Anhedonia and It (p. 694)
It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. […] We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.
Context
The culture-sociology stretch: U.S. arts selling emptiness as hip, and the young wearing masks of ennui against "excluded encagement in the self" — the essay's first cage, three pages before It gets one. Note the essay quietly going first-person plural ("we young"), recruiting the reader into the diagnosis.