Recently I was having a conversation with a young man in his early 20s in which I tried to explain the concept of selling out to him. Nowadays, calling someone a sell-out is almost a compliment—it means that you’re smart enough to make some money off your art—but 15 years ago or so, it meant that you had no integrity, that you cared so little about the meaning of your work that you had no qualms pimping it out to sell hair products or cars or whatever. The young man I explained this to giggled as though I were describing some quaint Victorian custom, but I was serious.

When I came of age, in the early 90s, we were ALL serious. My generation hated sell-outs because they epitomized the inauthenticity we hated in American culture and in ourselves. Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko put a happy face on greed, but a cursory look at contemporary history shows that much of the generation before us (the Baby Boomers) turned into the biggest sell-outs of all time. And I and most of my friends didn’t want any part of it. We hungered for meaning, but also felt powerless to escape the societal landscape we found ourselves in.  We grew up with both the threat of nuclear and environmental devastation and some of the worst sitcoms known to humanity—a recipe for growing a generation of cynics if I ever heard one.

It was different from the 60s, where righteous anger and blue-sky hippiedom ruled the day. Our malaise was more anti-social and hopeless, more ripped jeans and ugly flannels than hot pants and crazy colors. We smashed our guitars, but we did it with sarcasm, not rage. The 60s were about tearing down an old world and building a new one; the 90s were about looking for a job you knew you were going to hate before you’d even found it. Our possibilities felt very small, and we shrunk in response.

But something is changing now—I can feel it, and I’m sure you can, too. The conversation is shifting. Instead of seeing ourselves as helplessly adrift in a world too enormous to notice us, we are beginning to see ourselves and everything else as integral pieces of the big picture. And we see that every piece has a very real impact on the whole.

Why is this shift occurring? I think it’s a direct result of the snark that so may of us have indulged in for so long. After a while, irony gets old. Bitchiness gets boring. We start to realize that coming up with the most wickedly hilarious quip is not the end goal of life. We start to want something more.

The interesting thing to notice as this happens is that we are not giving up our evil sense of humor to do this. We are still cracking awful, dark jokes, but we’re doing it in the service of a new kind of determination. I won’t call it grim, because we are having fun and laughing a lot even as we behold the daunting tasks ahead. But we are approaching those tasks with our sleeves rolled up, even as we roll our eyes. Cynicism and optimism are learning to work together.

To me, this makes perfect sense. To get through the largest challenges humankind has ever faced, we are going to need some seriously black humor. Of course! Maybe The Smiths and Seinfeld and OJ were just there to prepare us for this. Or maybe we had to live in cynicism for a while so that we could learn its limitations and decide to go beyond it.

It occurs to me that in addition to providing a much-needed steam valve for frustration and fear, dark humor and critical thinking also play useful roles in helping us navigate the avalanche of green-flavored BS that’s coming down the mountain along with all the real, positive changes.

Whatever the reasons, ideas centered around optimism and responsibility are in bloom everywhere, from the millions-strong green blogosphere to green tips on the Today Show to the fact that we now see people carrying reusable grocery totes wherever we go. I certainly don’t operate under the delusion that grocery totes on their own are going to save the planet, but it is an emblem that things are changing. For all our grousing about the state of the world our parents left us, I can’t remember any of us grunge fans in the early 90s doing anything about it, even something as mundane as thinking ahead to bring our own bags to the grocery store. That would have struck us as way too eager, even if secretly we might’ve thought it was a good thing.

Regardless of where we came from, though, I couldn’t be happier to see this curious blend of optimism, responsibility, and hilarity arrive on the scene. One incredible example of this is the Greenzo episode of 30 Rock that aired last year during NBC’s Green Week of programming (choose Episode 205 in the 30 Rock link). Tina Fey and her cohorts are able to hold two competing ideas in their heads at the same time: the real need for change, and the fact that many of us (especially lots of big, status-quo-loving corporations) seem to want a green halo more than we want that real change.

Transforming our world will not be possible with either pie-in-the-sky optimism or dead-eyed cynicism. We need to think both critically and in terms of possibilities to make this jump to a future that works for everyone. For my part, I’m proud that, after years of being called shiftless, apathetic, and cynical, my generation seems to be taking the lead and using our powers of snark for good instead of evil.