Yuppie Calories and other such childish concerns

Baroque / Hercules Seghers/ Town with four towers

One of the things (monsters?) that us boomers created (enabled?)  was the snooty status-signally nonsense that that yuppie food prom got the country to buy into.  I was as real a culprit as anyone in the country and writing this is probably my act of contrition.

I watched Julia Child and Martha Stewart back in the day.  Truth be told, I also used Macintosh computers for the longest time.  When I look back on it, I recognize now how much of that was my utter buy-in to the “we only deserve the best” mentality that our society is so permeated with.  Because you see, those two women are the Eve offering the Apple (Oh my, I am unnecessarily myth-reference-ey here, but bear with me).

Us boomers are funny.  We are the first of the seriously spoiled Americans.  I suppose that is to be expected considering the way WWII went.  Like most spoiled children, we grew up thinking more was our due that the facts on the ground allowed for.  Since the bontemps just kept a Roulez, we passed this onto our children with a little lagniappe.  So now we have a couple of generations of spoiled people that need some calibration of expectations to reflect the real world.

My rice and beans rants of late are coming from a line of thought that I have been following for a couple of days.  Simply put, our expectations for what the future holds for us may not be in line with what is coming down the pike.  We have spent a lifetime carefully crafting lives that aren’t going to be maintained in the manner we expect them to be maintained.  

I have a sneaking hunch that we are heading into a period where expectations and reality may well need to go through a Hegelian style collision and the resulting synthesis may not prove to be in the interest of a lot of people’s inflated expectations.  Even worse is the upcoming psychic trauma to the self worth of folks who use the material largesse of their “achieved” dreams to establish their value as humans.

I am thinking that food is the simplest and most pervasive of any of the myriad of false dreams that the Corporate types have foisted on us through the modified magic of advertising and false needs and the foibles of keeping up with the Jones.  Martha and Julia were always about proving that you were better than other people.  

I think we need to spend some time untangling the sordid mess of false dreams that we have bought into.  This might be a good place for a lot of folks to learn about what they need and what they like.  It also might be a good reason to tease out what other folks have told you is needed and start charting your own path.