Grunge Parents

I love the opening to this article addressed to managers trying to figure out their Gen X employees:

"Let's say you're a baby-boom generation manager (age 40 to 58), and you've got a team of people in their late 20s to late 30s working for you—or, heck, maybe you report to one of them. Does it puzzle you when a 30-year-old employee with a great track record and a stellar future goes out on maternity leave—and decides not to come back full time, opting for part-time work instead? Or when a Gen X dad asks for more time off—a lot more—to spend with his family?"

I should probably send that link along with my next request for shorter workweeks, extended leaves or other newfangled arrangements that don't really fit the corporate mindset. This got me digging into how Gen Xers are approaching parenting:

• Gen X Keen on the ABCs of Raising Gen Y
  
• Gen X turns out some grade A parents
  
• The grunge generation grows up

So of course this stuff hits pretty close to home for me, having two young kids at home and thinking back to reading Douglas Coupland in university and remembering seeing Pearl Jam and Soundgarden at Lollapallooza in 1992. I was so Gen X, and I guess I still am, but it seems hilarious to imagine that all of those kids moshing to Ministry back then have kids of their own now. And their values are "alternative", but in a more conservative direction than I might have guessed:

"Gen X moms and dads tend to be homebodies - they are willing to sacrifice one spouse's income to have a parent at home with the kids, and frequently have to go into debt to own a house. Sometimes they choose arrangements, such as each spouse working a part-time job, that ensure that both parents get time with the children."

Much of this stuff rings so true for me -- I see it in the decisions and trade-offs I'm attempting these days, and in the values of many of my peers. One blind spot in this thread is the number of Gen Xers choosing not to get married or have kids, but I also see parallels in those choices because they're showing that we want to rewrite the old rules and create our own reality free of previous constraints and expectations.

At least some boomers resent the implication that Gen Xers are turning out to be better parents than they were, and of course there is always someone looking to capitalize on every demographic trend. The study referenced in all of these articles was done by Reach Advisors, a marketing consultancy that is doing their own kind of lifestylism project, except they're making a lucrative business out of it. Where did I go wrong?

Outsourcing Your Own Job

We all have days when we wish someone else could do our jobs while we sleep in or whatever. Apparently some geniuses have been taking advantage of the global economy to do just that. The Monster Blog quotes a programmer from a Slashdot thread:

"About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."

While there seems to be something vaguely odious about this approach, you have to admire the guy's (or girl's) initiative...a proactive twist on the controversy surrounding the outsourcing of white-collar jobs?

Life Coaching

Yesterday Brian Alger took an in-depth look at life coaching, and the types of education and certifications available for this emerging work:

"The notion of life coach certification provides practitioners with a source of authority and basis for establishing themselves as a trusted professional in the eyes of the public. In general, the market for lifestyle coaching is focused on providing solutions to help people bridge the gap between what they want to do or be in life and their present circumstances. In other words, lifestyle coaching is about providing a service for the preservation (and perhaps the recovery) of an individual's identity in the confluence of everyday life."

I appreciate Brian's cautions about this opportunity -- I have always been somewhat skeptical about companies like CoachU, although I can't really justify my negative stance. Perhaps it's a guttural reaction to the commercialization of every potential problem where we think we must seek out a professional (counsellor, stylist, tutor, therapist, landscaper, housekeeper, childcare provider) for nearly everything in our lives. It also seemed to be too easy to hang a shingle out and claim that you could help people transform their lives.

On the other hand, this lifestylism project is helping me understand how much help people seem to need, so if they're willing to pay for it, why should that be a problem? Although I'd like to see people develop their own strategies and networks for optimizing their lifestyle choices...I have to acknowledge that many don't even know where to start. I glean great advice from Curt's Occupational Adventure, and that's enough for me...but that doesn't mean that someone else won't choose to pay for his services, which I'm sure are excellent. Perhaps since the barriers to entry are so low, the supply of life coaches will outstrip demand for a while. Like any other consulting role, the wheat will be separated from the chaff soon enough.

