the new geek grownup: ‘New York’ magazine approves... sort of

“Up With Grups,” the piece is titled, and it defines grupness as owning a dozen pairs of sneakers and ten pairs of jeans, and wearing them to the office... in the unlikely event that the grup hasn’t totally blown off the corporate life as bogus and gone in for the haphazard freedom of freelancing, that is. Grupness is about listening to the same bands that the kids are listening to today. Stuff like that. But the author, Adam Sternbergh, who calls himself a grup, too, is a bit confused: he talks about thirtysomethings who are married with kids but make a living in a rock band and thirtysomethings single and barhopping and working for a megacorp in the same way, trying to tie them all into some strange and tortured definition of not-really-grown-up while never really addressing the idea that the only definition of “grown-up” somehow must include corporate slavery and spouse-and-kids and a wardrobe full of three-piece business suits. He waxes rhapsodic about “redefining adulthood” but doesn’t seem to believe himself half the time:

This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up (a real paycheck, a family, the warm touch of cashmere) with none of the bad parts (Dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree). It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.

Ah, “affluent.” What grupness is really, about, it turns out as you read on, is money -- since when does “the warm touch of cashmere” automatically connote adulthood? (Did I somehow miss the cashmere distribution when I turned 21 or collected my first corporate paycheck? Or have I not been notified of my cashmere entitlement because I have not yet married?) What this piece is really about is a slim slice of Gen X that has money to burn on “$450... jeans that are so distressed -- so tattered, so frayed, so worked over and beaten down -- that they will likely fall apart within two years.” Damn. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad that my $15-on-clearance Old Navy jeans have developed a manufacturing-defect worn-out hole right near the zipper. And I could just keep my mouth shut about the fact that I got my $60 PF Flyers for $20 at Daffy’s, and that my beatup jean jacket set me back a mere $4 at the local thrift shop. But I’d sure love one of the cashmere hoodies Sternbergh says is de rigeueur for grups.

Sternbergh’s thesis suffers a bit from a lack of noticing the obvious: “No wonder Grups like today’s indie music: It sounds exactly like the indie music of their youth,” he says. But he fails to recognize that today’s indie music is being made by young Xers or only the very oldest Millennials. Millennials will come into their own and start creating a recognizably Millennial pop culture within the next five to eight years. And when they do, watch out: Xers will hate it. It’ll be the opposite of how our Silent and Boomer parents reacted to punk and New Wave -- instead of finding the music of Millennials loud and incomprehensible, Xers will find it bland and boring and obvious and conformist. Sternbergh says:

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.

This fad is not permanent, and the generation gap has not disappeared -- it’s on its way back. We’ll start seeing hints of it very soon, as the eldest Millennials start to look back at their late-Boomer, early-Xer parents with revulsion and embarrassment and will seek to distinguish themselves. I swear to God, if within five to eight years we don’t start hearing about the latest trend toward “elegant dressing” among twentysomethings and the return of the business suit in corporate environments -- hell, the return of corporate environments as a desirable place to work -- then I will eat my PF Flyers. (And wait till Boomer and Xer corporate bosses start praising the “team spirit” and “dedication” of young Millennials. Time magazine will do a cover story before the decade is out about all the delightful fresh faces and can-do-it-iveness of the new batch of college-graduate hires, such a startling contrast to the thirty- and fortysomething middle managers.)

But generation gaps don’t separate one-apart generations: they divide two-apart generations. We’ll start hearing about “the new generation gap” with a vengeance in ten to fifteen years, when the children of these funky Xers -- who are not Millennials; they are the new Artist-type generation, as defined by Strauss and Howe, which Generation Watch has dubbed the “Homeland” generation -- begin to feel the need to assert themselves. The New York piece hints at it:

His tale [of a 32-year-old skateboarder who injured himself on the half-pipe] conjures an uneasy vision of an all-too-possible future: of a young boy, maybe 12, in a tiny suit, standing in a hospital room where his dad lies in traction after a gnarly kickflip-and-nosegrind combination gone horribly wrong. The boy comforts his father, perhaps fluffs his pillow, perhaps delivers to him a freshly laundered Cramps T-shirt brought from home. Then he replaces the earbuds of an iPod that’s playing Burl Ives, straightens his bow tie, and heads out to grab the bus home.

Bingo. And why will this happen? This is why:

Here’s the good news about kids: They’re defenseless. So if you want to put a Ramones T-shirt on your 2-year-old, you don’t need his permission. All you need is for someone to have the great idea to make a 2-year-old-size Ramones T-shirt. (And trust me—someone’s had that idea.) And if you want to play the Strokes for your 4-year-old son, what’s he going to do? I’ll tell you what—he’s going to learn to love the Strokes.

Maybe now, while he’s four, he’ll love the Strokes. When he’s 12, he’s going to hate his Ramones-loving father. Hate.

Sternbergh’s not hopeless. He gets it in the end -- it just takes him a while to meander around to there. (He was probably getting paid by the word, and I’m guessing New York probably pays a buck fifty or two bucks a word, so who can blame him?)

Under the skin of the iPods and the $400 ripped jeans, this is the spine of the Grup ethos: passion, and the fear of losing it.... Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth—or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?

I still don’t have an iPod, and if I stumbled upon $400 it’d go toward paying down my credit cards rather than a single pair of jeans, but I grok grupness. I used to say I was born 35. I was boring and straight-laced and sober and responsible when a lot of my peers were going wild. And then I turned 35 and started making a serious study of alcohol and started wearing T-shirts with Monty Python and Curious George on them and discovered I really liked the statement that my motheaten wool Old Navy sweater was saying about starving writers or the economic downturn for Xers or whatever.

Hey, I don’t wanna grow up. I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid. There’s a million toys at Toys ‘R’ Us that I can play with. And I mean that metaphorically as well as literally, of course.

Thanks to reader Anne-Kari for forwarding the New York article to me.

(Technorati tags: Generation X, GenX, Millennials, Homeland Generation, grup)