Tag: Boomers

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1812 and Highlander Political Power Sharing

There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?

There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.

Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia

This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.

These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.

Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.

We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.

Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.

The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.

I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.

Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?

But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.

Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.

Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.

Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.

Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1774 and Haywire Hell Handbaskets

It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.

I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.

2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.

And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.

Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.

And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.

And yet, I’m still unwilling to consider the centralized approach. We’d be eaten faster just like whales fished into oblivion by mistakes in the Soviet math.

It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.

However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.

We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1740 and Jungian Archetypal Stories

I woke up resolved to apply fresh energy to the new beginning that has forced me into a cycle of grief as I memorialized my father and worked through his death. It’s been a strange and very sad month.

Jungian archetypal stories such as the symbolically significant “kill your father” narrative are templates and fundamental patterns that appear in dreams, literature and myth.

These stories come from the 12 archetypes of Carl Jung and are meant to show fundamental drives and lessons that repeat across human nature. This chart Perplexity found me illustrates them nicely.

My generation’s parents have been alive, in charge, and looming large well beyond what many expected in traditional generational studies.

The fourth turning has nevertheless begun and scramble to secure position, authority and resources pits the remaining elders against their children.

Clearly this is not optimal and we should find our own Jungian stories to free us to reach our own future without the literal end of our fathers. But if one has to suffer this loss then I’ll make the best of it.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1739 and Inflammatory Grief

I am giving myself till the end of the day to feel the anger, pain and frustration that has come to define the grieving process I am in. I lost my father quite recently and it has been an awful experience.

After the memorial ends at 5pm today I intend to let go of what I can even though I know I don’t have full control over it. I had little to do with it at all.

From the moment I learned of his passing I knew it would be a challenge due to the complicated family circumstance.

I’d been preparing for this transition for some years, both for health reasons and because I know that not being next of kin means I have little say in the matter. My time with my father was from a different era of his life and I am grateful for what it gave me. I love my father and always will.

I won’t lie about how much this experience has hurt. I was able to handle a few emotional body blows as I know my father and I have forgiven him a thousand times over for any pain and trauma as it got me here.

That my father struggled to forgive himself seemed a given to me and I intended to extend whatever grace was necessary to those who carried him through his final years.

Everyone experiences grief differently and strange flavors of hostility have indeed surprised me. Sending a living woman’s private erotica kept by her former husband to her daughter is a special kind of fucked up.

In grief, whatever one has to do to the villains you have built in your head is alright by me. It hurt but I don’t think I am hurting as much as someone who would do this. I am doing what I can to not become inflamed by it. These choices are what was deemed necessary.

I do however think we are unprepared for the many private painful emotional moments that will come with the fourth turning as baby boomers pass and their children across modern families grapple with what was broken and its costs.

I consider myself to be incredibly lucky in this regard as I knew it was coming. I am less sure we are prepared as a civilization for the pain that will arrive as more change and death arrives.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1738 and On The Far Side

It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.

It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.

Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.

We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.

Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder

In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.

He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.

The Far Side Computer Calendae

Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.

Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.

Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.

Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.

There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.

Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.

My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.

She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.

My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.

I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.

I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.

My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1736 and Putting Good Things Back Into The System

I had a few appointments in town today including two doctor appointments. I like to have my husband with me when the medical system is involved just in case I need a backup or level headed second opinion.

Afterwards we were able to catch a late lunch (nearly happy hour) at one of Bozeman’s trendy no seed oil spots. It being an odd hour for dining we could hear the conversations at the bar as the place was mostly empty.

A virgin Huckleberry margarita

There were two couples, one Boomer pair and the other geriatric millennials, who as it turned out both celebrating their anniversaries this weekend. The out of town Boomers had come for a Yellowstone and Tetons visit while the younger couple turned out to be local farmers in the valley and were excited to learn the tourists had something in common with them.

The Boomers had also run a farm in Florida but retired and sold it as it is apparently nigh impossible to grow oranges for juice in Florida anymore. The conversation had turned to everyone’s frustrations with the tariffs and the pressures it put on their work.

No one could remain competitive as cost inputs kept going up. Finding labor for smaller farms was getting more expensive and harder to secure. And land developers increasingly competed to acquire land piece by piece from older larger family farms who struggled to compete. We were full on eavesdropping at this point.

The husband in the young farmer pair was dressed just like Alex. He could have been Alex for how closely their styles matched. When he left for the bathroom, his wife said to the older couple how hard it has been recently.

Land he’d worked for years on a lease had just recently been sold to developers at an enormous markup. They understood the demand for housing but how could anyone continue to farm and make a living?

Between tariffs, labor costs and ravenous unmet demand for housing that could only be financed by large scale real estate developers the era of the family farm felt over. Only the big dogs could afford the costs and regulatory overhead.

We were finishing up our meal as we nodded along. Alex said to me “ok I know we don’t do this very often but I think we should pick up the meal for the younger couple.” Being on the verge of tearing up myself I couldn’t have agreed more.

I waved over the waitress and asked if this was possible. She seemed a little surprised “the whole meal?!” But it wasn’t a crazy amount. It was about $100. We sneakily paid our tab and theirs as quickly as we could. We didn’t want to make a thing of it. We just wanted to make their day a little better.

