the opening paragraphs of the article, Up With Grups, left a bad taste in my mouth with the self-serving attitudes and the could-give-a-rats-ass take on the future but towards the end it struck a very raw nerve, one that I have been fretting over for the past couple of years. Adam Sternbergh writes:

Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch. Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. Just how easily a bona fide, by-the-book adult can be made to wonder where it all went wrong, and why you ever bothered to grow up in the first place.

Essentially, Sternbergh described my father, a man who put some 30+ years of his life into a company only to see it washed away in the early years of the 1990’s. I was a sophomore in college when it happened and it shook me greatly to see a man that I had known my whole life as going to work each and every day without fail before six and coming home after six be left anchorless sitting in his chair staring at the paper not really reading the words on the page. I asked myself if that was the reward for compromising and giving everything to the firm, to be cast aside when the firm has no more use for you. Was this what I had to look forward to when I reach adulthood?

Somewhere along the way I forgot the taste of the initial fear and I believed that with enough education and hard work I could amass material comforts that would make me feel better about myself and my direction in life. When things took a downturn in the last handful of years I was shaken out of my stupor to realize that I had been running in place and that my definition of adulthood was grounded on the same compromises that had betrayed my father. While I had run straight into B School I stumbled out with a stellar GPA but little to no desire to use it to make money for someone else. Defining myself and being comfortable in my skin became more important than a fatter paycheck.

This is where I most identify with these Grups; what is the definition of adulthood and is a hard and fast definition even applicable anymore? I have friends that I certainly see as being more adult than myself but these are usually ones who have reached a stage or two ahead of me, in this case parenthood, and it hammers home the fact that I have been using a sliding scale to define adulthood. It started with “When I graduate college and start a career”, which quickly evolved into, “When I finish B-School”, yielding to “When I assume a mortgage”, and now rests on “When we start a family.” Changing the definition has always kept this inevitable cultural notion one step ahead of me and now I am questioning even the relevancy of it.

I am aging, my body tells me so in that I wake up on cold damp mornings with a stiff knee and a creaky hip, and while I often dismiss those ails as old sports injuries the simple fact is that I am healing slower and old injuries are creeping up on me. Youth is as much a physical state as it is a mental one and while my body slows and stiffens like a preemptive rigor mortis I find myself increasingly desperate to maintain some sort of youthful credibility be it those games and music or just being more knowledgeable about youth culture than my thirteen year old niece who is living it. That is sad, just as sad as the Grups who use their children as little malleable vessels for their own tastes in culture or those who live out their frustrated dreams through their offspring. It is sad because that act of looking backward to keep moving forward does not allow me to really grow as a person and neither does all this artificial benchmarking.

Life happens, as the tee shirt goes, and the last thing I want is to one day wake up and realize that I squandered it. I don’t want to wake up one day like my father to the realization that I am disposable, career does not define the person, nor do I want to be like some of the individuals in this article forever chasing relevancy and that amorphous state of hipness, clothes do not make the person either. I may not have any answers today, and likely will still be fretting about these very same issues with my last breath, I can say that, at least for now, I am doing my best to define myself and my life by my terms and not one from a marketing firm or from a political-cultural power structure.