This morning I woke up with my soul in turmoil--about worldly things. Perhaps it was the dust yesterday, both outside, and that encountered while poking around the garage, awakening old memories through the touch of handling possessions.
Outside today it was a much nicer day than yesterday. Just a light breeze. On the edge between cool and warm.
It was, however, noisy. As I walked, I could hear the emergency beepers of trucks from far away, and the rumble and grinding of the engines clearing more of the land for a warehouses and, on the other side of 94th street, a pod of new luxury homes (which around here means 10 million and up).
The extremes of wealth here are obscene. Where do people get all this money? From filing lawsuits against each other? (I say this just as the famous luxury car auction is going on across Bell Road).
I can live with my own relative poverty compared to them. I personally don't need a lot of money beyond the basics. It is nice to be comfortable buying things you need, and providing for others.
Yet one thing I've learned in my life is that if I am having a strong emotion, about myself or the world, then probably a lot of other people are having the same emotion. That gives a great peace in feeling connected to the struggles of others.
Lately I think so much about young people---the Zoomers and the ones even younger. I see in them so many of the thoughts and emotions I myself had when I was that age, about my place in the world, and how my life would work out. My predominant emotion was one of envy. I wanted what others had. I felt left out (even as, at the same time, I paradoxically felt like the luckiest person in the world. Go figure).
For a long time in my thirties and forties I compared myself to my peers and to older men of previous generations and found myself wanting in regard to the things of the world. I beat myself up a lot about this.
It is not as if I have solved all these issues in my head, but I evaluate them in a much different manner.
Yet now I see these same emotions expressed in giant letters and in grand scale by an entire generation of young people. It is as they are living my life collectively, in a way that I felt isolated in doing in the 1980s and 1990s. It is both deeply gratifying and horrifying to see this. It is gratifying to see that youth are picking up on something deeply wrong in our country, and I don't mean the same old list of "isms". I mean that many young people have given up on the idea that they will ever lead what they call a "normal life", of getting married, having a family, buying a house, living in a community where you feel at home, working at profession that fulfills one's soul, seeing your kids grow up, and so on.
Some of these things are explicitly masculine in nature. For young men to feel as if they will never have such things can feel like life is hell on earth and that there is no reason to pretend to pursue it. I truly think this has the possibility to destroy civilization if not addressed in some way.
Meanwhile young women can get all the ego-attention they want in the world, and get showered with money, by showing their bodies and having sex with strangers on camera. Well, at least some will get money and attention, and all of them will wind up broken in some way, but there will little hope in making them see this until it too late.
This cannot last.
How is the 21st century not a technological dystopia?
I love telling young people that it was much easier when I was young. Nearly all my own problems were the result of my own bad decisions, indifference, and laziness. Had I played it "straight" in following the rules then it probably would have worked out well.
Yet compared to me, my dad and mom had it even easier. Somehow they managed to raise a family and live to a ripe age, seeing their grandchildren, while living in the most idyllic, perfect, prosperous place in history, which is Northern Colorado in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.
Like I said, most of the time I feel like the luckiest person who ever lived, one who spent most of his life making trouble for himself and reaping the consequences.
But Generation Z? They are, despite all the additional creature comforts and entertaining distractions given to them, ostensibly living through a collective dark night of the soul.
I would tell them: I don't know how I myself would even do it, were I the same age as them now. I know that's not a great pep talk, but at least they would know that someone understands what they are going through. I had the kind of life many of them can only dream of having now, even in my own degraded state.
When I was young I felt so incompetent in dealing with the world. I didn't know how anything worked. I thought everyone else did know, or at least they had parents with enough money to let them engage with the world with a safety net. I did have that safety net too, but not with money, so I felt envy over that. I felt like a fraud among my high school friends, and at Georgetown. There were some fantastically rich kids living on my dorm floor. Ironically the rich kids I knew were always gracious and never assumed others had the advantages they had. Back then in the 1980s we have a much more democratic society anymore. Everyone felt equal.
