“Up With Grups - The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood”:http://newyorkmetro.com/news/features/16529/
This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.
What starts off as an interesting article about a latent sociological phenomenon (one that completely resonates with me) unfortunately disappoints and turns a wrong corner with the shallow equation that consumption of pop-culture accoutrements somehow correlates with this new adult state of mind. Granted the article is New York/Brooklyn centric, so in a city where almost everyone makes a fashion statement, perhaps all this accessorizing is just how the point is made.
But I’m mostly turned off by the examples of Grup parents in the article. They are portrayed as vapid materialists, fettered to their _uniform_, _lifestyle_ and _musical taste_ as a statement of their condescension for the normal and prosaic. They also seem to have an unhealthy obsession with handicapping their children with the emotional baggage of transforming them into hip and trendy mini-version of themselves, rather than allowing them the room to blossom, discover a variety of different things and to possibly even dork out once in a while.
But the article says more about how _little_ has changed in the state of indie-alternative culture, music and fashion for the past twenty years, and how the ideas that constitute this milieu have remained virtually unchanged during this same period. Perhaps we’ve reached a cultural plateau that will take another generation to break out of? It’s more likely that the people who get to define the media message on hip are now themselves Grupsters, merely articulating what matters to and defines them personally.
Or maybe deep down, the new adulthood is really about never wanting to stop living the rock and roll lifestyle we used to have, and doing everything that’s materially possible to retain it or the illusion that we are still the same twenty-year olds that we once were or wish we could always be.
