a hundred million peter pans

when did we stop aging?

just a small bit of housekeeping before we get going here: i’ve been hard at work on a second season of my Htgtny series, the first of which is due on june 2nd, the last of which is due on August 25th, and the rest of which (13 in total) will fill in the space between.

apologies for being generally avoidant on this platform these past couple weeks, i’ve been in the throes of editing, taking the time to draft properly for once. taking time to make sure the work is actually worthwhile for you, the reader, (and not full of typos like my last one smh) means a lot to me; so here’s hoping the summer series continues turning out like it has so far.

that’s all i have to say about it right now but needless to say i’m v excited.

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The chain of restaurants I work for part-time is opening a new location that sells fresh deli meats along with gourmet hot dogs. This has become a real struggle for the ownership, it seems, who have never dealt with the hardships of sourcing salted and sausaged meats of this size. One of the owners, a fantastically bald man who stops by our branch on occasion, has somehow become more bald in past weeks. He’s been pulling out hairs he doesn’t have.

While titrating pork loins into sausages, the chain’s chefs and culinary people would lean on their elbows and sigh and think about their college campus instead of the pig intestines they were grinding into thin flows. This, a chef explained to me through the hot metal of the pass, was because they are a bunch of millennials and millennials do that, get caught up in nostalgia. The ownership cursed and threw fists at the sky for having hired millennials. Because millennials do think about their college days. I thought it over, found it to be somewhat accurate. Millennials haven’t left their college campuses, not really. Their companies and their start-ups, their news sites and shows all seem to yearn for the dorms. Zoomers and even Gen X are no better, though, but for different reasons: Zoomers can’t seem to escape a high school worldview and Gen X can’t seem to move on from their first bachelor’s pads.

There was a certain point for every generation where social (and intellectual?) development began to stall out: early adulthood for Gen X, college for millennials, high school for Gen Z. Will Gen Alpha be caught in their elementary school days forever? Or will they be mentally even younger?

It’s a question for only passing time to answer fully but the reason for why it’s happening is so much easier. It’s obvious. It’s the age we became too online. I’m a part of older Gen Z and we became too online in high school for the most part. Younger Gen Z people became too online in Middle School which, um, has wrecked some consequences on American politics since, let’s be honest here, the modern platform economy is not so different from a Middle School cafeteria.

Gen Alpha will, one way or another, be what breaks the camel’s back. As a generation of iPad babies, either they never emerge from a preschool worldview or they completely reverse the paradigm into a completely new trendline. Time will tell whether they figure out a new way to be online having been baptized into it so early (sometimes before even baptism). As for all of us older than fourteen years old, though, there’s a distinct feeling of stuckness, never really growing up. Still dancing the opening Jitterbug of Mulholland Drive, we are a Peter Pan people. A hundred million peter pans.

mulholland drive, david lynch