Still it wasn't until I got to Oregon and met some other offbeat "nontraditional" folk that I began to feel I was somewhat normal after all. Oregon was a great place to do that back then.
Now it feels like winner-take-all across all levels of societal. There is no longer a "normal life path" that one can follow, almost by default, staying out of certain trouble, and winding up with a happy liveable life as our grandparents expected to able to do.
The wiping out of the software engineering profession by offshoring, H1B, and emergent AI is probably the last straw for this. It was, for thirty years running, the last sure fire way a capable smart young man could go to college, get a degree, and then graduate and find work with a salary that could support a family and buy a house.
What path do you tell a young man to follow at this point?
In my day, even the value of a college degree was degraded from what it had been. Now one needed specific applied degrees or graduate degrees to gain a sure-fire professional career. The big thing was "go to law school", which I refused to do, as too many of my friends were doing that and it just seemed boring to me. I never would have been happy doing that. I would have never felt challenged enough. I would have yearned to have done something else, like study physics.
With some exceptions, the best thing a young man can do in the bloom of his youth (early 20s) is to go out into the world by himself if necessary, throwing himself into situations that would frighten the wits out of his mother if she knew about them. This is the natural order of the world. If there a war going on, historically he would join the armed services, or go to sea.
My own era was so peaceful and prosperous that to escape the confines of my own boyish self-image, I had to take the drastic step of dropping out of college, then working a job to earn just enough money to fly buy a backpack, some shoes, and plane ticket to Europe, and then spending the summer crossing from the Scottish isles to the ruins of Troy. It was interesting to find out which of my family members were rooting for me in this absurd endeavor, and which ones were trying to stop me, even by discouragement.
One of the great gifts I got a couple years ago happened during the last time I saw my Great Uncle Dick in Reno, just after the 2020 election, about a year before he died. His daughter, my cousin, bless her heart, almost wouldn't let me see him because of COVID, but I was already underway and calling from the Cathedral of the Guardian Angels on the Las Vegas strip. I asked if I could just wave to him at least from the curb, and by the time I got to Reno they said that it would be ok for me to come inside and see him.
In his old place he had memorabilia on the walls from his experiences in World War II. He was a gunner aboard a B-17 bomber aircraft, flying missions from southern Italy over Eastern Europe. He was very young to be in the war and it almost ended before he could get in the service.
He didn't always have that memorabilia on his wall. Probably it was put up only recently, as people discovered his war career and wrote articles and books using his recollections. He now had displayed a photograph of his flight crew with their plane, which was given to him by a researcher. Like most men of his day, he downplays his war experiences as being just what he had to do.
At one point in our conversation I was confessing to him the feeling of inferiority compared to his generation of men, and he waved it off. I told him the closest thing I ever did was my ridiculous trip to Europe in the summer of 1985, and I wound up staying on a Hungarian farm and then went camping and mountain climbing in the Transylvania Alps and got stuck sick behind the Iron Curtain, but that I persevered and made it to Istanbul, and went on to walk on the ruins of Troy, on day when I had the place to myself.
It felt so decadent to me now, to describe, some I some kind of fragile manlet who got by in life on easy mode like that, not having to get shot at by enemy aircraft as he did.
Dick just sat there with his mouth open, looking at me with amazement. He was blown away at what I did and told me so. "You did that all by yourself?"
"Yes", I said, awkward at being lifted out of my shame. It's not that he had possessed such a low opinion of me that he was befuddled I could accomplish the logistics a plane flight, etc. He was not of that spirit. Rather something in the way I described it to him deeply impressed him, in part I think because his own son, who is around my age, had given him grief throughout his life in part by not being able to establish a certain stability as a man. He never said as much about his son, but he implied it at times over the years I knew him in his later life. Perhaps I restored his faith in our entire generation with my story. He passed away the next fall and I'm very glad I insisted on that last visit with him.
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