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2 Year Itch Prominent In Generation Y

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2 Year Itch Prominent In Generation Y

Photo Attributed to Thenix

For a generation like ours where everything is fast and disposable, fast food, speed dates, fast cars, disposable cups, disposable underwears, disposable housing, we have a hard time concentrating on any one thing. I can’t imagine how it could get any worse for the future generations, but we have it pretty bad ourselves. We have short attention spans and that is a fact. In that short attention span, there are many displacements that occur, but one that I wish to talk about in this blog post is about relationships.

For me, a forever relationship freaks the hell out of me. I see so many people moving in and out of relationships, it seems that relationships have a really short half-life in the early 21st century. We are all ready to boogie for a second or two, but we see something new and shiny around us, and we want to boogie with them. We are ready to be polygamous, we are ready to try out different people – like they are the flavour of the day icecream. We aren’t ready to commit. We are too afraid to commit.

The idea of being with one person forever excites me to no end. It is the start of a beautiful thing – as portrayed in a billion movies. But what happens 20-30 years into the forever? What happens when you’ve been together forever and boredom or routine sets in? That idea of the 7-year itch scares me, but also makes perfect sense to me. In fact, the 7-year itch could really be reduced to the 2 year itch. How can our attention spans bear the span of 7 years? That just seems too long. 2 years is more doable.

Of course, there are hundreds of couples who have been together forever (more than 2 years) and are making it work, and will continue to make it work. But I am still afraid. I notice this fear in a lot of my friends as well. How can a generation of men who are used to video games and fast food stick with one person forever? How can a generation of women who are used to disposable tampons and 10 minute manicures stick with one person forever?

I don’t know, but I’m attempting to try – Happy 1 year anniversary to Boom and Thenix. Talk to me in a year.

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Asking your significant other for permission

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Photo attributed to flickr user Zanthia

I have noticed an increasing trend in the couples around me of asking each other for permission to do…anything. It might be going out with friends, or taking the children out for a walk, or even staying late after work. I don’t know why this is happening, maybe spouses tended to do this earlier as well, but I never paid attention, because I was too wrapped up in my own head-drama. But recently, as recently as last Monday, I noticed a colleague of mine, who couldn’t go to an after-work event, a few drinks at Jack Astor’s, because his girlfriend wouldn’t give him permission. She said, he had to come home and help her with grocery shopping!

While I’m all for being in control in the relationship, I do know what it’s like to be a control freak, I do not understand how all of this coddling, restricting, and being the dictator in the relationship will help the future of the relationship. I find myself that when I do not spend enough time outside the relationship, and outside my work, doing fun things, I do feel like life is a boring, meaningless sham and I usually end up blaming the man I’m in the relationship with, even if it might not be his fault.

The interesting thing to me, is that it isn’t only females who are reigning the roost, dictating to their spouses, but males as well, going with the jealous, possessive trend. There isn’t a gender-relation to this trend, which makes me wonder, what the reason for it is. Is it that we are so scared of the world, of all the crazy things that are happening on this Earth of ours, that we want to ensure our loved ones stay safe by keeping them indoors in our safe apartments or houses all the time? Or is it that we are afraid to trust someone else, we can’t believe that someone would actually want to be with us, so we keep a reign on them, ensuring they don’t realize that they can find someone better, newer, shinier out there in the real world?

Whatever the reason might be, the trend is disturbing and we need to stop ourselves when we do something like that.

A different retirement plan

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I was travelling to the States the past weekend. I noticed while visiting a gas station and a coffee shop in Buffalo that both of the people who served me at these places were older individuals. They were both definitely in their fifties or sixties. It seemed to me that both of these individuals were close to or over their retirement age, but unfortunately they were still working a night shift in a minimum wage job.

Obviously I do not know the situation for either of them. But something that came up in my head was that they must have been affected by the recession. Either they relied on their house values for their retirement or they relied on stocks which fell abruptly through the sub-prime crisis. In any case, they were being forced to rely on going back to work when they should have been lazing around at home with their spouses or their grandchildren.

This made me think of our own situation. Generation X as we are called, have already been two recessions. We are the generation born between 1982 and 2000. I was wondering what we have learnt about retirement from focusing on what’s been happening with the Baby Boomer generation. Something that clicked with me is that we cannot rely on either our homes or stocks to ensure that we will retire in time. It just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, looking at what’s been happening in the past, obviously both of these are prone to crashes and are completely unreliable when you wish to retire at a certain time.

Some things that I was thinking was that:

  1. Either you decide you are going to give up the idea of retiring at a certain age in the future, maybe 60 or 65? Maybe retirement as a concept itself needs to change in our heads. We shouldn’t think of retirement as something that happens in the far off future. We need to start thinking of mini-retirements as more of a norm. Taking one year off every few years during our working life would ensure that we are not going to need a big chunk of money at the end of our working life.
  2. The reason we are not going to need a big chunk of money at the end of our working life would be because we are going to keep on working in little bite-size pieces throughout. We are going use our hobbies to fund our lifestyle till the end of our lives. We might use our blogs as a source of income, or jewellery that we make or teaching yoga, etc.
  3. I was also thinking that we need to rethink of what our homes mean to us. We should think of our home as a retirement plan not as the value of the house, but as rental property. Modifying our homes when we are older so we can have a renter staying there ensure that we have a steady source of income throughout our semi-retired years.
  4. It doesn’t mean that we stop investing in RRSPs or retirement mutual funds. We just have to be careful not to put all of our eggs in one basket.

What do you guys think would be important for Gen Y to think with regards to retirement?