GENERATIONAL GENERALITIES? DON’T TAKE THEM TO HEART

I admit that generational generalities come in handy.

I use them all the time when I’m feeling too lazy to read anything new.

Like a checked box, they are what they are and will never change.

Never, ever, change.

Except when they do. Then what?

More often than ever I hear bits of conversations that are just a little off.

They sound like small tests to know what someone might or might not believe, and if I believe the same thing.

Just this morning a younger man said, “You know, people don’t want to work.”

He said it while he worked checking boxes on a form.

Seemed like a good guy.

So why the attitude?

“Everybody’s a victim, or tries to be a victim,” he said.

Was he talking to me? I’ve been victimized, but it’s not what I lead with.

It comes up infrequently, if at all.

Why? Because there’s a difference between normal life and being a victim and I don’t know what it is.

Besides, I’m a blogger, a hobby blogger, a retired guy with a blogging habit.

Not a pretend journalist, not a marketer, novelist, or poet, but a blogger.

In other words, a whiner.

 

The Whiner Generation

 Baby Boomers heard this from their parents growing up:

“What’s the matter with you, we’ve given you everything you could possible want.”

For many of us, that’s just what our parents did. And then some.

Both parents worked to keep the family housed and fed and clothed and left other stuff up to school and peer groups.

We figured it out on our own with help from friends’ older brothers.

 

When my wife and I had our first baby, my father in-law said, “No matter how much you might want to, and how much you try, the off-spring will always love the mother more than the father.”

This coming from a thrice divorced father of more than who I know as his kids. He had a couple of families along the way before new wives crowded them out.

He was a WWII guy, my dad a Korean War guy. They both knew how to draw a line.

It was somewhere this side of changing diapers.

Did all Baby Boomers change their kids’ diapers? I can give a big YES for my house.

Do millennials kids change their babies’ diapers? (Hey Dylan.)

What this amounts to is picking up after yourself and leaving things better than you found them.

Is that too much to ask?

No one expects everything to get recycled and renewed and reused. But it’s an aspirational goal worth the effort.

Just as no one expects blissful happiness, a kick-ass job, and a future within reach. The journey is the whole point.

Get started kicking ass in a blissful way to clear the road to the future.

The key is making progress.

 

Old Generational Generalities

There’s a guy named Rick Rubin.

He makes records.

Does he play guitar? No. Does he run the mixing board in the studio? No.

What he does is listen with one of the best ears in the business. He knows music when it rises above the noise.

Take a listen.

In short he says do your best work and don’t sabotage it by comparing and competing.

Do your shit and get it as close as you can to what you started out trying to find.

You know, be creative the best way you know.

Generational generalities fade away over the long run anyway.

Who is better, Michelangelo or Picasso?

There’s is no right answer, unless it’s Auguste Rodin.

Who is better, Hemingway or J.D. Salinger?

Try this instead:

Take what you like best from each generation and bring it forward with your work.

For example:

The WWI generation came of age on the verge of new tech like cars and planes, which were applied to killing millions of people, but that’s not what I’m taking forward.

They adapted to changing times.

The WWII generation was introduced to nuclear weapons, but that’s not my take.

Mine is they went out where they weren’t wanted, did what they didn’t want to do, and came back home.

And still had enough left in the tank to produce the Boomer Generation.

GenX either had older parents, or mom and dad hooked up in high school.

Millennials? My kids are millennials. They’re writing their own story.

I can’t wait to read it.

Will it age better than the boomer generational generality?

Stay tuned for updates.