Escape.

Get away from condo disputes, rigged auctions, annoying friends, obsequious enemies. It’s better to turn the corner and build a den, elevating everyday life to a gentle lullaby, working below your expectations, finding a benchmark in the lower reaches. Without resentment, in fact with infinite relief. Generation X hasn't lost; it hasn’t even started playing.

Coupland gives us a superb snapshot of that post-yuppie generation that from the very early '90s began launching paper anathemas and sowing doubts without yielding the predictable (and unforeseen) fruits.

Doug, Andy, and Claire are three young people from bourgeois backgrounds who leave their comfortable lives for infinitely more comfortable existences. But while in the '70s you would go to India, now you may reach Baja California at best (fortunately). The revolution no longer passes through smoking guns and flying Molotov cocktails but by sitting on a deckchair of a modest bungalow.

With frenzied ideologism (70s) and rampant hedonism (80s) gone, here comes extreme intimacy.

Why does it have to be so difficult to simplify one's life?

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