Dave Barry: Grown-ups used to have fun

Having the choice and declining one option in favor of another is totally different than gleefully reminiscing about the days when the choice wasn't available because our knowledge base hadn't yet been sufficiently advanced.

 

I agree that generational superiority is ridiculous. Especially when all the other generations suck.

 

I reminisce daily about the days when the Internet and Twitter didn't exist and the general public was better-read and better-informed and more engaged in politics and government and community service and such.

The tl;dr version of Barry's column is "some stuff used to be better." It really isn't that controversial.

 

Seriously ...

It's so much better now. We have all of this information, and all of these choices. We can get ahead of the curve. We can seize our future. Of course it costs us our present, but what the hell ... can't have everything!

 

DON'T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE!

 

To be fair, they wouldn't be so bad if only they'd do everything in life exactly the way I do.

 

Little bit easier to party it up when you have a job with fully-paid healthcare and a defined benefit pension.

 

In the link, were any kids told to get off Dave Berry's lawn?

 

As an offshoot of my earlier note about Barry's obscured personal timeline, a question ... When he is talking about how our parents used to do it up right, who exactly is he talking about? Because, you know, he is 67 years old.

The "Mad Men" era that he recalls from his youth, when his parents put the kids to bed and then partied away, he was a teenager when that era began and a full-fledged adult for much of it.

 

Wasn't his father an Episcopal priest?

 

Yes, but after other jobs. I think Barry, who is just a little older than 65 year old me, was recalling his more early childhood in the late '50s. My parents gave big parties back then too. That's how I was taught the invaluable career skill of bartending. But at that point, Barry's parents and my parents were in their late 30s if that. I had big parties at that age. Difference is, I didn't get married until I was 33, and folks of my parents' generation got married earlier so their kids were older at the same point of age.

 

I wish Barry's column had explored more of the "whys" of modern parenting.

I think today's parents are consumed with their children being successful. They're consumed with having an answer every time a kid says "I hate you!" And they're consumed with it, in part, because more than a few wished they'd told their parents that, but didn't, and want to prevent for their children the sense of absence -- emotional and otherwise -- their parents left in them.

But Barry's dead right. Young parents seem to have no fun. They seem to lack all kinds of trust. They feel obligated to pay out their ass for a horrible babysitter instead of knocking on a neighbor's door. They seem to be afraid, on a daily basis, that they'll be called, by someone, somewhere -- a bad parent.

And, yes -- there's less money to have fun, because fun costs more money than ever before.