The Silver Spoons Generation

Who do you live your life for? If you have a child, the answer is “I would die for my kid”. If you are a man in his thirties repatriated to the family home, more than likely you live for your parents. You are affected by their ascent into the octogenarian realm and all the vagaries that aging brings upon the mind-set of a parent. Since the number of adults moving back into, or in some cases never leaving the family home, has sharply increased in recent years in Canada, the question of how this affects the family dynamic is one that is increasingly being asked by academics. The questions of freedom and growth and familial responsibility all intertwine in this new dynamic. Still, there are people who have left the family home who remain heavily dependent on the support of parents, and people living in the family home who absolve themselves of all save the most basic contributions. There appears to be one standard similarity in the majority of situations falling into the multi-generational family dynamic: Today’s young adult seems unwilling to accept a significantly lower standard of living unless it is unavoidable.

Who’s to blame? As always, I blame TV. I blamed TV for my fascination with all things new and improved. Consumed with consumption, I became the vanguard for all new marketing tools. I began to look for products now bursting with more real fruit flavour. I needed the beta version of life. Everything had to be new and improved, even if the old and just plain proved worked unfailingly well. I never thought to save as a child, because saving was an impediment to consumption. How was I able to resist a GIC rate of 17% interest annually for a 5-Year Deposit? Atari, bitch. That's how. The original generation of vidiots, salivating at blinking lights and monochromatic destruction. At least we had to use our imagination with the first genesis of video games. Today's Mortal Kombat allows graphic depictions of electrified human entrails with the correct pressing of about 8 different buttons.

I blamed television for creating a generation of informed political youth. Teenagers who believed they could make a difference, and then went out and stopped a war. This is the early morally sacrosanct television that was a respected tool of education and closeness within the family unit. I liken this version of TV to thin Elvis. Parents may have shook their heads when Elvis shook his pelvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, but they were right beside their kids to tell them right from wrong. Then TV got fat. It grew as the capacity for carrying its signal grew from antennae to a system of underground cables. Unfortunately the content did not match the deliverance. There was as Bruce Springsteen said “Fifty-Seven channels and nothing's on”. This form of television consisted of cookie cutter programming focusing more on the art of the social commentary then the provocation of conversation. This is the fat Elvis, choking on a peanut butter and cream cheese sandwich.

So we are left with a new class of adult, the rise of the affluent poor adult. These are the people who have enough for a weekend of blow filled fantasy or a jaunt to Cancun or Vegas, yet who have a bank statement that is more difficult to reconcile than Elizabeth Taylor's fourth marriage. Asset light and debt heavy, these new adults are spending their days waiting until they can spend their parents inheritances. These are the adults reminding their folks to specify that "no special measures" be taken to extend their lifespan and enrolling their parents in advanced rock climbing courses at the local gym. Granted, these affluently poor adults are a *very* small portion of our generation and it is remarkable that they are even an identifiable sub-class of generation stratum. The people existed in every generation previous except we called them something else. Fuck-ups. Losers. Ne'er do wells.

Because our parents and forbearer toiled for four score and..... screw that, it was the technological age that ushered in this prosperity. We have maximized the utility of human energy and are able to extract and manipulate global resources at a heretofore untold level. The only thing our parents have failed to do is grow with this technological age. It is this generation that is so different that it has created a standard of living so attainable it makes George Jetson look like a Luddite farmer. In this vein our parents are the Luddites and we are the space aliens waving our Ipods around.

Somehow these late bloomers of the boom will find their way out of their parent's basements and into the basement apartments of the home one of their friends just bought. Life goes on. The next generation of slackers will make the former look like a group of bon vivants. These are the adults that will have never known the magnetic mystery that is the eight-track tape. They are the people who live in the Age of Pentium. The people for whom Rick Schroeder was an actor on a cop show, and not the symbol of agregious consumption. That my friends, is the nature of progress. End scene with a sepia toned Bob Dylan walking off frame, guitar slung around neck and a pile of cue cards left fallen on the street.