Food in Lifestylism

The Play Ethic has such a wealth of good stuff. After a longish quote from the NY Times about how "people find that additional experiences give them more pleasure than additional possessions," Pat Kane segues into a discussion of experiencing food in an age when people live more intentionally:

"So many times I've been asked, 'but who will flip the burgers in a play society?' You'll flip your own, comes the reply, particularly if you have a regulation of working hours that allows you to attend to your own nourishment. Or you'll enjoy them from someone who wants to take gastronomic care and give extraordinary service, rather than the sub-robotic assembly of diseased crap (SuperSizeMe)! The Slow Foodies - and their theorist, Carl Honore -- are onto something here. It's another reclamation of the right to order our time, space and materials."

This is inspirational stuff. Food is an important factor in creating our quality of life, but it is so often abused. Makes me wish that Hope would be blogging more often, and that my brilliant nutritionist-friend Sophie would put her food-wisdom online.

Nine Shift

Stephen Harlow discovered this week that he and I are leading very similar parallel lives in opposite hemispheres. My lost twin! He also tipped me off to Nine Shift from authors of a book by the same title -- lots of good lifestylism stuff in there, much of it focused on a fascinating comparison between current changes and the societal shifts of a century ago.

The Digital Life

My head has been spinning with ideas surrounding how people represent their lives to others -- not verbally, or with their outward appearance or where they live, but how they record, organize and display their experiences. In contrast to my recent focus on how people envision their future lifestyles, I'm pondering the value of the past.

I went digging into an old journal and found a few pages of notes I had made five years ago sketching out a business plan for helping people construct their personal histories (journals, memoirs, etc). My mom has done some of this kind of work both informally and through her business, Rosetta Projects. We talked seriously then about marketing consulting and publishing services to individuals and groups who wanted to create books, documents, web sites, and multimedia for their own posterity. We were looking at the scrapbooking phenomenon and thinking about all of the grandparents in the next 15 years who will want to reflect their lives for grandchildren and posterity.

Most of us have kept journals and letters, filled photo albums and dutifully saved home videos. Those media seem fairly manageable, and they can constitute a decent (although fragmented and disconnected) records of our lives. Anyone who has had a computer for a few years is starting to also see the mega(giga)bytes of other personal archive material piling up in disorganized folders: digital photos, music, projects, resumes, e-mails. If you could wave a magic wand to assemble all of those artifacts in a way that created a meaningful representation certain events, showing progressions over time and overall showed someone (or yourself) the essence of you, that would be pretty cool.

Now picture the implications of millions of people who always have portable devices that digitize and record anything they're experiencing. Cell phones already do e-mail, take photos and store music, so we're well down that road. Today I found this post on the topic: Personal Life Recorders and Digital Lifestyle Aggregators. I've bounced off of Marc's ideas before, but that was when I was thinking more about the learning and career-planning benefits of e-portfolios. He's envisioning technology that will make it easy for people to create and manage their own personal records and networks (think how easy blogging has become).

I suppose that the technology will eventually be as easy to use as a point-and-shoot camera. It made me realize that although nearly anyone can buy a camera, people still hire wedding photographers. Will people be willing to pay to have someone work with them to assemble the views of their past experiences and stories that they want passed on to their children and grandchildren?

Or perhaps from a less opportunistic angle -- will these kinds of skills be necessary and valued in the future? Just as we're expected to be able to assemble a meaningful and effective resume now, will the ability to digitally represent our stories, characteristics, and learning help us be more engaged workers, family members or citizens? What if we could all create the equivalent of Johnny Cash's video (RealPlayer or QuickTime) for Hurt as we look back in old age? What an intensely powerful personal artifact -- a four-minute snapshot of an extraordinary life, narrated in song by the Man in Black not long before his death.

Mortality is the unannounced shadow behind some of this discussion. People want to believe that their lives do matter; that they'll be interesting ancestors and that someone will care to understand who they were (if not who they are). Since I started paying attention to the blogging world, I've come across sites with a death notice as the most recent post -- the author has passed away, but their words, links, photos and files live on, leaving a fascinating public view of their lives that would otherwise never exist. A blog may be a fairly rudimentary personal history, but spend an hour looking through the archives of any established blog and imagine its value in conveying something meaningful about that author.

