Footloose & Fancy Free….

…. is a term my mother often uses to describe me and my friends — both male and female. Sometimes my dad says that i who was so focused and blinkered when I was twenty possilby regressed into my teens. My grandmother was zapped when she asked me recently “When are you going to settle down” ….My answer “Hopefully never” wasn’t really the one she was looking for….

And, now i have the perfect retort for all of them – I am part of the Odyssey generation. Odyssesy lies somewhere between adolescence & adulthood, and amongst the other peculiarities of this generation-

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.

How many people do we all know like this In fact I mostly know people like this….

and then….

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.

Oh lord, i laughed so much when i read this. This is so much me and so many of my peer group…..

My own take on this phenomenon is that we are living longer & healthier, are more fertile till later, and are therefore compensating for it in other ways.
In my grand father’s generation – the average grand dad died at 60 and the average grandmother at around 70. Move down one generation, the average age seems to be 75 and 85. By the time it is our generation’s time to go…… we are possibly looking at a decade more of life. That is a tremendously long time to be focused and sincere. Maybe our generation has braked because it has realized that this is a really long journey …. and it might as well be fun.
Patrix & Rashmi have great posts about this.

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