Thing about this panel is that, usually, it's not like this at all. Oh yeah, somewhere in there, I'm comparing myself to others and managing to come out of it worse off but the truth is that most of the people I meet who I knew in school aren't settled and don't have that good life.Some do. But most seem like they are still floating around like they're in their early twenties. Changing careers or working ridiculously hard at some worthless one, having been seeing someone for a year or so, look how drunk I got at some party, and that sort of thing. As a generation, we just don't seem to be able to settle. By my age, we're meant to be completely settled. We're the older generation. Sad but true. At least for me. And yet, we're really lagging behind.
Does it matter?
Yeah, I think it does. Because you only have to look at older people to know that old age creeps up very, very slow and then strikes fast. And one day we're going to wake up and we'll be old. We'll have trouble getting out of bed. It will take several hours to walk to the shops. We'll bitch about just about everything we see on television. We'll tell the young just how dangerous the world is and maybe even collect newspaper cuttings of horrendous stories to prove our point.
And we'll realise we're old.
And we skipped a whole stage of life. Probably a very good stage.
I wonder why that is? Why it's like that now?
I think I blame the corporate world, advertising and chick flicks. Yeah, that's a long topic in itself but I think we're focusing too much on this career thing for stuff we're constantly told we should have. A life we all deserve that is little more than a materialistic fantasy. And, on the relationship side (and this is where chick flicks come in), we're taught to expect some stupidly romantic happy ending that only occurs because you can end a movie at a very fixed point. Cut six months later from the end of any chick flick and you'll find something a little more like real life. Our stories don't end at that moment of connection. And it's rarely perfect.
But, whatever the reason, this generation, my generation, is very slow to grow up. And, even coming from someone who lives in a world of cartoons, games, toys and complete fantasy, I don't actually think that's a good thing.
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You know, I can't stand Facebook. It is simply a place where people can record and display "how drunk they get". It serves no real social purpose other than showing off how popular you are. That to me is at the crux of the problem with the current generation. We're in the "it's all about me" generation. I'm technically within that generation, but thankfully I have not been sucked into it.
As bad as World War 2 was, I can't help but dream of what it was like when people actually gave a crap about each other. They had to. Soldiers died for each other, people went out of their way to help strangers. What happened to make things like they are today? What made people suddenly want to spend all of their time taking photos of themselves in the mirror to post on Facebook or MySpace or Bebo or whatever? We're devolving back to animals - the only thing that matters is popularity and attractiveness. Call me old-fashioned but I think humans can be better than that.
Agreed with Andy. And the worst problem is, we *are* in the middle of a war for our very survival, just like in WWII; but this time nobody gives a shit.
The war is against our destructive habits that are ruining the planet. But by the time everyone agrees we need to do something, it'll be too late.
[After going to the loo and clearing my *ahem* head, I thought of other things to add up]:
It also occurs to me that the reason our generation is acting like aged teenagers, it's because when our fathers were our age the expectancy of life was roughly 60 years. Nowadays it's closer to 75 (in developed countries anyway); so I think that in the back of everyone's head we are all expecting to live at least to be 150 or something! We see celebrities like Madonna who are (despite their ghoul-like arms) in terrific shape for their age; we hear nerds like Ray Kurzweill tell us that immortality will be a reality in 20 years; and so we say to ourselves "all right! I can then afford to just kick back and stay in the party for a few decades more."
There's only one problem with this idea: I do believe we'll see amazing developments in increasing the lifespan of human life... but those will be only available for an elite of super-rich; the same elite who will take their holidays on space hotels and have their own private tropical island, while the rest of us "grubs" will might even see a decline in our life expectancy, due to all the junk in our air, water and food supply :-/
By the way Bitter, you're into your DS aren't you? Do you have DSi? I just got one and there's a fantastic little app on it called "Flipnote" which you can use to make little hand-drawn animations. For such a simple (and free) piece of software, it's incredibly versatile. Even Aardman has been using it!
Some of my little bits:
http://www.andysanimation.co.uk/Pages/Flipnotes.html
(Don't expect anything too amazing though lol)
I haven't used that before, Andy, and I have a DSi so I must get it. I had actually heard of it but had no idea you could export anything or do good stuff with it. I love your little animations!
I'll get it this evening and see what I can do.
Great stuff :) I can't wait to see what you do with it.
Have a look at what Aardman have done:
http://flipnote.hatena.com/AnimAndy/following
Those are amazing. I am so going to try that.
What do you mean, your generation? What age are you?
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