I keep hearing that forty is the new thirty. And that's cool (I guess. Actually, I don't care. No, actually, I don't even know this is supposed to mean.), but it occurs to me now that there's a terrifying implication at hand. If thirty is, in fact, the new twenty, then twenty is the new ten! This means that the average middle-American adolescent now "enjoys" about a 25-year period of wandering reign before being consumed by home ownership and then, probably, a midlife crisis (which is why I rent). That's 25 years of instant-gratification & indulgent, self-obsessed behavior. That's twenty-five years of having no idea what they're really about and acting as if there were no consequences to their personal actions. And that's all okay for a while, but for 25 years? That's just too long. I mean, damn - one and a half generations ago, adolescence still lasted only about seven or eight years (and in other parts of the world, I'm told, this is still true), then it was time to step up and be a pillar, or at least a cog in the social machine. So I wonder, will this new generation of guinea pigs even be able to survive all that adolescence???
My answer: Yes, physically. But psychologically, unless something is done to stop it (and here I'm thinking along the lines of some form of social or therapeutic intervention), an unconscious terror-despair will take root...and it will be a dumb terror-despair. And its eyes will be vacuous. And it will find no expression in any of the silly material possessions and artifacts of pop culture that promise to grant a sense of self-definition. And none of the older people will be able to relate to these young, who will barely even be able to relate to one another, beyond the sticky grope. And there will be little prizing of these things called "maturity" and "wisdom." And the universities and armed services and ashrams and churches and clinics will brim with people in search of meaning - any meaning - as the old ways gasp finally in the godawful end times.
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