The answer was here all the time.
Dante, before descending through the gates of Hell, articulates a life moment which has neither the carefree arrogance of youth, nor the cynical inevitability of old age.
The Albachiara Journal is an eclectic collection of our opinion and perspective, from our travels and encounters.
Middle-age has always been problematic.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Engraving by Gustave Doré
This opening line of Dante’s Inferno, before he descends through the gates and rings of Hell, is the poet’s articulation of a life moment which has neither the carefree arrogance of youth, nor the cynical inevitability of old age. The straight-forward path has indeed been lost.
Poets and artists always see the truth earlier, in better focus, and their work has often dominated my own writing. They will again today as, of course, we are all just plagiarists.
It may be something, or nothing, but when Grant Williams asked me to write this essay, it wasn’t really such a surprise. Because I know him and, in some way, we are all now in that same forest dark, like Alighieri, at the scary doorway. We all need a Virgil; a guide, a sherpa, a code, a point of reference, to make sense of it all. Someone or something to tell us that it’s all going to be fine, comforting us that we are worrying too much.
No one lives in a vacuum, and each individual is really just a minestrone of what is around them every day. In this, life has blessed me (the very last of the Boomers) with an eclectic and cross-cultural network of family, friends and colleagues, from every corner of our Blue Planet. I’m continually exposed to myriad diverse ideas, beliefs and convictions, often diametrically opposed. Like Dante, many of the people around me, playing the second half of their innings in a mixture of defence and attack, seem to carry a heavy load of despair and depression, fuelling a combination of anger and resignation.
To matters at hand.
“Blue” therefore is exactly today’s matter at hand, and Grant’s request wasn’t a surprise at all!
Mid-life crisis, menopause, call it whatever you want, but the fact is that the 50+ demographic (of intelligent people) has reached the stage in their lives where the fruits of their work can be seen easily on both sides of the ledger. The full double-entry of achievements. We should all be happy, because this is the Cheers, West Wing and Friends generation; animal spirits who benefited from the deregulation of the 80s, progressed through the Goldilocks 90s, reaching a very comfortable cruise control, until the dotcom bust and 9/11. We have also by now gone through the hard yards of building a career, a family, a home, and as nests empty, we have time on our hands to just reflect.
But we are not happy.
One can see so many of the children of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Clinton all in a bit of a funk.
Why?
Are we guilty about how poorly we managed those economic boom times? Are we ashamed of how difficult a life, how ugly a world, we have left for our children?
Both of these would be very valid reasons for the Boomer Blues.
If we listen to our children, their memes will describe (too) well the legacy of who we have been, and what we have done, explaining uncomfortably how we have had it very easy. All we needed was a decent education to walk into a well-paying job, to buy a very affordable home, and just climb the career ladder on the universal rising tide of globalisation and the start of the Internet. They instead have a slightly(sic) more difficult wall to climb, where only the globally-excellent human resources need apply, and, even then, after multiple unpaid internships, their remuneration will hardly cover travel, rent, and the Pret at lunch. Tragically, savings and home ownership are already seen by our children as delusional and unapproachable goals. Whisper it, these kids think we ran away with their futures, and in many ways they are not wrong. We paid ourselves too much, financed on the never-never, on debt, and have left it all on their backs, as we holiday in the Maldives.
Is that why we are all feeling bad? We had the most benevolent economy of all, and we absolutely blew it for our kids?
Guilt, that most Catholic of pain, is a bitch.
The answer to this thesis is however a hard “no”.
Many of us for sure have had to hustle really hard to get where we are today. It wasn’t the slam dunk it may appear with hindsight. And, in fact, my generation often has nothing but disdain for the soft underbelly of those who have come after us, thinking that the world owes them a living.
No, guilt is not the reason.
Is it then more simply explained by man’s eternal resistance to change? The passage into inevitable irrelevance? Where, as a Welsh poet suggests, we will all be damned if we go quietly.
So we won’t.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Another Dylan expressed an opinion on all that, in the month of my birth in 1964, but it could have been penned yesterday.
Change is inevitable.
Bob Dylan
Robert Zimmerman, the “jester wearing a coat he borrowed from James Dean”, laid the problem out very plainly 60 years ago. Change is inevitable, but will always be rejected as unacceptable and inappropriate by the older generations leaving the stage.
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'
Maybe what is really bothering us is just the relentless hiss of the clessidra running out of sand, which we obviously explain away as a general drop in morals and values?
Maybe in reality we are all blue because we just no longer understand? It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened; but now it’s our turn, and we don't like it.
The past however is always prologue, and perhaps we should remind ourselves of the vitriol directed at the arrival of Elvis, the flower power hippies, punk rock, the androgynous David Bowie. Or more seriously, the British Reform Act, Emily Pankhurst, MLK, Mandela, and Oscar Wilde. Societal and cultural evolution in the main has been a positive, so one must always resist the facile trope of it all having been so much better in our day. Because it wasn’t. Women were repressed, gays were seen as diseased, minorities were disadvantaged, and class divisions were ceilings of glass. We mustn’t ever lose ourselves in this foam bath of nostalgia.
We are better than that. Much better! And we are charged today to come up with superior explanations. Maybe they do exist.
The Fourth Turning.
The building-block DNA of the West, from Athens, Rome, Florence, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, no longer seems to be there, and this, de facto, is the literal definition of the Fourth Turning.
Generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which eventually creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis.
In short, we are seeing the collapse (perhaps desecration) of those basic fundamental structures and standards that have formed us all, certainly since the War. But, in truth, for a lot, lot longer. Since forever, in fact.
For some of us, this decay is well illustrated by the imagery of sexualised drag-queens “teaching” in children’s classrooms. Or the disrespect of the Last Supper at the Paris Olympics.
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