#The hamster wheel of life plus

I was reading a thread on Facebook last week with some millennials talking about how maligned they are by older generations (I really need to find another word for “maligned”) and it prompted me to send this note to another Gen X friend who I knew was also reading along:Īll young people are stupid. Except you’re not actually anti-the generation behind you, you just wish they understood all the things they could be learning from the benefit of your experience and hindsight instead of waiting 20 years for their own hindsight, but hi, they’re young and know everything. And then we get older and turn on the generation behind us because they’re whiny and they feel maligned and misunderstood. One pattern we seem to repeat is in thinking that our generation has it sooooooo much harder than any previous generation, and nobody understands our experience, and we are so maligned by the generation ahead of us. I can’t wait to see what I’m doing now that makes me laugh at 40-something Wendy ten or twenty years from now. It’s amazing that our parents don’t roll their eyes at us more often than they do. There seems to be a lot of realizing how stupid I was. You think you do, and then you get older, and you realize how stupid you were when you thought that. Now that I’m in the middle and looking both directions, I don’t at all assume I know everything – that is one thing I have learned. And there’s no getting this message through, because they think they know everything. They’re aware of the passage of time for maybe the first time ever, but they’re obviously not old. And now, I realize how stupid they sound. And I hear/see on Facebook people in their 20s and 30s say things in this vein all the time. I remember saying things like, “I’m sooooooooooooo olllllldddddddd” when I was 25. This awareness of what is and is not old seems to be one of the universal stupidities of young people. She is not your grandmother’s grandmother. Oldness has nothing to do with awesomeness, and the timing of this rambling contemplation could not be more fortuitous, seeing as tomorrow she is receiving an honorary doctorate from University of St. She also reads my blog, so hopefully she isn’t offended by that statement.

#The hamster wheel of life plus

The math thing, plus I have a 97-year-old grandma. In the US the average lifespan for women is something like 81 years, and I can do math. This is not a bad thing, even though when I refer to myself as “middle-aged” people recoil and assure me that I’m not. I’m not young anymore, in spite of what people think. I feel like somewhere in my early 40s (which is where I still reside) I reached a point of clarity or something. I’ve been contemplating age and aging and the giant hamster wheel of life for a while now. 20-something Wendy, I blame you – if you had stayed in a little more, maybe we’d have more cash reserves now – see, this is all your fault!

It’s convenient that I’m happy staying in, since at the moment I don’t have a lot of extra dough for going out. Today a quiet weekend at home with Ruby Dogwonkafonka is one of my favorite things, and if I go too long without one I get twitchy. Or at least leave me exhausted and in need of a weekend. “Fun” = going out, unless I were having a party or some kind of social gathering at my abode.

I used to consider it a failed weekend if I didn’t have something fun to do both nights. If time-traveling 20-something Wendy were to appear right now, she would die. I’m on the couch in pajamas, eating pizza, alone, catching up on my DVR backlog.