the generational circle of life...........................

 

...........this Boomer is rooting for the Millennials.

How did they build................

.............................all those cathedrals?

 Despite the acceleration of technological progress, indeed because of it, one of the few scarcities in the future will be a long attention span. There will be no shortage of amazing materials that can do magic, astounding sources of energy to make anything happen, and great reserves of knowledge and know-how to accomplish our dreams. But the gating factor for actually completing those big dreams may be the distractions that any society feels over the centuries. What your parents and grandparents found important you may find silly, or even embarrassing.

-Kevin Kelly, from here

Classic......................

 ................................Christopher Hitchens:

Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-1990

I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying.  There were a lot of other people born in April, 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them.
-2001

responsibilities...................

      It's more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.  Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future.  We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud.  The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it's to improve conditions for our successors.

-Adam Grant,  Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

We must be part of the same...............

 ............................................generation.

hey, that's my generation................

 . . . the liberationist ethic of what is sometimes called "the 1968 generation" perhaps paved the way for our increasing dependence.  We're primed to respond to any invocation of the aesthetics of individuality.  The rhetoric of freedom pleases our ears.  The simulacrum of independent thought and action that goes by the name of "creativity" trips easily off the tongues of spokespeople for the corporate counterculture, and if we're not paying attention such usage might influence our career plans.  The term invokes our powerful tendency to narcissism, and in doing so greases the skids into work that is not what we had hoped.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

On the importance of .........................

...................................change and risk:

 Increasing health and falling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have than about maybe getting much more. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.

for a war of their own....................

 Things move slowly, for a long time, and then very fast. Europe has long become a museum to its own past; which is why we love it. We walk the cobblestone streets; dine in the ancient taverns under empty castles drinking wine that was made when life was lived then, raging all around and not in the rear view mirror. When people looked to the future, not the past for their ideas of the west.

-Joel D. Hirst, from here

Good question.................

 .........................Given decline or growth, who doesn’t choose growth for their kids and grandkids?

demand...........................

 War has long been a rite of passage, with new generations feeling a need to prove their courage and earn the right to supplant their elders.  Clay's generation grew up on the hero tales of the American Revolution—the stories of boldness in the political arena and valor on the battlefield.  Often implicit in the stories, as in the stories of every generation of elders, was skepticism that the younger generation had what it took to match the elders' feats.  Where was the George Washington of the younger set, the general who could smite the British as Washington had done at Yorktown?  Where were the Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, whose words inspired a nation and brought down an empire?  Where were the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the framers of a new government for a new nation?

     Henry Clay had heard the stories and felt the skepticism.  He was burdened with no conspicuous personal sense of inferiority, but he reckoned that an ambitious young politician could do worse than demand that the country complete the work commenced by the generation of the founders.

-H. W. Brands,  Heirs of the Founders:  The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

Money...........................

. . .  I think independence is one of the only ways money can make you happier. The trick is realizing that the only way to maintain independence is if your appetite for stuff – including status – can be satiated. The goalpost has to stop moving; the expectations have to remain in check. Otherwise money has a tendency to be a liability masquerading as an asset, controlling you more than you use it to live a better life.

-Morgan Housel, from this post on the quick disappearance of the once unfathomable wealth of Cornelius Vanderbilt 

About history.......................

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

And occasionally some new ones..............

 Every new generation of investors has to learn the same lessons as the previous generation. We’re all human after all.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

Toughen up................................

 Humans are not built for a life of ease. This is a forgotten wisdom, one revered by the ancient Stoics and once fundamental to philosophical thought. Within the writings of Seneca and Epictetus lies the maxim that it is not our hardship that harms us, but how we relate to it. In choosing to learn and grow from affliction, we fortify our mind. As Seneca wrote, “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” . . .

“Humans don’t mind hardship,” Junger remarks, “in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

-Freya India, from this post on Generation Z and suffering

Observing that this is true..........................

 One generation's masterpiece can obviously be then next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.

-Russell Lynes

An antidote...................................

      Julian almost never complains—few people know, for instance that he's just on the other side of cancer treatment that could have ended very differently.  Normally a private person, he allowed his closest friends to see the fear in his eyes; to share in his vulnerability.  His illness made him newly reflective, which would have a cascade of repercussions in his life.  He'd reached the point when he had to take dying seriously.  Everyone passes through that valley and everyone emerges changed.  His bourbon is passing through a valley, too.  In the coming months, he will taste the new liquor that will fill his bottles.  The whiskey that built his success had run out, and the "new whiskey," distilled and laid up many years ago, is now ready to be tasted and, with luck, bottled.  I would come to appreciate the challenge of dealing with market trends when you product gets made as many as twenty-five years in the past.  When I met Julian, this is what loomed largest;  soon it would be time for him to test the first ever Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve made from whiskey distilled by his partner Buffalo Trace.  Whiskey is marketed as an antidote to change, so the magic is especially vulnerable during times of transition.  That tension ran through my mind during this otherwise carefree day at the nation's most famous racetrack.  Julian was looking far into the future, to see how this brand and whiskey would be passed from one generation to the next.  The Van Winkles have done most things very well, except for that:  the last time the baton pass got seriously fucked up.

The race ended, and Julian pulled a Cohiba out of his pocket and lit it.  "My victory cigar.' he said.  A grin flashed across his face.  "I didn't bet on the race," he said.  "So I won."

-Wright Thompson, two excerpts from Pappyland:  A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last

On the value of uncertainty................

 The price of certainty is high:  surrendering to a limited experience of life, designed by individuals and corporations who do not know us, whose interests are not ours.  In this condition, convenience is passivity and choice obedience. . . . Every generation of human being has lived with uncertainty and unpredictability:  that's how we developed our staggering human capacity for invention, discovery, improvisation, and creativity.  Our ability to invent came from necessity, not comfort.

-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

The great sin.....................?

In my research, I have found the so-called Millennial generation to be every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as my own, and what is worse, younger.

-David Warren, from this post

In (faint) praise of hippies..................

...........................Some of my best friends were hippies.  I wasn't much of one, although I did own a fabulous pair of rainbow bells.................

Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my perspective on youth culture now vs. the 1960s. To me, campus culture today seems idiotic. I think that the hippie culture of my youth also was idiotic, but it was not as aggressive. If you weren’t a hippie, the hippies didn’t try to shut you up or get you fired.

-Arnold S. Kling, as  he opens this blog post

The echoes of history...................

     Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades' age group just as the accomplishments of  the "greatest generation" of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens.  Spartans also fled similar apprehensions about becoming soft in comparison to their roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads who had died blocking the pass at Thermopylae.  thus, the Corinthians remonstrated with the Peloponnesians on the eve of the battle:  "It is not a just thing that all that was won through poverty should be destroyed through prosperity."

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War