The taste of a new generation

A recent conversation with someone that fits closest to a mentor, was about the dichotic differences in people employed in enterprise and government. Having been a government employee all his life he has the congenital fear of the private industry along with a distrust of modern day management practices. I guess what he finds most profane is the imperious job changing. Mobility is a good thing in the industry today and it is the “slow” that choose to remain stationary.

A rolling stone gathers no moss and the one with a 20 year Central Government contract. Slowly turns green as the other rocks go bounding up the hill.

This conversation was of course in the context of me. A quintessential rolling stone until two years ago when pretty much the same thing happened to me. While he was trying to induce in me the justification of "stability" and it's chawanprash like qualities.

His argument as passionate as it was for me was pretty much like the Chawanprash ad itself, with the sadhu atop a styrofoam himalaya grinding herbs. Sure it is endearing to think that the R&D department for Chawanprash is an emmaciated and suprisingly well insulated mystic, but the ad failed to really appeal to me at the discerning age of 16, atleast in comparison to the ad for another esoteric concoction of nutrients - PEPSI.

The chawanprash ad went off the air; Pepsi hired Britney Spears.
I think there is a point in everybody’s life where they suddenly are the “demographic.”
Every ad in print or on television seem targeted at you.
I am young, I may be swayed by an attractive woman who likes me because of the brand of gearbox oil I prefer, I on occasion have a craving to jump of a cliff pedaling my bicycle madly while synchronizing my consumption of aerated beverage to an acid rock, lead guitar riff.
The cool dude with glow in the dark hair and the guy with the breath so fresh and good smelling he could use it to fight evil are my contemporaries.

Hence, by induction I must buy myself jeans that expose that really attractive bit of skin at the anterior medial region of my knee.

Somehow the world thinks that it should be primarily made up of people like me. Or maybe just people who are easily swayed.

It is a luxury of our generation. A generation that in the words of Tyler Durden is working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.

My mentor on the other hand is from an age where you prayed on your good-fortune that you were not bombed by black and white B-52s and hoped on your ability that the world accommodated you in the electric arc lamp spotlight of the living. Each day lived a gift of freedom from despair and providence the celebration of that fact.

I recognize that his context is an anachronism of sorts or so positivity will have you believe. I find it fun that we want to rub in “new age” as often as we can, make sure he understands that nothing in this world is intended for him. As is evident from the Blood Sugar testing apparatus that he recently bought after much deliberation.
I am generally inducted into most purchases that contain more than 20000 transistors per square inch and went along with him to make the purchase. The device we picked is pretty damn fancy it uses the age old Glucose Oxidase reduction reaction but then coulometrically titrates the complex trapped in an enzyme electrode back to Oxidase and then tells you how sweet you are.

It is designed to be appealing to kinsmen of extreme snow-boarders, with cool curves and splashes of icy blue acrylic.
All while symbolizing success as a sheek and sexy fashion accessory when you are in the pub with the boys, complete with beeping noises and things that provocatively flash in neon imperiousness. A perfect complement to ones' glow in the dark hair.

So anyway, we opened the instruction booklet and politely skipped past the illustrated step by step operations in Swedish and the regular maintenance requirements in Portugese, flipped past the 50 page legal disclaimer that essentially implies that the number displayed on the screen could legally be - not your blood glucose concentration - but the present cricket score for New Zealand’s tour of South Africa and found the font size 4 instructions in English.

It’s operation is fairly simple, designed thoughtfully to be fully intuitive to regular users of variable energy cyclotrons and the X-box.
My mentor not unlike most snow boarding, X-box owning diabetics in the world, doesn’t operate high energy particle sources on a regular basis, which is why I get phone calls at godforsaken times of around 6 AM complaining that “this bloody thing doesn’t work!”
And he means that quite literally!

In all seriousness, this world and it’s overwhelming urge to fit a gaussian is the most poignant reminder of our mortality.