By Becky De Oliveira
Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.—Emily Dickinson
I always thought there would be some magical time when I was exactly the right age and that this would last for a while. More than being a specific “right age,” it would be kind of a golden era—a period of perhaps fifteen or twenty years when I would be old enough to be taken seriously but not so old as to be written off as irrelevant. During this period I would have all the energy and beauty of youth along with the wisdom that comes from a lifetime of experience. When I spoke, people would sit up straighter and perk their ears. Who I am kidding? I thought once this era arrived it would never end; it would become the default state of affairs. The whole world, the universe, frozen in time as I sat at the head of the table and pontificated, waving my finger for emphasis, always wrinkle-free, never having to go to the bathroom more than once in any given hour. The book of Job discusses this at some length, including these words: “Young and old greeted me with respect; I was honored by everyone in town. When I spoke, everyone listened; they hung on my every word” (29:7–8, MSG).
This respect I thought would be granted me was not to be confused with the fake interest real adults took when I was in, say, my twenties, and one real adult or another would sit me down eagerly and perhaps a touch forcefully, and ask me to explain my values, my world view, what people my age thought about life, what we hoped to achieve, what our dreams were. This was a trap, I soon discovered—a way for the real adult to explain what my values should be. It was a way of talking about their own values and lives, a method of passing on some kind of baton that I smiled weakly and pretended to accept just to make them go away until I could chuck the rusty baton into the nearest large body of water.
I got less advice in my thirties, not because the older ones didn’t want to give it (you could see it sometimes straining their necks, the effort not to speak) but perhaps because it was embarrassing to be seen lecturing a youngish person, one with a job and a house and children even. But I’d still get the occasional dismissive comment that told me the golden era had not yet arrived: “You’re just a kid.” “Oh, just you wait until you’re my age—then you’ll know!” When I hit forty—or pretty close—that mostly stopped too. No one really calls me a kid anymore, because clearly that is not what I am. But to my dismay, I’ve found that the golden age appears to have passed me over entirely. I went from being a kid to being old. I blinked and I missed that whole period of eternal bliss where I would be old-enough-but-not-too-old. Just like that I’m a dinosaur. And not one of the cool ones. A boring dinosaur, the kind no kid wants on his lunch box, the kind whose name no one can pronounce, the stupid-looking one with the helmet-like skull. Pachycephalosaurus.
For a while now, the millennials have frankly annoyed me a little—not them per se but the fascination with them. When I was young, the older generation was critical. They hated our clothes and hair and music and taste in, well, everything. We were called the slacker generation because we were thought to be unwilling to—gasp!—sell our souls to corporate America. We were latchkey kids, a generation raised in broken homes and during a bum economy, the ones fed a diet of non-stop fear of another war like Vietnam and of serial killers and motorcycle gangs and razor blades in Halloween candy and scratch-n-sniff stickers laced with LSD and backmasking in record albums. This was all, evidently, our own fault, as if we had ridden a wave of these things into this world along with our placenta. Everything that anyone had ever believed in had pretty much been determined to be false—or at the very least not as shiny and spot-proof as people thought—but we were supposed to keep believing anyway. Put on a happy face. As my mother, whom I adore in spite of her generation, would often put it, “The show must go on.” “What show?” I’d retort. “Why must it go on? I don’t want to be part of a show.”
The older generation never did warm to us or our point of view and instead they looked straight over our bandanna- covered heads into the safety-proofed cribs of the ones who came immediately after us—the millennials—and swooned. These young-uns can do no wrong. Everyone wants to know what they want, what they like, what they need! When I was young, if anyone wanted to know details like these about you it would be so they could deny you those things, but with the millennials, no—the oldsters want to know their desires so that like giants genies loosed from beach swept bottles they can grant them!
When my generation stopped going to church or kept going and complained about it, they said it was because we were unable to commit to anything. Now that we’ve stayed on and have come to actually run the church in the sense that we do much of the work—along with the work of raising our children and caring for our parents and working multiple jobs to get by—they tell us to get out of the way and let the millennials have a crack at running the show. Interesting. Many people complain about the millennial work ethic, but mostly in a soul-searching way, wondering how they might change their entire corporate culture to accommodate this group who aren’t, as a whole, super into paying their dues by making tea for the bosses or accepting slaves wages for the first decade, or having the attitude that they must simply be thankful to be employed at all, in any capacity.
