Moving along well on the "listening" and the "reading" aspects of my dotage. Forty-eight hours of music and a now getting my lectures downloaded and backed up. I should have all the audible files converted this week and the great courses downloaded.
Thus far pretty chill. I am driving more than my preference, but that kind of stuff happens during the holidays. Eldest isn't a terrible driver and hanging out with him on his belated driving lessons is not onerous.
Screed:I am hearing more rumblings about folks getting rid of their stuff. I am happy to hear these rumblings. I really kinda wonder if this rumbling will come to anything meaningful. I kinda doubt it though. So much of what causes our depression and our inabilities to connect are wired into the system that we use as a narrative.
I think that the only chance that us boomers have is to start doing just this, reducing our weight on the planet and the society that is the environment that we choose to live in. When us boomers start retiring in a serious way, and stop pulling our share of the load, things are going toe get ugly, ugly, ugly. Now, what we need to do is talk about this ugliness in real terms. One tends to think of the boomers as portrayed by TV, fairly well off middle class types, usually white, with a home and a retirement plan and social security and a strong hankering to get out and see the world after a lifetime of being subservient to the man.
I would argue that is a pretty small tranche of the boomers, maybe 30% tops. If you take a look around at the "invisible" people working at low wage jobs in the marketplace, you will find a lot of boomers in that crowd. They go to work and rub shoulders with GenX and Millennials and the like daily. Some of us actually kinda like the kids coming up after us. But, like your humble correspondent, these "invisible" boomers don't have that much in the way of retirement, and keeping up has landed us in more debt than is preferable.
So there are a bunch of us boomers out there who see the problem as clearly as the Millennials. As a matter of fact, I would posit that the majority of the boomers feel every bit as screwed as any of the mythical basement-dwelling Millennials residing in the mythical home of their mythical rich boomer parent. But that is not the narrative that has been popularized. We boomers have become our parents, artlessly defending a system that works for no one but the elite because we so wish to be considered part of the elite.
Nope, I am thinking that trying to cause an age war between the differing cohorts is a ploy by the elite that have taken far too large a portion of the proceeds to deflect the blame away from a corrupted and corrupting system. The boomers offer an easy target.
But, the war has been started. The hatred and blame has been sowed. We are just waiting for the harvest. That is why I chose the title that I chose. If us boomers are going to escape the anger of the younglings, we are going to have go to ground, and we most certainly won't be able to take our stuff with us. Right now, the boomer generation, for better or for worse, is going over the edge of being useful to the general population and is demanding a retirement and a lifestyle that simply isn't possible when considering the parlous state of the American economy and body politic.
So going to ground is my plan. I will use the next three years to get to a break even point and devise a lifestyle that will be low impact and low drag to slide through my waning years. I am planning a small life.
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