'lost' because of the war - they were anomic (my favourite term), dislocated and disillusioned.

Campbell's list of things the Nova Lost are facing pales in comparison to two world wars and a depression that made a quarter of the workforce unemployed; apparently, we’re "crippled by student loan debt and living beyond our means", We're having to give up our "dreams of owning a home". Oh noes. Big deal.

I think there's often something useful in trying to condense down the spirit of the times (or of a generation) into a simple phrase or explanation: it helps in getting a sense of the general feeling, the intangible energy in the air. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's account of what's sometimes now called the consciousness revolution: "that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

That's fantastic. But the temptation, all over the place these days, is to pick up whatever short term trend you want to hype, put it into the form 'The [your term here] Generation' and make a lot of noise about it. Perhaps I'm wrong but in twenty years we're not going to be known as The Lost Generation because of mortgages and personal finance.