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

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

Like, my grandmother looked older than me when she was in her late 20s.

This feels really major, like all the old photos of my friends' parents look ancient when they were our ages or younger. A friend turned 39 recently and her mom posted a photo of them when the mom was 39 and she looked...old. My friend looks like a child now in comparison. Maybe it's just familiarity, or clothing and hair styles, or something, but objectively she looked much older.

A couple of weeks ago some of my junior/senior university students asked how old I was after going off on some "back in my day" tangent. They guessed 31, then 36, then I got some gasps and a "holy shit" when I told them I was 40. I don't know if I don't fit their idea of a 40 year old or if they just have never really thought about such a thing before.

hard livers amirite

i get that every week at my store. from the boomers. it doesn't really bother me anymore. "You can't know about that stuff...what are you 10 years old?" i guess it's a compliment? i used to let it bug me. because it was a way of being dismissive. and i don't really feel like explaining my life/history to people i don't know. but i'm always thinking people are younger than they are too, so, there you go...

doesn't it seem in america like most ppl you meet want to be seen as younger than they are? it's always a big topic of conversation at the bar - ppl discussing how young bartenders have thought them in the past, whether they'd still be confused as looking that age, etc. has it always been this way or is this part of the same phenomenon? fwiw i've always wanted to look older and i'm thrilled that i'm starting to go grey. i think grey hair is gonna be ballin.

i don't know, something about this feels just completely subjective. my brother is 2 years older than me. my whole life he has been older than me. 2 years seemed like a lot when you're a kid or a teenager. i look at photo of him at 19 and he STILL seems older than me, partly because it is so vividly present to me what i felt like when i was 17 and he was 19. i'm the "more adult" one now by society's measure, having completed grad school and married and with a kid. but he'll always feel older than me.

clothing styles have obviously gotten more casual, for sure. so if i see a photo of my grandma at age 25, she's gonna look older because she's wearing older fashions. but i have a photo of my grandma at age 25 wearing work pants and a white undershirt, and that casual outfit really helped dispel my subjective feeling that he looks older in that photo than he actually does.

also, there is a class thing going on when you talk about how "men were adults back in the day" and "gravitas" and shit when you look at a photo of madison avenue in the 50s and everyone is wearing a suit and tie and a hat. these are white men working in new york city. not everybody dressed that way in the 50s.

getting carded for cigarettes in my early 40's just seemed sad for some reason... no gravitas!

The older I get, the worse I become at guessing the age of others.

lots of people wore suits in the 50's!

x-post

or all kinds of people of all classes got dressed up more often anyway. wasn't just a white dude in new york thing.

disclaimer: i only know stuff from pictures and movies.

in watching the roosevelts last night on pbs i was regularly struck by how a 24 year old teddy roosevelt looked much older than me
and how basically everyone looked about thirty years older than they actually were

lol i watch pbs

i didn't actually read the whole new york times thing though. i got the point fairly early on. sick of mad men sociology in general.

I think it's not just that people got "dressed up" more often, but that there was really nothing like the modern conception of casual clothing -- no equivalent of just going out in an ill-fitting t-shirt and some cargo shorts.

sick of mad men sociology in general.
this x 1000

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/ww2_8/w30_1a34948u.jpg