Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?
(I am aware, I should also say, that this article is primarily concerned with middle-class and above people who have some desire to be intellectuals, academics, or professionals, and live in urban-ish areas. It's a trend piece, it comes with the territory.)
This has all the marks of style-section failure: 1. Treats New York (and I suspect this really means Brooklyn) as the world. 2. Compiles a number of examples of disparate phenomena. 3. Fails to consider whether there might have been any older forms of the same behavior (j and k seem to describe what I understand to be a permanent class of freelance intellectuals who have existed in New York since the '30s, at least--see Mary McCarthy and Dwight MacDonald or Diane Keaton in Manhattan; see also n and o, because apparently facial hair has never been a fashion statement). 4. Assumes that any general advance in taste must be a sign of immaturity rather than maturity (f--why exactly listen to torturously bad children's music when there are better examples available?) 5. Again, assumes that taking advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by New York is somehow a sign of immaturity (d). 6. Exists as a kind of Watch the Throne of cultural commentary, in which the ability to drop the correct names becomes a sign of hipness even while attempting to distance itself from the knowledge of said cultural items.
So for the article to end like this:
And this, improbably, is the happy ending to our story. (And, I admit, I’d hoped for a happy ending; for all the bedhead haircuts and Hives-peddling parents, I wanted this to end well.) Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth—or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?
Of course, that’s not a real ending—even the Grups don’t know how this will end. They know they’re making up adulthood as they go. “My dad’s worked at the same place he’s worked for 30 years,” says Peccini. “But when I left my job, he said to me, ‘If I was your age—and if I hadn’t had three kids and a mortgage—I would have done the same thing.’ ” When I ask Peccini what he sees himself doing in ten years, or at his dad’s age, he gives the typical Grup answer. “That’s a great question,” he says. “I don’t know. But I like my life.”
is a little shocking. It only took our author a few thousand words to end up at the conclusion he was hoping for all along! How heartwarming.
What's more, it seems to arrive at a conclusion that is shocking only for those who have never really thought about it. Some of us have observed our parents working at the very end of the one-company-for-life model of employment, which has meant being unceremoniously fired right before one's full pension would kick in (I grew up in a company town and knew at least four or five people this happened to). The rest of us have been socialized by culture into the idea that adulthood shouldn't mean the gradual sealing off of oneself and one's identity into 'spouse' and/or 'parent': the married people I know haven't pulled away from those of us who aren't and off into their own worlds, nor have the parents declined the company of the rest of their friends. The result of this is that we all seem pretty happy with our lives, and I have a hard time imagining the circumstances under which that will change radically.
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