With the news that Beavis and Butt Head are coming back with new episodes on MTV, some people are using this as a time of reflection...looking back on their earlier years.
One such person is David Giffels, who writes for a website called Grantland now, but who wrote an occasional episode of Beavis and Butthead 'back in the day'.
The article is not so much about how great Beavis and Butthead where, and why they deserve to be back on TV, but how our generation(the guy is only a few years older than me) is the only generation that would allow a show like Beavis and Butthead to be successful twice.
What really stuck with me from the article is this thought:
Both in our 40s, Mike Judge and I are part of the first generation of American men for whom the notion of a midlife crisis is irrelevant, because we don't really know how old we are. It's not that we're in a state of arrested development or denial, but rather a legitimate temporal disorientation.
We can't measure our career spans against our target retirement date, because we don't really believe we'll ever retire. We can't claim alienation from our children's music, because it streams from the same machine we work at all day. We can't complain our bodies are breaking down, because science will no longer let them.
We have been groomed not to live out the days of our lives, but rather the days of our lifestyles.
That's pretty deep...and frighteningly accurate(well, not so much the body breaking down one). I maintain a retirement account through work because it is the expected, AND prudent thing to do... not because I am waking up every morning thinking 'Man, I can't wait until I am 58/62/65/68/72...I won't have to do this anymore.' I know my peers aren't either, because it's the kind of thing you talk about over beers. Right now, I plan on working until either I am unable, or I don't need to. There is no target age...either I will no longer be physically able to go to work, or one day I will realize I have nothing else big to pay for, and I can finally afford to stop working.
No financial planner needed here!
That is a very perceptive statement. I was born in '64 and for many years I continued to "wait my turn," as a Boomer, for the time when the world would belong to MY peers. Every generation was supposed to have it better than the last one, but it never happened. The world changed, and the old standards simply don't apply anymore. So we cope, we adapt, we try to figure out who and what we are, and we wonder if such definitions even matter. Life goes on for Cindy and Bobby, even if we'll never get to be Marcia and Greg.
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