And to be honest, I have to take my hat (or bandanna) off to the young ones. Who knew the old ones were so easily frightened? Not me. Back in college, I took notes like a mouse and typed my papers late into the night to make sure I never missed a deadline, slavishly reading over the requirements to make sure I didn’t miss something important. I’ve worked in higher education now for more than a decade, as an instructor and currently as a doctoral associate working on my Ph.D., and I spend a lot of time laughing weakly. Just this week a student in his late twenties wrote to my boss (his professor) to ask for a template for a poster for research evening. “I don’t think I can spare the time to create a poster from scratch,” he wrote by way of explanation, thinking, apparently, that this was a perfectly reasonable stance even though the assignment was to create a poster for research evening. This student had not lost a limb, nor was he running a temperature. He just couldn’t spare the time. Shrug. But his professor could. She, a tenured academic with an impressive list of publications, on the other side of the world delivering a keynote address at an important conference, managed to spare the time to find a template on the internet and sent it to him along with a few kind words of support.
What’s my point? I have a few, actually—and they may not be quite what you’re expecting. The first is this: I’ll bet everyone who has ever lived has felt a version of what I’ve just described. The older sibling in any family is lucky be- cause he or she came first—and cursed for the same reason. The younger one will always get to do more, sooner, faster, granted privileges by slowing and weary parents who cannot maintain a lifetime of vigilance. That’s not really the younger one’s fault. I feel sorry for millennials to the same degree that I feel sorry for my own generation and for every one that went before us and for every one that will come behind. It’s hard to be a person, to deal with your own judgement of yourself along with the judgement of everyone else, to try to forge some kind of meaningful existence in the midst of so much noise, so many endless opinions.
Generational order is different from birth order in the sense that there is always another one coming up; in a family it is possible to truly be the baby. Generationally? Not so much. And what difference does it make anyway? New research suggests that birth order has little affect on adult personality—in spite of much anecdotal evidence to the contrary. Maybe generational affiliation is also of little effect. I’m not sure I really believe that generations are particularly unique. There are some historical and societal things that are common to people born in certain eras, but I deeply resent the argument that I can’t use technology, for instance, the implication that there is anything I automatically can’t do because of my age. We all live in multiple bodies while living as this one person—if we’re lucky. That is to say, we will all have been infants, toddlers, children, teens, young adults, not-young adults, old adults, and stumbling shells of our former selves before we’re through. We will experience it all—if we’re lucky, or not lucky, depending on how you see life, I suppose. Jessica Kriegal, writing for Forbes, makes the point that putting too much stock on generational identity creates “reductive stereotypes that prevent us from seeing people as the individuals they really are.”
It makes perfect sense and is quite reasonable that people in different stages of life should have different perspectives and priorities—but it’s amusing to note how rarely we step back to think rationally about what those might be and what might be driving them. Recently a woman around my own age wrote a letter to the editor at my son’s university complaining that the young women there wear leggings to worship. She’s afraid of the effect such clothing might have on her four sons’ ability to, uh, focus on spiritual things. “Can’t you think of the mothers of the sons when you go shopping?” this poor woman lamented. “My darling,” I wanted to ask her—softly, tenderly—“when did you ever think of anyone’s mother when you went shopping when you were nineteen? When do you think of anyone’s mother when you go shopping now? Face it, no one is ever going to think about anyone’s mother when they shop for clothes.”
What are some things you might assume other generations should care about that really make no sense at all?
We are all making our way through this swampy life, trying to avoid crocodiles and piranhas and quicksand, hoping for a rainbow now and then, hoping to make it to somewhere worth the trouble. We are not all at the same point in the journey and we frustrate one another with our superior knowledge, with our lack of knowledge, with our arrogance, with our ineptitude, with the headphones some of us just won’t remove from our ears. But we are guided by the same God above, the one who places the bow in the sky, who plots our course, who whispers—and sometimes shouts— encouragement and warning along the way. He is with us through it all, to the very end, He says. Wherever that might be, whenever the curtain falls.
–Becky De Oliveira is a writer, graphic designer, and research methodologist working on her Ph.D. at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.