It's Always Something: What is Happening to Us?

People just burn out, don't they? It is looking like people get to a certain age when they take most of their dreams and interesting charecteristics and put them in a little box so they can pull them out 15 years later, show them to their kid, & say "See I was pretty cool once myself!". That's a lot of what it's looking like. Granted, I am getting older, and this nesting behavior is becoming more and more common & natural ammong my peers. But it seems to me that people get to their mid 20's, and decide they've gone far enough, and just settle down. They may not know they've decided that, but inadvertantly that's what they've done.

*Disclaimer* I do have some very good actually married & soon to be friends that are NOT like that (SB & KL, KG & N... I'm looking at you), so this is not an all inclusive idea. Just a general one.

Anyway, people seem to just get tired of trying to work towards whatever "passion" they once had, and of being mobile and active and strange and fun and of dreaming, and just give it over for wearing polar fleece and watching movies at home in all their spare time, and accepting mannagerial positions at jobs they never wanted to keep for more than 6 months.

And I don't want to judge that. I think it just kind of scares me. If people want to loose their edge before they're 30 and stop expanding their life experiences beyond the scope of stories to blip about on your myspace page and cute funny secrets that only you and your partner have, then it has to be for good reason. But I don't understand it. People used to want so much more for themselves, and now all of a sudden all they want is...this?

Perhaps one day when I find myself in a long term relationship which I believe might be life long, then I'll get what everyone is doing. But I still know that for myself I have always had things that I have to do, which move beyond mortgaging a dumpy house and pushing out babies in the prime of my life. Those things cannot be compromised by fear. To me it seems that all this settling down is exactly that--settling--and that after two to five years of "trying to make it" people get scared and burn out. Like somehow they thought that becoming sucessful at what they wanted to do would be instantaneous, once a few people saw just how good they were. Or that the fear of not actually being capable of success just overwhelmed them and they decided to cling to the nearest solid source, and not move.

Ultimately, people's personal happiness is what's most important. And if people's ideas of happiness shifts over time like this, so be it. Then it's the right thing.

But what is disheartening to me is to think back to when we were all teenagers, and people in college, and remember how dedicated people were. How driven people were to do and create and stretch themselves. And how talented they were. Those people were not like our parents & they didn't ever want to become our parents. So now if those people, one by one, give up all those things for a domestic partnership and a job they don't really love, what does it mean? Does it mean our dreams were stupid? Does it mean we were all foolish? Furthermore, does it mean that in trying to still do something with my life, I am the foolish one?

And it's those ideas that scare me. Not the polar fleece and constant tv.