We got up and said to both couples that we couldn’t help overhearing it was both their anniversary weekends coming up and we wanted to wish them many more happy years together.

We thanked them both for keeping America fed and tried to casually saunter out before anyone noticed what we’d done. Hopefully this added a little cheer to their day. In a system as big and opaque and impersonal as America it can feel like there is nothing any of us can do.

So when you can do something even if it’s a small thing like picking up a meal we should do so. America is an idea but we are also a people and we stick together even if our elites make stupid decisions.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1734 and Oink Oink Slop Slop Piggie Piggie

It’s seems a tad unfair to use our porcine friends as comic stands in whenever we wish to mock trough consumers of remixed refuse. Pigs are intelligent animals whose biological closeness to human may allow us to use their organs in a pinch. We insult ourselves when we insult pigs.

And yet every time some new form of processed artificial intelligence content drops, we call it slop. Sooie!

Neither pigs nor humans deserve that kind of diet, even if we are both omnivores willing to consume just about anything. Staying alive sometimes requires a bit less discretion in diet.

Presumably so does staying spiritually healthy as well. If there is no Mozart to be had, I’ll take Moby. If there is no Melville then we take a pithy viral tweet. Where is the event horizon of art?

Michael Pollen called it the omnivores dilemma in our food system. When it comes to our art, it doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma. More creation and more tools for creativity are a social good but when it becomes regurgitation and re-ingestion does it not seem liable to make us soul sick?

And yet the industrialization of food has inspired the industrialization of all forms of content. Scale has indeed become the standard way we’ve come to feed our bodies and mind. It was Gut with Gutenberg but where are the limits? Do we even know?

Facebook and OpenAI both released new content creation tools this week that were widely derided as slop factories in my circles.

Of course, I spend my time on the written web amongst producers of the tools that produce the slop. We think we know better and can use these tools wisely. We know what’s in it, or at least we have the know how that programs the machines extrude it. Some of us have some sense of the original material but precious few.

The engineers who built the Doritos factory probably enjoy a cheesy corn chip too even if they can afford aged cheddar thanks to pay which came with popularity of their creation. Imagine how a medieval peasant would have felt encountering that much extreme nacho cheesiness.

The intelligentsia of the written web like Substack, Twitter and Reddit (admittedly that being an intelligentsia is a funny conceit) presumes the unwashed TikTok, Reels and Shorts masses have no taste and will consume anything and without end.

Video? How gauche! But isn’t it just so funny when our elders can’t tell the video of the lady breaking the bridge with a rock isn’t real. Ha ha! Stupid oldsters. We don’t realize soon we won’t be able to tell either. Walter Benjamin knew it was coming. He aura farmed too.

My brother told me recently that our grandmother worked in a hotdog factory and refused to eat processed meat for the rest of her life. I also won’t eat hot dogs or sausages so maybe the sense memory runs deep.

I admit that I feel the same way about encased meats as I do about short form video content. No amount of condiments or “answering to a higher authority” will entice me into consuming the stuff. ConAgra owns Hebrew National now and they answer to the stock market not God.

Even if there are artisanal varietals of processed meats (and processed content), I struggle with the ease with which it bypasses my satiety filters. We have peptides for overconsumption of food but not yet overconsumption of dopamine.

It’s fine if we crave whole meats and whole books. Or at least a long form essay. Something can be created with the finest ingredients carefully sourced and prepared by caring hands. And yet we know man cannot live on tweets and sausage alone. Pigs probably shouldn’t either. Sooie!!!!

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

Categories
Culture

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

The Fourth Turning has become something like accepted elite discourse canon for generational analysis and grand theories of history.

William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory is probably familiar to you but I’ll cite it for my own edification.

The Strauss–Howe generational theory, devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generationcycle in American history and Western history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–25 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate (mood) exists.

Neil Howe Generational Theory

I go in for this “generational horoscope” theory. But I go in for lots of other “deterministic and unfalsifiable” things too so weight that in your assessment. I’m a woman who has a deep respect for woo even though I do generally consider myself a rationalist. And like all rationalists I’m hypocritically predisposed to biasing own qualia. Nevertheless I believe the hard laws are physics not culture.

So it was with interest that I was this theory of elder millenials cross my feed. The oldest of the last generation to live without the internet may prove a further data point for The Fourth Turning fans.


My guess is that the most interesting political figures of the next 20 years will come from this cohort— 1981-1987.
-not digitally native, but digitally fluent.
-came of age during or just after September 11th.
-Started adulthood just before or during the Great Recession.
-the final bridge to the 20th century, but young enough to be grounded in the 21st.Katherine Boyle of a16z on Twitter

American dynamism is a patriotic posture of older Silicon Valley culture. And this group of proudly rationalist and engineering minded types is extremely frustrated with being made the enemy by the government. Obama era technocracy represented what looks like a detente between the Boomers and the millennials.

If we are in the middle of a generational changeover between Boomers and millennials it would seem as if the elder children might inherent. But you don’t see a lot of folks who remember a world before the internet. I think there is something in this narrative that will prove important as the moods shift.