Getting a Life
posted by Scott Herring @ 10:16 PM
During the time that I was working in Yellowstone National Park, the phrase "get a life" entered the everyday language. It annoyed me greatly, because I was already failing pretty miserably to do as the motto ordered. Or so I thought.
As noted in my bio (and you should check those, as we begin the process of getting acquainted), I spent five years working for what was nearly the smallest concessionaire in YNP, Yellowstone Park Service Stations. I was never happier, except when the future came up. The job was not a career position, of course; I had nothing describable as a career, and in the end it was probably that lack--and the guilt it caused--that drove me out of the park for good.
I mention that long-past problem because you may very well have been there yourself. I also mention it because I am no longer sure I ever needed to worry.
My thinking was changed, oddly, by an article in a magazine, one that had nothing to do with parks. I stumbled on "The Perpetual Adolescent," by Joseph Epstein, in the usual internet fashion: quite by accident. It ran in The Weekly Standard on March 15, 2004, and is really a long harrumph: Epstein glowers at such trends as the national decision to permanently dress down (people used to wear ties, and now instead wear baseball caps that say "I'm With Stupid"). He connects this change in national dress habits with other examples of mass immaturity--the popularity of video games and gross-out movies and such--and uses them to attack the tendency he sees in people to act like teenagers until well past their fortieth birthdays.
The article is a long one, and draws some questionable conclusions; it reads as if Epstein had the TV on while he wrote, and the TV showed "Girls Gone Wild" infomercials over and over until they finally drove him mad. But the article started to ring a bell for me when it turned to the way people now defer career choices.
"The increasing affluence the United States enjoyed after World War II, extending into the current day," Epstein says, "contributed heavily to forming the character I've come to think of as the perpetual American adolescent. Earlier, with less money around, people were forced to get serious, to grow up--and fast. How quickly the Depression generation was required to mature! How many stories one used to hear about older brothers going to work at 18 or earlier, so that a younger brother might be allowed to go to college, or simply to help keep the family afloat!" After the war, "With lots of money around, certain kinds of pressure were removed. More and more people nowadays are working, as earlier generations were not, with a strong safety net of money under them. All options opened, they now swim in what Kierkegaard called 'a sea of possibilities,' and one of these possibilities in America is to refuse to grow up for a longer period than has been permitted any other people in history."
Epstein gets close to the heart of the matter when he talks about our changing attitude toward time: "Time for the perpetual adolescents is curiously static. They are in no great hurry: to succeed, to get work, to lay down achievements. Perhaps this is partly because longevity has increased in recent decades--if one doesn't make it to 90 nowadays, one feels slightly cheated--but more likely it is that time doesn't seem to the perpetual adolescent the excruciatingly finite matter, the precious commodity, it indubitably is. For the perpetual adolescent, time is almost endlessly expandable. Why not go to law school in one's late thirties, or take the premed requirements in one's early forties, or wait even later than that to have children? Time enough to toss away one's twenties, maybe even one's thirties; 40 is soon enough to get serious about life; maybe 50, when you think about it, is the best time really to get going in earnest."
As I've said, Epstein is grousing, but what he has put his finger on here is something larger and more important than he realizes. Like it or not, since the end of the Second World War, the US and the rest of the industrialized world has grown ever wealthier. As our science and technology gets more sophisticated, even people with spotty or bad healthcare end up living a long time. We no longer need--as our grandparents did--to find a permanent job, get married, and start having the first of six babies by the age of nineteen. So what do we do instead?
That is one question, among many, that I want to look at in these blog entries of mine. I have become convinced that we've entered a period of large-scale historical change where these matters are concerned, a period that doesn't have a name yet--and people who are living through such a time usually aren't aware of it at the moment (people did not greet each other in early 15th century Florence by saying, "Hey, buddy, nice Renaissance, huh? Thought that Medieval thing would never end. I mean. . .yeesh"). Our society is performing an experiment, trying to decide what we should all do with the time granted to many of us now that we no longer have to hustle and be good salarymen at Yoyodyne Inc. from an early age--unless we want to.
Such a large social experiment is of its nature lengthy and chaotic, and leads to a lot of dead ends and wasted time. A lot of people end up spending a decade playing Xbox on one TV while another shows the DVD of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same over and over and over, night after night after night. How much better to spend that time at Yosemite or Great Smoky Mountains or Denali? Or Yellowstone, like I did--feeling guilty all the while about how I needed to get a life, even though what I was learning there, over the course of a half-decade, has been immeasurably valuable to me ever since.
I used to think that I stayed in Yellowstone too long. Now I wonder if I left too soon.
