FROM URBAN TRIBES

HERE'S A SNIPPET FROM MY BOOK

Having delayed marriage into our late twenties and thirties we lived with a remarkable amount of personal autonomy to make up our lives as we went along. This did not feel like some sort of multiple choice freedom, but rather the type of freedom that could descend on us like a cyclone—erasing landmarks and spinning us around until we were dizzy with the complexity and sheer number of options that swirled around us. We didn’t talk about it much because freedom is a hard thing to identify in one’s own life. Given that freedom is, for the most part, an absence of restraints, we rarely stopped to count the things we were not bound by. I decided that was exactly what I needed to do.

To begin with, I knew we not tied down by family. I’ve already mentioned this but it deserves emphasis. No generation before had delayed the starting of a family with the tenacity we had. Not only did most of us not have kids, but in certain hipster areas of major cities you could literally go days with out seeing a child. Of course we had families in the form of parents and brothers and sisters. They were largely self-reliant, however, and required only our presence at high holidays and our voice over the phone every week or two. Our parents were living longer and more healthily. Even when they confronted illness, distance was often a wall to responsibility. Predictably, those of us who delayed marriage the longest were those who moved away to college and then to large metropolitan areas that promised interesting and consuming careers. We might have felt emotional accountability to our families back home (or wherever it was that our sisters and brothers landed), but it was seldom a drain on our time.

As for our parents’ attempts to constrain or guide us from afar, mostly they didn’t even try. By the time we hit twenty-five and had been living outside the house for six or seven years, parents had either abdicated their roll of advice giver or we had stopped picking up the phone on Sunday mornings. Avoiding their calls was seldom necessary. Even when we were in high school and college, very few parents of my generation seemed to be much interested in the role of stern advice giver. They worried for us and sometimes that worry influenced our behavior. While they encouraged us in our education, they did not, as a general rule, threaten disinheritance or any meaningful or lasting sanctions if we moved in with our girlfriends or boyfriends, bought a motorcycle, or quit our jobs to follow the lure of a deep certainty that we needed to become a Zen monk or a dot.com entrepreneur.

Comments

[kaushik chatterjee]

HI, this is Kaushik Chatterjee from India. Twenty-seven, going on Twenty-eight, fending off friend(those married), parents and grandparents, who ask the terrible question - What's your plan? What are you doing next year? ans- well, nothing much, some trekking in the himalayas, a tour to the beach. reply from dad - that's not what I mean't. This urban tribes phenomenon is not just confined to the States. Read about the phenomenon in this issue of the Indian newsmagazine "Outlook". a thoroughly enjoyable blog. am searching for the book.