But what of the inherent narcissism in all of this for those of us who plan to be around for a while? The knock against blogs is that nobody else cares what I ate for dinner last night, my opinion on Michael Moore, the process of writing my thesis, or whatever else I might think is important right now. I've always found this argument to be absolutely irrelevant (although it stings to hear it from people who know you blog). Just because most people's personal artifacts (letters, songs, writing, videos, photo collection, other creative works) won't have a big audience doesn't mean that it won't be extremely valuable to the small group of people who do seek it out. And the most important member of that audience is the author, who can look through the filtered layers of their life and try to find wisdom, personal growth, and opportunities emerging from their past.

It's also true that although there may be a couple of million bloggers who all think this personal publishing phenomenon is something pretty special, only a small fraction of people will ever want their lives recorded and reflected in the ways I'm describing here. They will clamour for better ways of collecting, creating and sharing their stuff while hundreds of millions of people never get the urge to put their lives on display in any way -- not even just in print for a family heirloom. This does not negate the possibilities in this area, because the I suspect that the number of people looking for easy ways to represent who they are will continue to increase (especially as the boomers age) and the technology will keep making it easier for them to do so.

What Do We Really Want?

Cynthia has been doing some thinking about the differences between the urban neighbourhoods she grew up in and the suburban ones she raised her kids in. She dismisses her own "good-old-days" nostalgia and points to the obvious problems with isolating people in the 'burbs:

"Why and when did things change? And who said that the pursuit of happiness should include spending your whole day away from your children, getting up an hour and a half earlier in the morning so you have time to drop the kids off at daycare and penciling in 'dates' with your spouse...and children for that matter? Why does it seem we are embracing this lifestyle even moreso, even though we see the negative results right under our noses?"

Rob's comment to the post also sums it up nicely: "It seems so strange that we have come to believe that a 'normal" life is a life where we are separated from all that we need the most - our partner, our kids, our place and in the end our true selves." ...to which Cyn responded that it seems like it's time to get back to basics. I agree, but I think it's more complicated than that. My response:

The "basics" seem to run counter to many of our motivators and goals these days. I think at in the past (maybe in the '50s and '60s), the American Dream included the desire for leisure and spending time with your loved ones...but in those days, one normal income was enough for a family to buy the house with the picket fence, and the new car and whatever else.

We still tend to think we're entitled to the same things, but most families need two good incomes to achieve those same goals. For whatever reason, it's very difficult for people to sacrifice the nice house/nice car/nice neighbourhood in order to spend more time doing what they want to do: leisure, socializing, hanging out with their families, etc. Maybe we all say that we want those things, but they're actually lower priority than working more to get better stuff? They must be, or we'd be doing it differently.

Doing it differently for most families starts with freeing up more time to spend with each other, meaning working less (often going to a single income), which probably means reducing costs and standard of living -- perhaps renting, or sharing accommodation, or buying in out-of-the-way places without the usual conveniences, fixing up the old car for years, forgoing vacations and fancy toys -- and most of us aren't willing to do it. We've tried to do some of these things very intentionally, and it works pretty well...BUT it is hard when your peers all seem to be "getting ahead" in all of the traditional measures of success. It's hard to purge the very bourgeois desires for nice stuff, beautiful homes and recreational properties.

More Optimism

Historian Howard Zinn writes about the optimism of uncertainty:

"An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

This last line is inspiring, I think. Isn't this lifestylism? We're creating our individual and collective future by living out our values and dreams.

Generation Y's and Values

Pat Kane links to this article from Australia about how Generation Y approaches the world differently:

"For them, office life bleeds into personal life, which means the polarities so beloved of baby boomers are blown away. 'It's a new paradigm,' Chalke says. Upwardly mobile is no longer cool. It is now about 'adultescence', a conscious choice to experiment rather than acquire. Verginis wants a home and family, but is not prepared to be a wage slave to get them. 'I'd get a house quicker if I'd stayed in my job,' he says, 'but I don't want to sacrifice what makes me happy.' Unlike his parents' cohort, the boomers, (aged 43-58), he is not chasing utopia, or claiming to get no satisfaction."

