Hannah forwarded me an article from the wall street journal. link. So, jumping right over the part where this might have been a subtle push for me to get something going in my life, I read the article and we had a little chat about it yesterday. We talked about the post-women’s-lib tendency to look down on or even openly ridicule the traditional “manly man,” how traditional male roles belong to narrative forms that died out sometime in the sixties with the coming of postmodern norms and expectations, how it’s silly to say that men aren’t men just because they aren’t filling up houses with wives and babies. We talked about all that. Still, as a 20 something male, unmarried with no children, no career, and no immediate plans to get started on either of those things, I feel like there might be more to say. i’m just not sure what it is.
The article is written like there is something wrong with all of us. We’re stupid or lazy or spoiled or hedonistic or whatever damn thing. We just can’t handle the responsibility. Society never prepared us for it or something like that. You know, blah blah blah. I don’t know that I agree. I’m just going to have to use myself as an example. I remember the first time I realized that “It will look good on your resume” was not a valid reason for me to participate in something. It had been up until then. I was on the same track as everyone else. The one where we had to strive and outperform everyone our age to get one of the limited slots at a ‘good school’ without which we would never be able to get a ‘good job.’ It was in light of this pressure that my peers and I competed in school sports, joined, founded, and participated in various clubs and societies, took on extra credit assignments, and all the rest.
Talk to a (driven) middle schooler. Try to pretend that childhood is still a time of naive indifference to the world around you.
I know how it happened. I had a nervous breakdown. I was a Junior in high school, as I said. Little outbursts had been the norm for me as I grew up. Intense freakouts that would land me in the principles office. I would cry, school officials would get that sympathetic look on their face, I would be recommended for whatever counseling. Blah Blah blah. This one was a bit different. All of a sudden everything I had been working toward seemed, I dunno, foolish? I was in a meeting for NHS, a nationwide community service organization for kids with a certain GPA, when the advisor was trying to get us to sign up to work at graduation. It was worth 4 points she said. We needed 10 points to be considered members she said. I overheard someone say something like, yeah i really hate the class of 03 and i don’t want to go, but I need the points, NHS looks really good on a college application. It struck me as absurd that this was considered volunteering. For half these kids, you might as well have been holding a gun. The college app/resume was all important. That was it. It just didn’t seem serious to me anymore. Still doesn’t really. I guess I haven’t recovered.
So now we come back to the article. We’re all in our 20s and we all have degrees, but none of us haves wives, children or careers. Well damn us for failing to conform to the previous paradigm. Setting aside how sick it makes me to think i should do these things purely because its proper for someone my age, let’s look at our main model for these decisions. Let’s look at our parents.
I’m not here to bitch about how I was raised ruined me. Its important to remember that I don’t consider myself ruined. That being said, if you’re a baby boomer who thinks my cohort and I are wasting our lives right now, what’s coming is likely to sound a little like blame. As a group, those of us in this listless sort of relative affluence, we are the children of too-busy parents. Parents who worked so hard to provide us with the nicest houses in the nicest towns with the nicest schools. We had the nicest food and the nicest vacations, toys, and clothes. Our parents worked very hard to give us only the nicest things. At some point I think the boomers realized that they had made some sacrifices. In order to provide for their children, they had to give up some of the dreams that had guided them in their youth. For the most part, they succeeded in providing those things, and now we are spitting on their legacy by not continuing the cycle. I think thats what’s at stake here. If we don’t make the same compromise, it puts their choice in jeopardy. Our inaction can be interpreted as an active rejection of their values.
They ask us about careers and we avoid their queries. “How will you support your family?” they ask, and we tell them we don’t have families. They say “Well, wouldn’t you like a family?” It isn’t really a question. But we don’t really know the answer either. A generation of parents who worked so hard to give their children everything, and mostly they did so. What they failed to give us was their time. We were a generation raised by too-busy parents.
Of course a generation of children raised by too-busy parents is a generation raised by t.v. We grew up on the narratives of pop culture, and even before we fully understood them, be sure we were learning the themes. We all knew, even before we knew, that childhood is a time (as I said) of naive indifference, then high school are the worst/best years (the paradox was lost on no one), then college are the actual best years, a time of experimentation and wild behavior, then its grow up, settle down, get children, get responsibility. There are also, of course many moral lessons along the way. Ideas of friendship and adversity, overcoming challenges and the like. It’s all on the t.v. Ask some kids and they’ll tell you. We all know about this compromise, where you trade freedom for responsibility and your children are worth it.
The thing is, it’s different now. The game has changed, is changing. It changes. Forgive us for taking a moment to catch our breath and look around. We’ve been on the fast track to success for a long time now, and suddenly there is reason to suspect that it heads nowhere. At the same time, there may be no reason to expect that we have to spend all our time working at some office to take care of our children. Maybe we can provide them with a life that is less nice, but one in which we are a lot more present.
Let me say this for myself and the rest of these supposed no good “guys”. While I may not be making babies nor contributing significantly to US GDP, I’m not really a drag on society either. My lifestyle is very inexpensive: rent, food, communications(mobile and internet). We’re all sitting here, waiting, watching. Some of us are paying attention even, some will come up with some great things, things that wouldn’t have worked for their parents. This is a new world. We’re a new people. Whether or not we eventually conform to your idealized picture of good men, what are we doing is just fine. Please go back to busying yourself.
