thoughts after bills

so bills are obnoxious--glad all I have to worry about is the phone and the student loans. elsewise I might go mad.

a quick thought before I head back out into the un-wired-world.

I have a lot of friends (guys and gals, but more guys than gals) who are late twenty-something, single, living at home or on their own, Playstation and X-Box owners who simply don't want to grow up.

I don't mean that in a derogatory way--it's just that my generation of guys has no real desire to marry, settle down, have a career, become a grown-up. I think that's why one of my friends just got a divorce and a new girlfriend.

We're the type who have mid-life crises at twenty-five. We get divorced and start hitting the bars again at thirty. Maybe because we grew up being told that grown-up life is boring, and hence grown-up's lives are over. Life, if it was to be lived, was to be lived in that hedonistic aura of high school and college individualistic excitement. At least, that's what every marketing image we've ever seen has told us.

And now they're telling us that we can be youthful and accumulate toys and have adventures and never settle down or accumulate responsibilities. Because once you have responsibilities and commitments you are no longer free. life is over.

Of course, without responsiblities and/or commitments, life is pretty much meaningless. But we haven't realized this yet. We keep wondering where we've been sold wrong--why we feel disappointed with our marriages, jobs, where the excitement and feelings of significance and importance went. Maybe they're over there, around the corner, if I could be free I would be able to live it up, to taste the excitement again...

huh. It's not a clear idea so much as a feeling I had yesterday while moving dirt from point A to point B and thinking about why one of my childhood youth group friends is getting a divorce. But I have work to do, so I don't have time to pound out something really incisive and profound. Just found it interesting to think about twenty-something angst and flailing in terms of the mid-life crisis.

When you're raised in a materialistic paradise where everyone is told everyday by image-based advertising that glamour and excitement and wealth and sensuality are your birthright, and the good life is there for anyone who can go out there and buy it, and you don't feel it, feeling left out can be really devastating. You could be happy and fulfilled and instead you're feeling cheated and held back.

You were meant to be larger than life; treating yourself to good things, being on the cutting edge of teachnology or music of something significant, being someone impressive, suave, exciting and hip and involved, oh yeah--these are the stuff of the good life, real life. Think about MTV's The Real World: the hijinks and instensity of high school and college are real life. Dating isn't a preparation or precursor to real adult life--it is real life, the only life exciting enough to warrant attention. Exploring your identity through new musical, emotional, sexual, stylistic or ideological experiences isn't a stage in growing up to a stable adult--it's all there is to life.

If it isn't epic, it isn't living. If you're settled, you're boring. If you aren't mobile, you're dead. Growing up is the act of becoming irrelevant, too consumed in commitments to be free and wild. We have nothing to look forward to because being young and free was supposed to be the best time of our lives, and we particularly blessed for being born American in the golden age of Living It Up For Me.

There's no glamour to growing up--nothing to look forward to, no really exciting prospects to something like marriage or commitments. Sure, it's a lie once you think about it--but how can you stop and think about it when it's so widely assumed? And who is proclaiming any sort of desireable alternatives? Smug, boring evangelicals?

well. brain vomit. I wish I had time to edit. oh well. cheers!