SAXTONS RIVER — Recently I've had occasion to talk with some old friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven't spoken to in two decades. Naturally, in the course of playing catch-up, we talked about our kids, all young adults trying to make their way in the world. As a result, I've come to see modern life as pretty toxic and dysfunctional and to wonder what our legacy to our kids really is.
I'm not talking about environmental or economic issues, although those issues exist as well. I'm talking about the frenzy and frustration of daily life.
Nearly everyone had a story to tell about how their kids are trying to cope - with city life, with negotiating healthy relationships, with balancing love and work in a culture that calls such striving “lack of ambition.” These bright, well-educated, and career-oriented, if not career-driven, people are also politically savvy purveyors of the landscape looming large before them, and a lot of them don't like what they see.
Some say they feel “trapped” in a world without values. Others think a career change might give their lives more meaning or a new relationship might reinvigorate them. But the subtle subtext - the back story, if you will - the common denominator is that these thirtysomethings are feeling scared about their futures and suffocated by systems and expectations they didn't expect to face.
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The problem seems to be more prevalent among our daughters, young women who by nature, one could argue, are more perceptive and more willing to articulate their struggles.
These women want careers, for which they have trained and from which they derive the juice of life; at the same time, they want families and healthy home lives with partners who “get it” and are in for the long haul. It doesn't sound like they're asking too much to me.
But their desire for a viable combination of love and work can seem like a lot in the “real world” because that world is still laden with organizations that don't understand, value, or get behind healthy lifestyles no matter what their gender manuals say.
Colleagues who would make great friends (or perhaps life partners) push themselves to the limit, forfeiting God knows what in their personal lives, thereby setting standards that others dare not confess they find too hard to emulate. Today's information technology doesn't help. And so the frenzy is perpetuated because no one is willing to stop the world, get off for a bit, and help to reshape it.
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I asked one friend if she thought the Third Wave - feminists of our daughters' generation - were doing anything to change things. She said she didn't see it and that it would be terribly hard in today's world.
By way of example, she told me her pregnant daughter, who works for a lead agency supporting reproductive rights, was admonished to produce a note from the doctor because of a hospitalization that caused her to be absent from work. “You know, our generation fought to enter the workplace, to have it all, to live our lives like men did," my friend said. "But we failed to realize that we didn't want to live like men. What we really wanted was a paradigm shift. In that sense, we failed our daughters.”
I think she's right, even though I recognize that the women's movement is an evolutionary one. I just hope that our daughters and the men they love, our sons and the women they love, and everyone else out there, from politicians to pundits, can give the subject of our true legacy some thought.
What kind of a world have we bequeathed to our young, after all? How can we help them live lives of value (and self respect), at work and at home? If each of us had it to do over again, what might we have done differently, for their sakes?