The Four Letter Word

I heard a sound-bite the other day from Hillary Clinton saying that, "Kids today don't know what work is. They think work is a four letter word. They think they should go right to the top making fifty or seventy thousand dollars a year and they have TVs and I-pods and computers...I hope we get back to the old way of doing things. I hope we all start thinking some very old fashioned thoughts in the future."

So upon hearing this my first reaction was, yeah, she's right. I've thought this very thing before and even alluded to it in a previous blog. Then I let it roll around for awhile and thought, what older person hasn't thought this about the upcoming generation? Of course we have a better life, supposedly because that's what our parents were working for. And of course our higher level of comfort is going to bring about a more liberal attitude toward work (among other things). But I'd like to give us more credit than just being a generation of Trustifarians (spoiled kids). Despite some of the things I've said before, I think that my generation is starting to wake up a little bit. I think we're looking at our parents--two-thirds of whom are divorced, many of whom are on anti-anxiety and depression meds, most of whom hate the jobs they're working but keep doing it for the sake of money--and we're saying, what's the point? So we work some mediocre job and we live in some cookie-cutter neighborhood and we try to be good people (whatever that means anymore) and when the dissonance gets to be too much we look around at all our nice things and say, "Well, I can't complain too much." Why would we want to repeat this? More importantly, why would we want to one-up this?

I think my generation is finally saying enough is enough. We're saying it quietly-- it's definitely not the grand cosmic turn-around that people predicted of the Gen- Xers, but if you look at the big picture, a change is happening. People my age don't want forty-hour a week jobs. Some of us still work them, but we're looking for something with some flexibility. We want to have control over our lives Senator Clinton. We're tired of being miserable just because our parents were. We're not down with the Puritan work ethic. Let's face it America, we're not Puritans. I can't even check my email without seeing some twenty-year-old in a bikini trying to sell me car insurance. Why? Because sex sells and we just don't care anymore about whether it's right or wrong. Those are questions the Puritans would have asked, not Americans. Not in a country that wants to believe that what we're doing is okay so desperately that we create our own news station (Fox News) that agrees with the government and will tell us everything's going great despite a huge anti-American sentiment throughout the entire world. But I digress.

On the topic of work, my feeling is that it just doesn't matter all that much. So some of us would rather be hanging out and working part time jobs or jobs with flexible schedules, or getting higher degrees in something we enjoy. Would it be so horrible to have a more educated America? Maybe some of us just want to enjoy life a little bit before we bite it. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with my own generation. I can't be too far off if it's coming up in politics. So if you're a Gen-Xer, don't fret. I say we move to the thirty-hour work week right now. Let's all build more moderate houses and drive little hydrogen powered cars. Let's throw away our anti-depressants and give a big middle finger to this arrogant, bigger is better attitude our seniors have passed on to us. Let's start using our heads a little bit. We have to start thinking about social responsibility in this country or we're going to be passing on a time bomb to the next generation. Slow down. Breath. Go for a walk. A long walk. Or a bike ride. Just chill out because you're driving me crazy. And if chilling out means I'm not a good Puritan-American, well, I think I'll sleep okay tonight (without the aid of sleeping pills).