Jun 14
I have been meaning to post this for a while now but somehow never got around to it. I recently started watching the first season of Mad Men, a pretty good, though largely unknown tv show about advertising executives in the early 1960′s. The show itself is entertaining, but I admit that the most staggering part of it all for me is the massive culture shock between the characters’ world and my own. And yet, as alien as their lifestyle appears it is unbelievable to me that what I am watching is a presumably accurate depiction of the same world I live in… only fifty years ago.
The culture of 1960 is difficult to quickly express, but according to Mad Men it is essentially an R-rated version of Leave it To Beaver. Everybody smokes… all the time. The men smoke. The women smoke. The doctor smokes while he is examining you. Oh, and all of the men drink too. They drink at work. The drink after work. They drink on the train ride home. The women don’t seem to drink much, but they devote all of their time to cooking dinner, watching the kids, and gossiping with the other women. It is a completely man-centered world where everybody wears a suit and the men constantly tell jokes about the Jews and the Negros and slap their secretaries on the ass. The men are all married of course, but they also all have mistresses. Women are expected to have a job only until they get married, which they are of course expected to do as soon as possible.
I looked up some clips on YouTube and it is difficult to get a complete picture in a single one-minute clip, but here is a decent example.
I assume that the show takes some liberties and makes generalizations, but I also assume that the world it presents is not too far from the realities of the past.
I bring this all up because it directly relates to an article that I have been meaning to share with you. Lukas sent it to me a while back during a prolonged discussion of the obviously ridiculous belief systems of the current generation of “old people.” At that time we were referring to what we believed to be a wholly idiotic mass brainwashing of senior citizens in support of Hillary Clinton. (“Old people are inherently racist.” … and so on.) Basically, it made no sense to us how previous generations could be so completely out of touch with modern realities. Along the same line we also wondered how those same generations perceived the current one (in my experience they generally don’t like us).
Take a minute and read this article.
Seriously, it is important.
There is a fundamental generation gap in today’s world, presumably one that is far more striking than any that have come before. I of course expect that my grandparents didn’t really understand my parents at some point, just as their parents didn’t understand them. But the differences in perspective and motivation between this generation and those are, in my mind at least, almost impossible to fully consolidate.
In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this.
That statistic makes me feel much better, but I don’t expect it will do much for my mom or the now-reliable questions of girlfriends and marriage that have become a staple of our conversations. It makes sense though… to me at least. I can understand why getting married and having kids can be so important to her. Unfortunately, I wonder if she will ever understand why it is so equally unimportant to me. The world in which she grew up is radically different than my own.
The world of her parents is even more foreign.
I sometimes try to imagine the lives of my grandparents when they were my age. I have seen pictures of the men in their suits, proudly going off to work at International Business Machines. They work hard every day while their wives stay at home and manage the family. Their friends are all white. They smoke cigarettes and drink liquor and probably feel like they are living in wondrous times because the television has been invented and scientists just discovered a vaccine for polio.
I sometimes also try to imagine the lives of my parents when they were my age. I have seen pictures of them too, although now those pictures are in color. They wear funny clothes and have long hair and beards. A lot of them still wear suits to work, although now the company is called IBM. The women work too… at least some of them. Once they have kids a lot of them will quit their jobs, though, and stay home to raise their families. They might have one or two non-white friends, but they keep mostly to their own kind. They still smoke, but now it’s weed instead of tobacco. They drink beer instead of liquor and probably feel like they are living in wondrous times because man has walked upon the moon and Pong has been invented.
And as for my life? Well, I don’t smoke at all and I rarely drink. If I did do drugs the ones I’d do would have been designed in a lab by chemists with advanced degrees. I wear a suit only for weddings, funerals, and job interviews. I have worn shorts and sandals to every real job that I have ever had. I feel sorry for my friends who already have kids and have no immediate desire to start a family of my own. I laugh to think that IBM was ever cutting-edge and expect to find as many women in an office as men. Most of my friends are Asian or Indian and I have a few that I’ve never actually met before, having spoken only through our computers. I am convinced that I live in wondrous times because I am posting this journal entry on the internet and because I can buy a zero-calorie Cherry Coke that tastes almost exactly like the original.
Sadly, it is impossible to imagine the world of my potentially-never-going-to-exist children – although I expect it will involve a lot of very small computers and gas prices in the low hundreds. I can only assume that theirs will be as different from mine as mine is from my parents’.
It’s a cycle that never ends.