Illustration by Michael Byers

The onset of middle age used to mean that one could ease into becoming a bland old fusspot, free from the burden of remaining attuned to the microscopic upticks of the cultural barometer. You’d have bought a reliable European sedan, started making bad jokes to waitresses and receiving all your news from Time. Blissful irrelevance was the calling card.

But thanks to a confluence of factors, the generation gap that once created a comfortable buffer between youthful folly and mundane adulthood has all but eroded. Instant Internet access to the entire history of popular culture has played a role. There’s also the trend toward flat, decentralized workplaces, where those of us who watched the Nixon impeachment sit in open offices next to co-workers who were still teens when the first African-American president was elected. And not least of all is the fact that so many 40-somethings—men and women of my generation—refuse to act their age.

We now exist in a timeless culture. As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues in his new book, Present Shock, there is no past or future—only right now. “The present isn’t so much a culture of its own as it is an amalgamation of all the periods we’ve been through,” said Mr. Rushkoff. “And this makes it difficult to belong to a particular generation.”

The old generational identities that once defined us have broken down, and the net result is a messy temporal mashup in which 40-somethings act like skateboarders, 20-somethings dress like the grandfather from My Three Sons, tweens attend rock concerts with their parents and toddlers are exposed to the ethos of hardcore punk.

It didn’t used to be like this.

“I worked at Limbo cafe on Avenue A in the early ’90s, where The Paris Review would do readings for the drag queens, squatters and smackheads,” recalled Michael Rovner, a 42-year-old former magazine editor who is now a principal in the content marketing agency Mr. Finn Content Works. “These 45-year-old swells from the Upper East Side would show up, and it always seemed like they were crashing our party. But now I’m in my 40s and younger people don’t look at me that way. I can go see Sky Ferreira at Glasslands, though I suppose I do run the risk of being called ‘sir.’”

The lines are blurred, the edge has been dulled and the traditional time lines have been jumbled. We all now feed from the same cultural trough. And while the Baby Boomers are busy preparing their sloops for that sunset sail into retirement (provided their 401ks haven’t taken on too much water), the graying of Gen X has been postponed indefinitely.

While the erosion of the generation gap may seem like a positive step for society—longhairs trusting people over 30, Archie Bunker making peace with Meathead—the liberation provided by this breakdown is largely symbolic. As Mr. Rushkoff put it, “Culturally, everything is just one level deep, one search away.”

“There are no longer the same generational divides, but I think that’s also because no one is experiencing much of anything in depth,” he continued.

Which is not necessarily a condemnation of our 140-character society, or the technology that wrought it. The Internet has unlocked the creative potential of humanity, and it is making people more accountable for their actions. But for me and many of my generational cohorts, this interconnectedness has also resulted in a lot of extra homework, as we’re now expected to keep up with every new ripple in the sea of culture.

You may know, for instance, that Skrillex is the EDM dude with the weird haircut that all the suicide girl baristas had last summer—a trend that, of course, has spawned at least one Tumblr. I didn’t. So I had to do a little studying, in order to communicate intelligently with my younger co-workers.

It may sound trivial, but maintaining all this awareness is tiring business. Though I feel neither old nor outmoded, I just turned 45. Assuming I manage to walk the Earth for as long as my recently deceased father did, the first half of my life is over. By even the most generous definition, I am middle-aged. As such, I tire easily.

And I’m not alone.

“It’s gotten exhausting,” said Kyle Smith, the 46-year-old author and New York Post film critic. “I have to keep up in some ways, otherwise my cultural references risk sounding like Grampa Simpson’s. But I’m also supposed to stay on top of reality TV, Homeland, everything on HBO, the latest politician’s gaffe and whatever’s trending on BuzzFeed, Vine and Twitter? I can’t do it. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And I just don’t have the desire.”

Illustration by Michael Byers

Even when we make an effort to avoid new information, it finds us, thanks to the constant stream of social media and the omnipresence of digital devices. Sure, some of this is self-imposed. And, yes, one could move to a remote cabin in Montana and do nothing but read the works of David Foster Wallace and annotate old perfect-bound issues of The Baffler, but there isn’t much money in that kind of thing these days.

Besides, if one were truly to unplug, one would run the risk of missing out on what Jezebel editor in chief Jessica Coen refers to as “eye-opening intergenerational experiences.”

“Whereas once it might have been easy to slowly disconnect from pop/youth culture and fade, blissfully ignorant, into irrelevance, now ‘disconnecting’ means literally to deny yourself the full experience of a dominant cultural medium,” said Ms. Coen, who, at age 33, splits the difference between the Millennials and Generation X.