As noted in my bio (and you should check those, as we begin the process of getting acquainted), I spent five years working for what was nearly the smallest concessionaire in YNP, Yellowstone Park Service Stations. I was never happier, except when the future came up. The job was not a career position, of course; I had nothing describable as a career, and in the end it was probably that lack--and the guilt it caused--that drove me out of the park for good.
I mention that long-past problem because you may very well have been there yourself. I also mention it because I am no longer sure I ever needed to worry.
My thinking was changed, oddly, by an article in a magazine, one that had nothing to do with parks. I stumbled on "The Perpetual Adolescent," by Joseph Epstein, in the usual internet fashion: quite by accident. It ran in The Weekly Standard on March 15, 2004, and is really a long harrumph: Epstein glowers at such trends as the national decision to permanently dress down (people used to wear ties, and now instead wear baseball caps that say "I'm With Stupid"). He connects this change in national dress habits with other examples of mass immaturity--the popularity of video games and gross-out movies and such--and uses them to attack the tendency he sees in people to act like teenagers until well past their fortieth birthdays.
The article is a long one, and draws some questionable conclusions; it reads as if Epstein had the TV on while he wrote, and the TV showed "Girls Gone Wild" infomercials over and over until they finally drove him mad. But the article started to ring a bell for me when it turned to the way people now defer career choices.
"The increasing affluence the United States enjoyed after World War II, extending into the current day," Epstein says, "contributed heavily to forming the character I've come to think of as the perpetual American adolescent. Earlier, with less money around, people were forced to get serious, to grow up--and fast. How quickly the Depression generation was required to mature! How many stories one used to hear about older brothers going to work at 18 or earlier, so that a younger brother might be allowed to go to college, or simply to help keep the family afloat!" After the war, "With lots of money around, certain kinds of pressure were removed. More and more people nowadays are working, as earlier generations were not, with a strong safety net of money under them. All options opened, they now swim in what Kierkegaard called 'a sea of possibilities,' and one of these possibilities in America is to refuse to grow up for a longer period than has been permitted any other people in history."
Epstein gets close to the heart of the matter when he talks about our changing attitude toward time: "Time for the perpetual adolescents is curiously static. They are in no great hurry: to succeed, to get work, to lay down achievements. Perhaps this is partly because longevity has increased in recent decades--if one doesn't make it to 90 nowadays, one feels slightly cheated--but more likely it is that time doesn't seem to the perpetual adolescent the excruciatingly finite matter, the precious commodity, it indubitably is. For the perpetual adolescent, time is almost endlessly expandable. Why not go to law school in one's late thirties, or take the premed requirements in one's early forties, or wait even later than that to have children? Time enough to toss away one's twenties, maybe even one's thirties; 40 is soon enough to get serious about life; maybe 50, when you think about it, is the best time really to get going in earnest."
As I've said, Epstein is grousing, but what he has put his finger on here is something larger and more important than he realizes. Like it or not, since the end of the Second World War, the US and the rest of the industrialized world has grown ever wealthier. As our science and technology gets more sophisticated, even people with spotty or bad healthcare end up living a long time. We no longer need--as our grandparents did--to find a permanent job, get married, and start having the first of six babies by the age of nineteen. So what do we do instead?
That is one question, among many, that I want to look at in these blog entries of mine. I have become convinced that we've entered a period of large-scale historical change where these matters are concerned, a period that doesn't have a name yet--and people who are living through such a time usually aren't aware of it at the moment (people did not greet each other in early 15th century Florence by saying, "Hey, buddy, nice Renaissance, huh? Thought that Medieval thing would never end. I mean. . .yeesh"). Our society is performing an experiment, trying to decide what we should all do with the time granted to many of us now that we no longer have to hustle and be good salarymen at Yoyodyne Inc. from an early age--unless we want to.
Such a large social experiment is of its nature lengthy and chaotic, and leads to a lot of dead ends and wasted time. A lot of people end up spending a decade playing Xbox on one TV while another shows the DVD of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same over and over and over, night after night after night. How much better to spend that time at Yosemite or Great Smoky Mountains or Denali? Or Yellowstone, like I did--feeling guilty all the while about how I needed to get a life, even though what I was learning there, over the course of a half-decade, has been immeasurably valuable to me ever since.
I used to think that I stayed in Yellowstone too long. Now I wonder if I left too soon.
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1 Comments:
Scott, As I see it you hit the nail dead on. At 62 I grew up in the post WWII era. We had to grow up--there were no saftey nets. Now I also appreciate that sense of perpetual adolesence (used to be called irresponsibility. While you write of a sense of an endless hour glass, my hour glass is clearly delimted. We do share a common spirit though. I hope to spend as many days in the Grand Caynon and on other vast horizons, working in as many dead-end jobs (literally) as I can fit in. Hope you make it back to Yellowstone.
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