What is it about 50-somethings?

There has been a lot of discussion generated from the article “What is it about 20-somethings?” by Robin Marantz Henig in this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine. The article enrages me. If you want to know what is up with 20-somethings, you need to look at the source of these 20-somethings: The 50-Somethings.


Our parents’ generation got married too soon and went through traumatic divorces. They bought houses they could not afford with unsound mortgages. They ran up their credit cards.  They declared bankruptcies. They created chaos in our lives while expecting us to still be perfect children. While we were dealing with the emotional backlash of their irresponsibility, we were doing more homework than any other generation, killing ourselves with too many after school programs, and competing to get into the best colleges.  Ironically, this was done to please our parents--they told us how important it was for our success. We were raised being told that as long as we worked hard enough—If we got the best grades, went to the right schools, and pushed ourselves (God did we push ourselves), we could accomplish anything.  We could become whatever we wanted to be so long as we put our hearts and souls into it.  What they neglected to tell us was that it would come at the price of a lot of student loan debt, delaying our personal lives for the sake of our careers, and lots of therapy for the havoc they wreaked on our generation. Maybe 20-somethings just need a break from all the stress we were under before we left the nest. They certainly did not leave us much to work with upon our college graduations: A recession, emotional trauma, a destroyed environment, and unrealistically idealistic views of our futures.


Cut the 20-somethings some slack. They are a product of the 50-something “Me First” generation. I am a 26-year-old woman living in New York City. I pay my own bills, have a full time job in the pro bono department of a large law firm.  While I was struggling to pay back my student loans, my father attempted suicide. It left him with a permanent brain injury that required me to sell his two houses, his two cars, and file a Medicaid application for him. Lawyers, doctors, nurses, social service agents from the “Me First” generation come to me to handle my dad’s problems. I am my dad’s legal guardian. Why was I put in charge of this? Because none of the 50-somethings in his life were willing to step up and take responsibility. Typical. Like everything else, it’s not “their problem.” And you expect me to get married and have kids anytime soon? With what time?  While our parent's were fostering an unreasonable sense of idealism in us, they failed to teach us the hard-truth that life happens with its many ups and downs.  All the studying, practicing and dreaming in the world was never going to show us how to handle the real "stuff" of life.

I’m not alone in this. I know many 20-somethings making it on their own despite their parents’ missteps—divorces, bankruptcies, and midlife crises. And these 20-somethings are making ends meet in anyway possible despite the horrible economy they found upon their arrival to adulthood.  We all grow up trusting our parents--but when we look back, were they really the best people to take advice from? Maybe not.

Today’s 20-somethings do not want to replicate their parents’ missteps. I for one refuse to measure my maturity by arbitrary markers of adulthood imposed by a failed generation, the first generation to set America back. They lead us into two wars that they still fail to approach rationally, and are now throwing away the lives of several of us 20-somethings because they failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam. We carry the burden of their blessings. As their life spans have increased because of advances in medical care, they're continuing to occupy economic positions, tie up resources and generally obstruct America's formerly functioning economic ladder.  Purportedly, Eskimos would shove the old and infirm off to a death with honor aboard an ice floe, now the 50-Somethings rally around Terry Schiavo and piggishly refuse to accept reality.  They ostracize their gay children, refuse to accept interracial relationships and generally fail to understand why we find them so odious. The article's framework fails because there's no reason why 20-Something, with the benefit of the Internet and a faster, freer exchange of knowledge, would ever want to resemble the corpulent 50-something set.