Revisiting my future
A lot of young people think the world looks bleak. It once did for us older folks too.
Having been happily wed for almost 26 years, I’m always curious when I hear the institution of marriage is in trouble. While this article blames a combination of factors, one part jumped out at me: author and podcast host Shani Silver saying her generation expected marriage and family to come naturally until, “as millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did...We’re starting to see a future that can be scary because no one has really mapped it out for us” (emphasis added).
This is the polar opposite of how I and many of my contemporaries saw things. Our future was horrifying precisely because it was mapped out. According to the post-WW2 middle-class mindset, we were supposed to get hitched when we were young, settle in the burbs that had spread like mutant kudzu across the land, have 2.7 kiddos or maybe a couple more, and live a life of conformity from the playground to the boneyard. The culture was brilliantly satirized by folksinger / activist Malvina Reynolds in “Little Boxes.”
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
Right now a professional career, a family, and a home in a new suburb probably sound like an easy ride, but these rewards came with conditions that sent us running in the opposite direction. As some of you recall, during the 60s and most of the 70s, virtually all of those doctors and lawyers and business executives were male. Women were expected to be wives, mothers, and not much else. Racist covenants kept people of color off the hillside altogether. And in the worst years of the Vietnam war, men who couldn’t afford the university and the military draft deferment that came with it could be sent off to die.
I sympathize with people who are struggling to sort out marriage, student debts, stratospheric home prices, and AI’s assault on the job market. The one piece of advice I can offer is this: when your heart shouts from the rooftops that you’ve truly found the one, do whatever it takes to stay together. Marry or cohabitate, update that grand life plan you’ve had since high school, but hold tight to him / her / them because you might never find another. Your situation may require thinking outside the box. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?