Some of my peers on the brink of middle age do succeed at ignoring the noise. Stephen Metcalf, a Slate contributor and author of the forthcoming Junk, about the unexplored relationship between Reaganism and pop culture, feels the greatest gift he’ll give to coming generations is his out-of-it-ness.

“I’d love to not seem like a used-up husk,” he said. “But realistically, if it hasn’t been on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, I haven’t heard of it.”

As an aspiring fuddy-duddy, Mr. Metcalf suspects that Generation Xers aren’t the only ones who are suffering due to the loss of the generation gap. “There’s no more ‘gap’ in the traditional sense,” he said, “but isn’t this just another theft, courtesy of the Boomers? Isn’t the Alternadad taking away his kids’ turn at self-definition?”

Take rock concerts, for example, those smoke-filled dens of electrified wizardry which young people used to seek out in defiance of their parents. Now they’re family outings. If you’ve been to venues like Madison Square Garden or the Barclays Center recently, you’ve probably seen second-graders rocking out to Canadian power trios and aging British quartets right alongside their guardians.

One wonders what the result of all this generational commingling will be. Will our children be forced to go to further extremes to rebel? Or maybe they’ll become archly conservative boors in response to all of this enforced hipness—the mature grown-ups we’ve not yet had the guts to become.

It would serve us right.

I know that I’m part of the problem.

My nearly 5-year-old son is well versed in the lore of the Ramones and could offer a dissertation on the original Star Wars trilogy. His younger brother recites the lyrics to Beastie Boys songs like they were nursery rhymes. I have introduced them to the cultural totems I once cared about, but I wonder if I am shortchanging them in the process. Not to mention infantilizing myself.

(This topic was covered some in Neal Pollack’s Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America, in which he takes his toddler to the Austin City Limits festival, among other generation-sharing adventures.)

But maybe that’s the key. There does seem to be a deeper fear of growing up for men and women of my generation—an insecurity about what comes next. Many of us can’t say with confidence whether we’ll have a job in 10 years. Or what our bank accounts will look like in 20. Retirement will be, for many, an impossibility. So perhaps as long as we act like kids, we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are still young, that we have at least one more chance to get it right. Even if, in so doing, we abdicate our roles as serious, solid citizens. As adults.

I know guys whose style of dress and off-duty interests haven’t changed a lick since college. They devote their free time to movies about comic-book heroes, to video games and to fantasy football. No, they aren’t hurting anybody. But perhaps what we really need to do is put on suits and take our wives out for expensive dinners, like our dads before us.

My father was 45 when I was born—the age I am now. Though he was always youthful and athletic, even to the end, he was a child of the Great Depression, a first-generation American Jew who grew up poor and scrappy in a shared rental duplex on Detroit’s west side. He seemed to have become an adult the day he graduated law school.

In his early 50s, my father was a dark-haired force of nature in double-breasted suits who was as feared in the courtroom as he was generous outside it, and my view of what adulthood is supposed to be is modeled on this snapshot of him. He seemed older and more respected than I can ever imagine being.

When my father wasn’t working—and he was almost always working—he was reading the evening papers, listening to baseball games on WJR radio or watching old cowboy movies. The things I was interested in—punk rock, BMX bikes and National Lampoon—were simply not on my father’s radar. I didn’t take this as a lack of interest. He was loving and warm and present. He just seemed too adult to have an idea that things like Black Flag or Foto Funnies even existed.

He had his interests and I had mine. The difference was that, like most of my generation, I became defined by those interests. And have been ever since.

Perhaps what is truly lost with the erosion of the generation gap is this sense of actual adulthood—the maturity to stop caring what my interests in pop culture say about me; the comfort in being seen not as an equal, but as an elder (even if my younger co-workers stop asking me out for drinks). As Mr. Rushkoff told me, “Maybe that’s the generation gap we’re longing for—the permission to let go of the search.”

Jenkins, Amy Acker and Whitford in The Cabin in the Woods.

On the advice of a friend who described The Cabin in the Woods as the next cinematic “happening” in horror and mayhem, I bit the bullet and suffered through a creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like Humans Versus Zombies and I Spit on Your Grave seem like Molière and Proust. Some films have to seek their own audience like oil seeks its own level in water. Others arrive with a preordained sort of word-of-mouth anticipation that cannot be explained. This is one of them.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description. Five college kids take a motor van to a country weekend cabin. Stopping at a crumbling shack on a deserted road to buy gas, they encounter a cretin with rotting teeth and one eye who insults the women and spits tobacco juice at the men like a cross between Yosemite Sam and the winner of a talent show for troglodytes. Just behind the bloodstained glass window stands a barrel of meat hooks. Oh, I get it. It’s a send-up constructed from old movies and the clichés in Tales From the Crypt comics. Instead of heading back to civilization, onward they plunge, across a narrow mountain pass to the cabin of cobwebs. Rooms with two-way mirrors, grotesque paintings of brutality and massacre, and the creaking door to a cellar of corpses are just the beginning of a set that looks like the haunted house at Knott’s Berry Farm.

