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Bill Kelso
How Life Styles have Changed since We Graduated in 1963
I thought our class might be interested in the following article I downloaded from the Wall Street Journal which described how the younger generation has embraced a very different lifestyle from our generation.
To summarize the Wall Street Journal article, you might argue that the generations from the end of WWII until the 1990s lived segmented phased lives while today the younger generation live simultaneous lives.
In a phased segmented life, people of our age became friends with the individuals they grew up with. But once they graduated, went to college or got a job, they lost touch with their old friends. Their lives became segmented when they started to work as they acquired new relationships divorced from their past.
The younger generation, however, grew up with the internet, TicTok, and Facebook and have been able to maintain ties with their old classmates while making new friends. They have decided to simultaneously live both in their present and past worlds, mixing and maintaining a diverse array of friendships.
Interesting enough, our class is a transitional class. When David set up the McClatchy website in 2013, he gave us the option of connecting two different phases of our lives.
However, I am sure many of you have found that if you write some old friends from McClatchly, they choose not to respond. I think our class has some people who just want to live in the moment and forget their past, while others are eager to reengage with old companions.
But for the younger generation, as the following article demonstrates, living a simultaneous life seems like the most advantageous way to live. As the younger generation gets older, they will have more friends to console them as they see their family and associates pass away.
By Katie Roiphe
I sometimes forget that my daughter has left for college. She Facetimes me on her way from the library to the gym. I see a small portion of her head, blue sky behind her, headphones dangling from an ear, part of a cup of coffee. She constantly texts me on her classes. I am still part of the dailiness of her life in a way that I am quite sure my mother was not in mine when I left for college in the last century.
My daughter also stays in close contact with her friends from home via group texts, Snapchat, TikTok, private Instagram stories. They are warm, vivid presences in her life that would likely have faded in a different technological moment.
While I remember high-school friends drifting, high-school boyfriends vanishing by winter break, many people she knows have romantic interests from home that endure. After all, their relationships with their new friends are also, to some degree, on the phone. The people in front of you comprise only one of many social situations you have access to.
To those of us who grew up before the internet, there is something innately repellent about the sight of a teenager disappearing into a phone.
Most people I know think of this as a bad and inscrutable phenomenon, just one of the myriad small ways in which life now is a compromised or tarnished version of life when we were young. I would tend toward this view too: that it is better to live in the moment, to fully inhabit your life, to be where you are. .
But sometimes I am not so sure. Some part of me wonders if there aren’t benefits to this new way of being, along with the obvious downsides. My daughter is attached to her college friends and her friends from home. She is almost living in two places simultaneously; she is inhabiting more than one possible world.
When I was around her age I was obsessed with a mysterious story called “The Garden of the Forking Paths.” It is a kind of thought experiment about the possibility of experiencing many destinies at once:
I loved to contemplate this glimmering idea of simultaneity, this chance of being many places at once. Now it makes me wonder if we ever leave home or if we somehow carry home around in a small rectangle in our minds.
To many of us, there is something suspect in the new remote forms of friendship. Our instinct is that they are somehow unreal or fake or shallow or illusory. And yet, when I glimpse all those elaborate Instagram stories, group texts, TikToks sent back and forth, I can’t be certain that the conversation I am having at a dinner party with my friends is more substantive, more authentic, more deeply or honestly connected.
“They are just different from us,”
It might be tempting to think of this generation as not growing up or not moving on. I think of my life with its phases passed through, maybe more linear and straightforward than my daughter’s. But is that necessarily better? I notice my daughter seems to be thriving amid the usual difficulties of starting life in a new place.
Meanwhile, in the analog world, my daughter’s college roommate is staying with us. The two of them are lying on her bed playing loud music. They are about to go out to meet my daughter’s high school friends, whom her roommate knows through social media, through dorm-room Facetimes. Her worlds constantly overlap.
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