ramblings

Longer Lives Equal More Life Stages

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NYT Op-Ed Columnist David Brooks just wrote a piece called the Odyssey Years whose premise is that there used to be four common life phases but now there are at least six.
Old phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.
New phases: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age.
He says that the Odyssey stage,” the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood,” is the least understood and I would tend to agree with him. I have seen this stage first hand in the lives of both friends and family and admit it baffles even me, a simple friend and/or cousin who is only 30 years old, not a parent who is, in many cases, bankrolling this voyage into adulthood.
A Hoboken resident named Leigh Higgins wrote in response to the piece that:

“Parents should focus more on guiding and supporting their children in a discovery of their own values and life purpose and less on micromanaging an outcome we hope to see as parents.”

This seems a bit trite and a no-brainer but I guess there are plenty of parents that say, “Be an accountant or else…”
I found another response much more interesting because it speaks directly to one of my favorite issues: class. Philadelphia resident Laurence Steinberg noted that:

“Recent empirical analyses indicate that about 40% of American young people follow this pattern. Poor inner-city and rural youth, as well as young people who live in the so-called red states, are far less likely than their advantaged, suburban and blue-state counterparts to delay the transition into conventional work and family roles, both because they choose not to and because they simply can’t afford to.
Perhaps over time, the odyssey stage will come to characterize the life course of the majority of young Americans, just as adolescence began as a middle-class institution and spread to less affluent groups, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

Below, feel free to read Mr. Brooks’ article and see if you agree with either of the readers above.
The Odyssey Years by David Brooks – 10-9-07
There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.
They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
Yet with a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.
Two of the country’s best social scientists have been trying to understand this new life phase. William Galston of the Brookings Institution has recently completed a research project for the Hewlett Foundation. Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has just published a tremendously valuable book, “After the Baby Boomers” that looks at young adulthood through the prism of religious practice.
Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it’s at 21 percent.)
The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.
Social life is fluid. There’s been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers. Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.
This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.
The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.
Rather, what we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties.
But there is every reason to think this phase will grow more pronounced in the coming years. European nations are traveling this route ahead of us, Galston notes. Europeans delay marriage even longer than we do and spend even more years shifting between the job market and higher education.
And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by “Friends” and later by “Knocked Up.”

tech

Current Web Usage Stats

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I use the Internet every day. I even managed to do so while on vacation in Hawaii using my T-Mobile data driven Blackberry Pearl so I’m curious if more people are like me or if I’m the minority when it comes to web usage. Therefore, I was happy to hear that Avenue A | Razorfish surveyed 475 consumers across “all demographics” in July and that they made available their findings. I think they show the usual divide between what the loud techno-elite minority cares about, as compared to the quiet mass-consumer majority is still in effect. It also shows which parts of the web are catching on faster than others. Take a look:
Overall Stats

  • Only 60% personalize home pages
  • 47% never share bookmarks
  • 44% never use RSS feeds
  • 65% never use tag clouds
  • Almost all read the “most popular” or “most emailed” items on sites

That being said, here are specific stats about a number of different categories and whether they are “big” or not.
Video: Big

  • 67% regularly watch videos on YouTube, etc.
  • 95% have watched online videos in the last 3 months.
  • 49% have uploaded online videos in the last 3 months [shockingly high–almost makes us discount all findings, or at least conclude that this is a highly web-literate and young consumer sub-set].
  • 85% have watched online movie previews in last 3 months.
  • 71% have watched a TV show online in the last 3 months [more than we would have thought].

Online Music, Photos, Blogs: Pretty Big

  • 42% regularly purchase music online
  • 41% use photo-sharing sites
  • 70% read blogs regularly

Online research when making product selection decisions: HUGE

  • 92%+ use the web when making product buying decisions (research, reviews, retailer location, price comparison, etc.)
  • 54% start their product research at a search engine
  • 14% start it at a comparison shopping engine
  • 30% start it at an e-commerce or retailer site
  • 55% rely on USER REVIEWS most when choosing products
  • 21% rely on EXPERT REVIEWS most.
  • After product selected, most important criteria when choosing where to buy are PRICE (38%) and SITE REPUTATION (38%)

Mobile data services: Small

  • 68% never use mobile phone to listen to music
  • 76% never use mobile phone to watch video.
  • 64% never use mobile phone to check headlines.

Via Silicon Valley Insider

politics

On Democracy

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Stanley Fish was asked 10 questions about democracy by the BBC. Two questions are related to one another: “What is the biggest threat to democracy?” and “Can terrorism destroy democracy?” and I thought I would share his responses I thought they were not only insightful and sum up how I feel:
The answers depend on what you think democracy is. I tend to resist romantic definitions that feature phrases like “noble ideal” and opt instead for something more analytic: democracy is a form of government that is not attached to any pre-given political or ideological ends, but allows ends to be chosen by the majority vote of free citizens.
What this means is that democracy is the only form of government that, at least theoretically, contemplates its own demise with equanimity. Democratic elections do not guarantee that the victors will be democratically inclined, and it is always possible that those who gain control of the legislative process will pass laws that erode or even repeal the rights – of property, free expression and free movement – that distinguish democracies from theocracies and monarchies. (Some would say that this is exactly what has been happening in the past six years.) Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes captured the fragility of a form of government that can alter itself beyond the point of recognition when he said that if his fellow citizens want to go to hell in a handbasket, it was his job to help them, even if he deplored the consequences. Democracy, then, can be said to be its own biggest threat.
Terrorism presents a parallel threat from the outside. The danger is not so much that terrorists will defeat democracies by force as it is that, in resisting terrorists, democracies will forgo the procedural safeguards (against warrantless detention, censorship and secret surveillance) that make a democracy what it is. (Again, some would say that is already happening today.) If terrorists can maneuver democracies into employing tactics indistinguishable from theirs, it could be argued that they have won no matter what the outcome on the battlefield.
For more on this topic, check out www.whydemocracy.net

ramblings

La la Land At Its Finest

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I saw this in Brentwood, CA by a Peet’s Coffee Shop (which is actually where Mezzaluna, where Nicole Brown Simpson dined before OJ, I mean someone, killed her, used to reside) this past weekend:
lambor%20bike%20rack%202.jpg
If you’ve got over $100K for a Lamborghini, one would think you also have enough money to get another car on which to affix your bike rack. Ridiculous.