The argument often made about Canadians at the end of the 20th century is that we lack the direction imparted to our elders by struggle and deprivation. Previous generations contended with war, hunger, and 25-kilometre hikes through the snow to reach the nearest saloon. Today, the biggest crisis in the average Canadian life is cable versus satellite.

In the new millennium, the challenge, then, is to find meaning in lives that give us everything except purpose. Thankfully, there is a new crop of magazines and zines willing to address the difficult task of documenting the luxurious uncertainty at the heart of our cushy lives.

Let's start with Toronto's Coupe. Now on its second issue, its editors are clearly determined to raise apathy to inspired new heights. Here's a magazine that consists almost entirely of ironic juxtapositions in the form of deep thoughts superimposed over lush collages: "Art is Not Dangerous. Art Doesn't Make a Difference" is a typical Coupeism given a full page with a flowery wallpaper background. Articles, it seems, are out and Coupe faithfully provides us with only two retrograde text pieces, one an utterly mundane work on The Chemical Brothers and one a design manifesto that includes the advice "it usually takes the passage of time to understand an article of technology." The only full page of "writing" in Coupe is a list of the best "television shows," "surfboard makers," "bombshells" and so on. This list is so calculated in its attempt to imbue the magazine (and our lives) with nonchalant hipness that the effect is to reinforce the void at the heart of such concepts as Engelbert Humperdinck, Farrah Fawcett and the 1963 Impala Sport.

Perhaps Coupe would benefit from purveying some of the zines that, for the last several years have been diligently exploring the empty shell of Canadian existence. Montreal's Benzine (now on issue 7) costs only two bucks to Coupe's eight. But it too features collages rendering history as a series of curious ironies (a "gratuitous centre spread" featuring grainy photos of Pierre Trudeau), pithy reflections on the nature of art ("Margaret Atwood meets Mothra") plus silly lists (of suggestions posted on a bulletin board in the "bowels of McGill's Redpath Library"). And Vancouver cartoonist Brad Yung's two-dollar zine Stay As You Are bests Coupe's effort to convey the deflated atmospherics that cloud our empty age. In one segment from the fourth issue, Yung's alter ego and his pal rush off to the grand opening of "Lotsa Coffee." Once settled in front of their mugs of java, they fall silent and disaffected, gazing into space as if to say, 'Why did we bother?'

Can any magazine truly express the nothingness that betrays our lives? The New York-based Nest, which is on its seventh issue, comes close. Dubbed a "quarterly of interiors," it is a giant-sized zine with ads from fancy European designers and a price tag of, gulp, $12. Nest features lavish pictures of the unusual ways we make home "home." In the winter issue, we have a house wallpapered with gingerbread; we have a photo spread on the attempt to turn the ancestral tomb in Cairo's City of the Dead into the family abode; and, my favourite, interior shots of the tents occupied by refugees from the Kosovo war. Each pictorial is introduced with a non-judgmental blurb encouraging us to indulge the voyeurism that the age of nothing might well claim as its greatest triumph. Nest is a visionary magazine, no question. It raises the banal and pointless to new heights by refusing to condemn what we do to stave off the uncertain hunger gnawing at our gingerbread dreams. Nest's glorification of domestic details (as if they are an end in their own right) captures nothing so well it almost makes it something.