even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

co-sign w/ Hurting -- which means i have to retract my Pol Pot comment.

TBF, though, even if i had $100K+ at 23 i don't think that buying a condo would've been on my list. and my list wouldn't have been entirely wasteful either. then again, maybe it's just the generation gap (and that ILXors aren't the target audience for this type of article).

I think they're just trolling for hits at this point which does make ilxors a target audience

lol @ agonising here won't somebody think of the 1%

feasiblility aside - the laments of the 22 y/o struggling with the 450k studio apartment market in manhattan definitely fits the bill for this thread.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/fashion/at-soulcycle-tribeca-the-spinning-stops-panic-ensues.html?_r=2&referrer

Yes, the spinnerati of downtown Manhattan has had to face its greatest fear: The TriBeCa flagship studio of SoulCycle, the chain of indoor cycling studios that is a haven to celebrities and everyday-workout-obsessives alike, closed last Monday for renovations, for three weeks. The construction, which began in February and was to have been finished by Labor Day, will double the location’s showers, bathrooms and locker space.

TriBeCa, of course, has multiple high-end gyms, some that offer spin classes. But rock stars, as SoulCycle calls its riders (who include Lena Dunham, Harry Styles of One Direction, Oprah Winfrey and, since a SoulCycle opened in Washington in August, Michelle Obama) accept no substitutes.

http://i.imgur.com/QTlhVuV.png

the picture that goes along with that article is frankly hellish

and the last three grafs propel that one into the pantheon, mamma mia these people

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/10704094_10154627573370298_4784795503358084576_n.jpg?oh=6e431ddfa56eb5a4a6a6bd8c77b564d7&oe=549C81E7&__gda__=1418171914_ce2f865e9f9049e34fa0e2f5cf0c5a58

just wanted to put that somewhere.

lol

how soon will there be a thread dedicated to AO Scott's mag piece, “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture"?

if you will it, dude, it is no dream

There should be...Some of it made sense but his take on wearing shorts has me smh

It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarily proud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops, or the reflexive arching of my eyebrows when I notice that a woman at the office has plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/the-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture.html?src=me

everything else otm, esp skateboards

Skateboards, they've almost made them respectable.

on the bright side, everyone who can remember when men wore suits and ties and hats to work will be dead in 20+ years. and people being 20 forever will just be normal. the urgency to get a lot done at an early age is gone now. you don't have to get married and have kids when you are 20 or EVER really! the urgency to grow up is gone. and the urgency to grow up and do grown up stuff is also gone when you realize that you have 70 years of netflix watching ahead of you. people live too long now. and it will probably get worse. in the near future people will probably be pushing 120 without breaking a sweat. which is why you shouldn't vaccinate. replacing fellini and magical realism with harry potter and the hunger games just a natural outcome of a longer life-span and a lack of responsibilities. (i get called "kid" ALL the time by people older than me. they think i'm 15. you aren't an adult anymore unless you are 80.)

trust me, ppl think i'm an adult. Even tho I never got a "career" bcz I had no idea you wouldn't be able to live alone in Brooklyn without one.

i've had a LOT of heavy shit happen to me in my life and i've worked a ton since i was a kid and i even have kids and i don't feel like an adult most days. my example would be my parents. they were so totally adults. they owned cufflinks.

morbz, you are baby boomer. you are exempt. you are last adult gen.

My wife just said yesterday that she thinks there's an inverse correlation between number of years past 30 a guy is still skateboarding and IQ.

underrated aerosmith to thread!

i don't really except the boomer label since I was about ten when the draft ended.

foghat generation then. same thing kinda.

ok i reject that even more insistently

i dunno, most of the people i went to high school with are probably 100% adult. when i see pictures they look old and normal.

this is a kid who grew up down the street from me. same age as me. same class. wish i had learned how to wear a suit properly. or make cgi tigers...

http://www3.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Bill+Westenhofer+85th+Annual+Academy+Awards+Vbm0ujCNzxHl.jpg

scott i own cufflinks but only have like 3 maybe 4 shirts w/ french cuffs

I still have this thing where I see pictures of other "adults" my age I think "oh they look like adults, there's no way I look like that." I probably actually do, or maybe I'm just really childish looking.