One by one, the visitors learn the meaning of “gotcha.” Zombies rise from the swamp and eat the sexy chick’s flesh. Vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood. Only the smart girl who reads “Soviet Economic Structures” and the reefer-smoking doofus, so stoned he has to struggle to make complete sentences, manage to survive the monsters crashing through the ceiling, windows and floors. What they fail to notice is the hidden cameras. Yes! The rooms are all being monitored on a wall of video screens in some kind of remote science lab where an army of scientists like the security teams in Russian attack movies shift the course of the game with switches, including one labeled “Zombie Redneck Torture Family,” conjuring fresh hordes of killers from childhood nightmares to rise from their graves and gnaw, stab and mutilate the screaming victims. It’s all part of an elaborate video game that allows paying customers to watch real people slaughtered according to the horror of choice. The five kids in the cabin are innocent pawns to test the mechanics of the game, the way fiends in a horror movie test the sounds of screaming babies as they feed them to the jaws of mutated crocodiles.

The game, like the movie, is a meaningless absurdity. If it sells, people with a passion for gore can experience real terror while the players are shredded, one by one. What the game testers didn’t count on was luring a pair of victims smart enough to outwit them. The game ends only if the virgin survives. Somehow miraculously managing to figure it all out, the stoner and the brainy girl (who is also a virgin) crawl into a grave and get to the other side of the “ritual.” Then the real hell breaks loose and the whole movie collapses. It’s not a movie about acting, so ignoring the unfortunate people in it is an act of charity, but somehow Sigourney Weaver shows up in a neat spin on herself and her own sad contribution to horror movies to warn that if the virgin doesn’t survive it will mean the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet. But why say more? The Cabin in the Woods has died already in a boring finale full of metaphysical explanations that filch from every horror genre ever invented.

This is a first-time effort for director Drew Goddard, who developed a loud camp following by indulging his wacko imagination as producer and writer of numerous TV episodes of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only imagination on view here is the creature effects. From snarling werewolves and humongous cobras to a faceless child in a ballerina costume whose entire countenance above the neck is nothing but a round hole filled with snapping razor-sharp teeth, the mythical monstrosities are awesome. The rest of the movie is the kind of time-wasting drivel designed to appeal to electronics nerds and skateboarders addicted to Xbox 360 video games whose knowledge of the arts begins and ends with MTV2. Instead of electronic wands like Nintendo’s Wii controllers, the master fiends working the control panels tap buttons and pull levers right out of Dr. Strangelove. As their victims plunge deeper and deeper, the narrative gets sillier and sillier. Maybe that’s why an entire row of what they call “fanboys” at the screening I attended laughed all the way through the movie, although I failed to see anything remotely amusing. I doubt if these people even know who Sigourney Weaver is.

At the risk of inviting a monsoon of unwanted hate mail, I admit it is indeed a brand-new world out there. I’m so glad I don’t have to write for it.

rreed@observer.com

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Running Time 95 minutes

Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Directed by Drew Goddard

Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Chris Hemsworth

1/4

So, if NBC does decide to renew a third season of Chuck, and if the network, like MTV and other channels, starts paying more attention to those youngsters who are tip-tapping, tweeting and blogging about their favorite characters and plot lines, how will that not only change rankings, but television programming itself? 

Here’s one idea: If Generation X was all about grunge, malaise and snark ("I want my MTV") this new "civic" generation will be about participation, hope and, well, niceness (“May I have my MTV, please? Why, thank you!”).

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, co-authors of Millenial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics, explain in their book that if Baby Boomers were individualistic idealists and Gen-Xers were cynical loners, Millenials are "activist doers." And that's going to play out on television, they told The Observer.

“There has been a decline in TV viewing across the public, but particularly among young viewers, simply, in part, because of competition from other forms of entertainment, [like Facebook and YouTube]. But it’s also, in large part, I think, that the programming is not meeting the needs of this particular young generation of people,” explained Mr. Hais, who served for a decade as vice president of entertainment research at Frank N. Magid Associates, where he conducted audience research for hundreds of television stations and cable channels. “Today’s 18-to-24-year-olds are the same as they were 20 or 40 years ago. Television really needs to pay close attention to that and recognize generational changes.”

