No Day But Today

Today, I was thinking about a conversation with a friend that took place a couple of months ago. I asked about her job and she remarked that she could see herself staying there for the rest of her career and being fine with it. I remember being completely taken aback. This wasn’t a reflection on her job, but a reaction to the oddity of hearing someone my age speak about the long term. Twenty or thirty years might as well be to infinity and beyond for most of Generation Meh.

Photo by ronnie44052

We talk about the future, but it’s in vague, nebulous terms – buying a house someday, starting a business, paying off our student loans. It’s not so much concrete plans as an acknowledgment that time will continue to march on and some stuff will obviously happen in the interim between the all-too-vivid now and the yet-to-be-determined then. In a way, it’s comforting. There’s always the possibility of improvement, a change in fortunes, a rising tide to lift all boats. Maybe even soon. Soon-ish? Someday?  Being relatively young, believing in better times ahead (at least at the level of the individual, best to take an ostrich-like approach to collective fate) is still plausible. After all, we were promised robot butlers, weren’t we?

But as much as the idea of the eventual comforts us, investing in it lets us off the hook in the here and now. There was a neon sign on the Tex Mex restaurant near my old office – Free Beer Tomorrow. But the weak joke is on the patrons, of course – that mythical tomorrow never comes and the drinks are never free. It’s just a string of todays that lead us further into the future that we believe will be better than the present but aren’t actually taking steps to create.

And yet, things are pretty tenuous without that American Dream infrastructure, aren’t they? Sure, there’s the tantalizing freedom of being able to collapse the tent, pack up your wares and move on, move out, move up at a (figurative) moment’s notice, but there’s also the worry that, without roots, a stiff wind could upend everything and you’d never find all the pieces or be able to put them together in the right order again.

So, for the moment, Gen Meh has set up camp in our individual way stations. While we haven’t figured out the future, we also haven’t committed to the present. We know that now is not enough. Now will not suffice for the next 20, 30, 60 years. But we haven’t gotten much further than that. One foot in the present, one in the future and both eyes on the clock. And that’s where the fear creeps in. It reminds me of a (misinterpreted) conversation I had with someone once upon a time. I mentioned not wanting to just let time pass, to eventually find myself staring down the barrel of 30 and not be able to account for the years that got me there. I’m no proponent of five-year plans and scheduled existences, but I understand the nagging fear of becoming a Rip Van Winkle in your own life, the fear that if you don’t or can’t get square with the here and now, to assign it some (any?) intention, endow it with a greater purpose, that you might very well wake up one day to realize that you’re in a hot air balloon drifting three hundred yards over a Kansas wheat field with no recollection of  having untied the cord or thrown the anchor out.

Oh my, how did that happen? is a pretty poor substitute for carpe diem, isn’t it?