Wedding season is upon us. From the save-the-date card to the band's final Journey cover, has this first "event" of a couple's marriage merely become a detail-oriented presentation of the bride and groom's personalities? Rozann Carter, a self-proclaimed wedding blog addict and huge fan of the cutesy detail, explores the dynamic of the wedding culture as it relates to an age of self-expressionism and to the sacrament of marriage.
There was an article that ran in the New York Times earlier this year entitled “Generation Sell.” In the piece, author William Deresicwicz claims that the unique and enduring characteristic of the millennial generation, distinctive of earlier generations, is a hyper-entrepreneurship, a definition of self that is based on a creative self-salesmanship. He begins by asking the reader to consider “the Millennials’ characteristic social form…: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet. Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business.”
Deresicwicz goes on to relate this social form directly to the cultural personality of our time: “We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something,…we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted. The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.”
This idea of the "entrepreneurial self" extends into practically every aspect of our lives—our Facebook “likes”, our iTunes playlists, our resume-building service experiences, our Pinterest boards and Instagram shares. It affects where we shop for our clothes and what model of car we choose. Whether we like it or not, we are constantly advertising what it is that “makes me, me"...