I thought to blog about this topic one recent Friday
afternoon as I read my new book at Barnes & Noble and sipped on a Grande
coffee. There were a large number of single adults that were also enjoying the
space on that cloudy, humid weekday. It was like a sober Happy Hour! In that
time, I took in the zeitgeist of our era, reflecting on how the world has
changed over my lifetime. When I was a little boy there were very few people
out and about like that on a weekday, unless they were a family vacationing
together at the Jersey Shore, or a group of delivery drivers grabbing a slice
of pizza before heading back to work. In today's world, however, it's not
uncommon to see people from all backgrounds engaged in a wide variety of
activities at any given time. The weekday has been transformed, even largely
done away with!
For our generation, our adult lives are vastly different
from those of our parents. Our daily lives are not structured in ways they were
for our moms and dads in 1988, or even 1998. We may lack structure, but that
allows us to be more creative in how we live our lives and to ultimately build
our own meaningful structures that inspire confidence and self-discipline.
Unfortunately, the protective bubble of the 80s and 90s created a false sense
of security for many people, as they failed to look at the big picture and to
anticipate future changes. Some of them were shortsighted because they clung to
false premises and relied upon their baser emotions.
Jobs come and go, relationships come and go, and most of
us move relatively frequently, when compared to our parents, who often lived in
the same homes for 20 or 30 years, relied upon long-term marriages and worked
an 8-to-5, Monday-to-Friday job for the same company their entire adult lives,
until they retired with their hefty pensions. In today's world, only 2% of
American adults actually experience the traditional workweek of the 20th
century! This may seem shocking, but it is absolutely true.
People today either work part-time jobs (often more than
one) or full-time jobs consisting of shift work or extensive overtime. For
nurses and service industry professionals, like many of you, your
"workweek" consists of a string of consecutive long, grueling days,
punctuated by a few much-needed days of rest that may or may not fall in the
middle of the week. For example, my friend Carla Sagan is a full-time server at a restaurant in Easton, while also holding down a part-time job at a coffee shop in Bethlehem.
Carla experiences such a nontraditional work week, as her restaurant shifts understandably coincide with the weekends. Therefore, she also enjoys this midweek rest period.
This arrangement is very common today as a great number of us are employed by
the health care or service industries, a change from the regimented, structured
factory work of the Industrial Age. Carla does enjoy meeting a wide variety of
different people, along with the fact that she often works with Alyssa,
her close friend and roommate. She definitely makes the most of her life in the
service industry.
Another facet of today's tumultuous economy is the
changeability of small businesses that occupy storefronts in cities and towns
across America. It used to be that, in every city or town, there were several
established businesses that had many long-term customers, spanning years or
decades. Now, small businesses seem to come and go with frightening speed! As a
result of this, urban local consumers always have to look for new places to
shop, to dine, to drink or to enjoy a shot of espresso. Due to changing
consumer needs, online marketing and advertising is more important than ever,
creating job opportunities in those ever-growing fields. We have to figure out
how to use the flash in the pan to create a good meal, for ourselves and
others!
Sadly, though, many of us are unable to attain those new
job positions. Some of us are very unlucky, being stuffed into private prisons,
work release centers or homeless shelters. In a sense, the decline of the
middle class has turned us all into "others," unacceptable to the
dominant ruling class. You and I feel the sting of being rejected like this!
People feeling rejected and lost often turn to crime or develop substance abuse
issues. Marginalized individuals, however, can learn to band together to
provide mutual support and to achieve a few important objectives.
We do need this mutual support, as a great many of us are
renters, instead of home owners. Even many couples with young children are
forced to raise their families in rented apartments or houses, causing new
problems that are coupled with a troubling sense of uncertainty. Home ownership
is often out of the question for families today, due to the difficulties
involved in obtaining a mortgage, lack of job security or insufficient funds in
savings accounts or investments. The types of homes that more successful people
are able to afford are small condos and townhouses, clustered together in dense
suburban developments hardly suitable for quality living, let alone creating a
child-friendly neighborhood. Our society has created a nightmare for families!