Their book was first published in March 2008. In it, the two fellows for D.C.-based political think tank NDN (the second generation version of the New Democratic Network) laid out evidence that the first wave of the Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2003, would provide the bulk of Barack Obama’s margin of victory in November 2008, which obviously came true.

So it’s no surprise that some of those same young people rallied around NBC’s Chuck and used similar tactics from the Obama campaign to attempt to save the show. They don’t like when nice people, like Chuck or Obama, lose out. Remember, this is the same generation that grew up with a trophy for every player on their team. Everybody is a winner.

The co-authors, along with their political predictions, anticipated Millenials boosting the ratings of  “nicer” networks, like ABC, CBS, Nickelodeon and Disney, because of characters like Hannah Montana. Maybe that's why shows like The Biggest Loser are so popular. Sure, there's only one "loser," but everybody wins because the contestants lost weight and got healthier!

Edgier networks like Fox News, with all their yelling and screaming and active division of political sides? Expect their numbers to plummet, the authors say.

Mr. Winograd and Mr. Hais explained that some of the “feel-good, do-good” traits of this new generation were bred on the Internet. With so many in constant connection with their friends and family on email, phone, Facebook and Twitter, how can they feel as alone or lost as the previous generation? They’re listening to others, constantly. Expect to see fewer brooding, loner types (no more Chuck Bass?).

As the “like” feature on Facebook, Vimeo, Tumblr and other sites teaches us, young people want to be nicer to each other on the Internet these days—and they mostly want to hear from their friends or chosen networks and which stories and TV shows their friends find interesting. “This unwillingness to abide by the opinions of experts is another fundamental trait of the generation,” Mr. Winograd said. They’ll go to user-generated review sites, like Yelp, to get lunch suggestions, or consult their Twitter followers to see which movie or TV show they should start watching, instead of picking up a newspaper or tuning into some other so-called “expert” for a review. 

“All those things, where the crowds are better than the experts in terms of the source for the right answer plays itself out in the media as well,” Mr. Winograd added.

“They say we don’t need cultural arbiters to say what they should watch and what they should pay attention to,” Mr. Hais explained. “People themselves can do that and now are in position to actually, rather than just influence TV ratings, they can actually produce the programming that people watch.”

And certainly, young people, more and more, are making their own viewing content available on sites like YouTube and Vimeo and others (a quick search proves that there’s plenty of results for video-diary-type entries).

But how else will young people be able to influence television programming? There’s already American Idol, in which their votes can change which singer succeeds. ABC’s In the Motherhood was meant to be an experiment in incorporating users’ real-life stories relayed to the network online and placed into the plotline, but was controversial among the Writers Guild of America and the idea fizzled.

Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics of Nielsen Online, told The Observer that social networks might soon have a big impact on live broadcasts. He gave an example: Think of a tasteless joke made at the Oscars. Producers can monitor Twitter, and if users are upset by the comments, they can inform the show’s host and have him say a joke or address the comment on the live broadcast, instead of doing catch-up in the newspapers the next day.

“I don’t know about you, but I have my laptop open whenever I watch TV,” Mr. Gibs said.

MTV knows that is how most of their viewers are watching their shows these days. So they’re experimenting with new models for programming—hoping to get back all those young viewers they’re losing to the Internet…with the Internet.

On April 28, they announced a new after-school show that they hope will be the Total Request Live for the Millenial generation. The “working title” is The Alexa Chung Show, and it’s a one-hour, interactive chat show hosted by a British model. She’ll welcome celebrity guests and introduce musical performances, just like on TRL, but there will also be a segment reviewing the best of the Web.

Audience members—those at home and even some of those screaming, sign-wielding fans who used to so famously clog up Times Square—will be able to interact with Ms. Chung and her guests live on the show, through Twitter. “Whether Alexa's audience is at home, on the move or on the set, Twitter and MTV will capture their experiences and bring them right into the show,” according to an MTV statement. A video application they’re calling “RockYou Live” will also allow audience members to upload their favorite viral videos and videos they shoot themselves, and they'll be aired on the show.

This sounds just Millenial enough to work. But Mr. Hais and Mr. Winograd warn that Millenials sometimes like to just kick back and enjoy their favorite shows. "Television is a passive medium,” Mr. Winograd told The Observer. “It washes over them and they don’t necessarily want to interact with television.”

Mr. Hais chimed in too: “People are thinking about the television screen as something to watch and the computer screen is something to be interactive with and I think that’s the fundamental challenge"

He added: "If the television programmers said people are talking about our show, let’s do something about it. They really need to be online and engaged in the conversation to do something about it.”