Generalizations about an entire generation of people tend to paint with too broad a brush, but I think there is a shift occurring in how we view our purpose and the things we values in our lives. I think we're less willing to live by simple rules governing our big decisions -- "climb the corporate ladder", "get more stuff", "bigger, more, better homes/cars/toys" -- the old rules just don't capture the relativism and varied expectations and values in play today.

Scottish Radio

Excellent radio show from the BBC, including Pat Kane talking about shorter workweeks and The Play Ethic and an introduction to Tom Hodgkinson's advocacy of idleness in sharp contrast to our fixation on work. Really good stuff.

The clip starts at about 16:00 and the feature is at around 16:26, so skip ahead about 25 minutes unless you want to listen to the rest of the Scottish arts report.

Inventors

The Creative Generalist linked to this great article from Fast Company last week: Mothers (and Fathers) of Invention. Inventors are real lifestylists, I think -- not only are they working outside of all normal channels, they are creating new things for new kinds of lifestyles. A while back, Doug also tied these innovators to his conception of proactive living.

Worthwhile Clips

Worthwhile Magazine is looking really promising -- I hope they don't phase out their blog after the print version goes into full production. In cleaning out my Bloglines clippings, I found three recent posts, mostly from their Passionate Work category:

• The Male Jobless...How They Pass Their Time, which covers an interesting study about workers who have given up looking for work and what they're doing all day.
  
• The Next Generation of Leaders, theorizing that "the 20-somethings are searching for (and finding) more meaning in their work."
  
• What Do You Do? I like this approach -- the next time someone asks you at a party what you do, reply with a description of your favourite leisure or interest outside of work.

Doing vs. Thinking and Serendipity

I'm cleaning out all of the stories I've clipped in the past few weeks, and there were a couple of gems from The Occupational Adventure. This one pulled out a great quote from a book talking about minimizing the intellectual exercise of planning and deciding in favour of actually getting out there and doing stuff as a way to figure out your path:

"We learn who we are - in practice, not in theory - by testing reality, not by looking inside. We discover the true possibilities by doing - trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us. What we want clarifies with experience and validation from others along the way.
...To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads. We need to act."

The second one I wanted to keep was Curt's better definition of serendipty, using some advice from a photographer: "Some photographers call it serendipity. I call it being at the right place enough times to give the right time a chance of happening." It's related to the first point because of the focus on doing rather than planning or waiting for the perfect something. I found a similar phenomenon when we used to live beside Value Village (great new tagline: "The Ultimate Treasure Hunt"). If you want to find the coolest items, you don't go there once a month for three hours...you go a couple of times a week for fifteen minutes, preferably after they've put out some new stuff.

Oxymoronic Thinking

I love Doug's post on oxymoronic thinking, if only because the opening line makes me laugh out loud: "Beethoven was the Snoop Dogg of his generation." He goes on to explain how every exit is an entrance into something else, especially in the world of work.

Life and Love

Brian Alger is writing profoundly about the role of love in our sense of the quality of our lives. I recommend reading the entire article, but I was most struck by this paragraph's relevance to the lifestylism concept:

"In an enigmatic twist of fate, this questioning happened at the same time, from the perspective of a bystander, that I might have been seen as at the height of career attainment - international travel, the six-figure income, the bottomless expense account, the high-rolling with executives and government officials, and so on and so forth. But what precisely had been attained? There was nothing wrong with that career path, yet there was something missing within. Clearly, my definition and perception of attainment and success were suspect since I began to question the purpose of what I was doing. The source of this personal mind-body-spirit conundrum was love."

So much of our sense of worth or satisfaction with our lives is influenced by (or more sadly, derived from) how we compare ourselves to the people around us. There's always someone further ahead, with more interesting work, travelling to exotic places, buying perfect properties and accumulating the best stuff. But of course that's not the point. Lifestylism is about what makes us happy and what gives us meaning. Achieving The American Dream won't give us purpose and happiness, although the pursuit of it seems to compell most of us for a while even when we know the "result" won't necessarily be what we had hoped.