For single adults like many of us, it is very hard to
find a suitable apartment to rent, due to long waiting lists, exorbitant fees
or security deposits, competition among prospective tenants, bad credit, minor
criminal convictions, or a host of other reasons. This often leads to
short-term private deals in which urban, lower-class men and women live
temporarily with friends in their apartments, leading to a
"transient," come-and-go lifestyle that is completely unsuitable for
anyone involved. Many of us in this segment of the population are living
paycheck to paycheck, and may be only one step away from joining the ranks of
the homeless or America's ever-growing criminal class. Not surprisingly, these
dire straits didn't just appear out of nowhere; they were decades in the
making!
The base emotions that people clung to since the 1980s
were used against them by the powers-that-be who sought to screw over the
average man and woman. Greedy, powerful individuals manipulated these emotions
for their own benefit - like Donald Trump, but on a smaller scale. This process
resulted in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the small, elite group
of super-rich. The consequences for many of us are that living standards are
poorer for our generation and we are forced to eat the scraps that fall from
the rich man's table. In America today we are all trying to gather as many
scraps as we can, in order to be full and satiated.
However, this is not all bad, since we do have tools at
our disposal to prepare ourselves for this new high-tech, transitory world. Our
main tool is, of course, the Internet which, along with social media, offers us
information to learn new skills, and an online marketplace in which to use
those skills to make extra money. As the Internet continues to grow, economic
opportunities increase proportionally. The human imagination can be used to
create countless new ways of earning a living online. You and I just have to
adapt to the economy of 2018!
There are also positive perspectives for looking at
social changes, as well as economic ones. These must be adopted if we are to
survive and be happy in today's times. For example, the upside to these
ever-changing living conditions, is that we get to meet and connect with a lot
of great friends and acquaintances. If the living arrangement doesn't work out,
one or both parties could move on to better living situations. This may be a
nightmare for landlords, but the landlord-tenant relationship is never an easy
one. This is all a process of adapting and growing as individuals.
Sex, relationships and parenthood are no longer centered
around a lifelong legal commitment that keeps miserable, squabbling couples
together merely out of a sense of duty, but are centered on loving, meaningful
relationships. Even in the event of failed family units, the "serial
marriage" invented by Boomers has been replaced by changing relationships
and living arrangements that may be difficult but are actually easier than the
process of bitter divorce, followed by awkward remarriage. These changes are actually
better for people's children in the long run, because kids are less exposed to
constant quarreling at home or to clever, but cruel courtroom maneuvers. A dysfunctional
order is a bad order!
The children of the 2010s are growing up in a unique time.
Due to a radically volatile economic landscape and a society in flux, the world
is more dangerous and precarious for children growing up now than it was for
us. When I was growing up in that late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, I felt
safe, secure and invulnerable to economic changes in the adult world of my
parents. For many my age, this created unrealistic expectations for our adult
lives and for our own experiences with parenting. At least, with exposure to
difficult personal finances, children today will grow into tougher and more
resilient adults, more satisfied with interpersonal riches than with material
ones that give only fleeting pleasure. Their high-tech gadgets will gradually
take a back seat to kinship, community and human rights.
Our aging parents often seem unable to understand those
of us in our 20s, 30s or 40s, viewing us as "the Peter Pan
generation" or "developmentally disabled." They sometimes fail
to recognize that we are living in the world that they created, as we are
forced to fight our own battles out of economic necessity, family obligations
and our own pride in who we are as individuals. It is the American Dream
deferred and scattered into a thousand digital pieces, or widgets. The irony of
the song "My Generation” (1965) by The Who, is that our generation - and
not the Baby Boomers - are the ones who "get around!"
In future years, however, when we rebuild our world, we
will make sure that everyone is represented in their economic/financial plight,
their political objectives and their rightful place in American society. We can
create a fairer, more progressive socioeconomic order for the coming decades.
Our generation will have a lot of work to do as we enter middle age, but our
goals are largely attainable, due to the example set by many great leaders in
our times and in our recent past. These include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Nelson Mandela, President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders. As we have
seen in our lives, when everyone is taken care of, everyone prospers! Our
future will never be perfect, but I foresee big steps in the right direction.
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