I feel similarly non-adult, scott. I was sorting laundry the other day and thought, "I am jointly responsible for the care and well-being of a human baby. I do laundry every week and usually manage to fold and put it away before laundry day rolls around again. And yet I do not feel like a grown up at all." It's really disorienting, actually. I guess I chalk some of it up to not meeting a number of adult milestones (rent, don't own a car) and meeting other adult milestones on my own schedule (married in my early 30s, then a law degree, then a baby at 40).

Like, my grandmother looked older than me when she was in her late 20s. By 35 she was already rocking a weekly wash-n-set hair helmet.

im 31 and most of the kids i went to high school with are all either a) attorneys or b) in finance. their linkedin photos all show them in suits with the same style of portrait. they wear collard button-downs on the weekends even if they wear shorts and flip-flops with them

i work in academia though so i just wear a wrinkled shirt to work and that's fine

I do think something happened to me some time within the first year or so of parenting, where my mindset really started to shift from procrastinating responsibilities to usually thinking about them first, and that does feel "adult" I guess. Like when I finally get my daughter to sleep and the FIRST impulse I have is "go wash the dishes, wipe the counters, take out the trash, clean up all the toys in the living room, and don't stop until the place is in order" -- that feels adult.

i definitely feel like there was more urgency as far as art goes. people burning brightly in their teens and 20's and making this immortal stuff. i look up info on all these dead musicians and they made these amazing works of art and were dead by 23. i could barely get out of bed when i was 23. it takes people longer now. the world has changed though. things are different.

I think we probably need to separate visuals from behavior re "old school" adults. Our forebears were "hard livers" for a bunch of social, evolutionary, and genetic reasons.

I don't iron pillow cases. I don't drink diet soda. I don't look back fondly at my high school glory days. Even the stuff that makes me feel out of touch, like the loss of familiarity with cultural references or not knowing a single god damn band in festival lineup, makes me feel old, but not like an adult. Like I said, it's disorienting.

xp ha, I'm an attorney but I work from home most of the time so I dress like I'm in academia. Plus even though I'm in "big law" I'm not partner track, so I can get away with being quirky. That definitely adds to the overall sense.

xpxp okay, we do that post-bedtime whirlwind of cleaning up to avoid living in our own filth.

xx...xp: Yeah, late to the thread but the old markers of adulthood were largely points of conformity, falling into line with often v narrow expectations? This seems obvious, sorry. So now we have a greater variety of models of "adulthood" to conform with, I guess?

I drink diet soda. "Iron," is that a verb?

it's the lack of gravitas, i suppose. that makes someone feel like a mock-adult. i would be a completely different 45 year old if it were 1950. i would have been a yard boss obviously. scaring hobos and other yeggs out of box cars.

Yeah but where does "gravitas" come from? Having a family at age 24 and then drinking for 50 years to dull the anxiety and later the regret?

it's not JUST conformity though. people actually SEEM younger. and look younger. i used to think i had some general idea of how old people were, but not anymore. i have no idea.

turning 30 is the new getting through puberty

"Iron," is that a verb?

lol, otm. we have this ironing board that in my mid-20s I only used during the first few days on a new job. i don't care anymore. we threw it up in the attic this weekend since i can't even remember the last time i used it

scott on the job circa 1935

http://s3-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal05/2012/3/23/15/enhanced-buzz-20655-1332532750-118.jpg

Oh sure, my grandma died when she as 57 and in my childhood mind she was already an old lady. She WAS an old lady, because she had old lady hair, clothes, made tacky crafts for church bazaars, didn't do any sports or outdoor activities. She accepted the limitations of "oldness" as it was packaged and shown to her.

Somewhere between her generation and my own mom's, that got a lot more diverse? Society probably reached some apex of conformity in post-war boomer America and people started to live their variety of choices and it un-normalized the "oldness" package.

my grandfather in his 20's. this is what i'm talking about with the gravitas...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/1549473_10152762808752137_70201308_n.jpg?oh=fad57e47c50f4dbe95a14e249022a015&oe=548288EA&__gda__=1422353004_d2e5498c3fb1d85cbd66ede48055d469

Wow, yeah.

the last few dozen comments >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> that a.o. scott piece

yea that piece was terrible