Sometimes I fear my inner child is a bad influence on my daughter who is a Type-A, go, go, go, go lady. I get tired just watching her work, moving swiftly from one goal to the next. I am a Type-B person whose inner child just wants to go out and play and cannot resist interrupting my daughter to tempt her into doing something fun with me instead. It is strange how the tables have turned. When my daughter was a child, I felt guilty for not playing with her enough. The first full sentence she spoke to me was, “Will you come play with me?” At that time, I was goal-oriented. I felt loaded down with responsibility, so putting aside what I needed to get done was difficult.
The older I get the more I realize how important fun is, especially for the world-weary who have spent too much of their lives doing what we have to do to survive. To be fair, my daughter is also a fun-loving person and good company, but she is at that age now when she is building her career and needs to prove herself and earn her place in the world.
I feel like what should have been just a stage in my human development turned into a lifetime struggle to prove my worth and justify my existence, due to the chronically unstable economy that began during my young adulthood and is still with us today. I feel I have been beating my head against a rigged system, with, not even a glass ceiling, but a cement one, and not just against women or people of color, but against everyone who is not a member of the excessively wealthy class. My career days began with the Reagan era when the trickle-down economics mythology swept the mainstream American culture like a plague, and it is still killing us today.
The Reagan era was when the “dumbing-down” of Americans began, and it had to be done because people had to be very stupid to buy into the idea that giving all the money to the wealthy would eventually “trickle down” to everyone else and make them wealthy too. The conservative and neoliberal “think tanks” did such a great job distributing this propaganda, even in high-school and college textbooks, that it took only five years for the big lie to catch on. Now we are so entrenched in it our financial institutions are deemed “too big to fail," so they, and not the workers, the middle class, or the poor, are bailed out when they are, in fact, failing, to the detriment of everyone but the excessively wealthy who receive billions of dollars in corporate welfare while everyone else’s wages go down and the cost of living climbs higher every day.
I feel for the millennials and the younger generations. Will they also have to sacrifice their lives to the excessively wealthy to survive? Will they ever be able to go out and play without worrying about accumulating debt? All I can say is if my children cannot manage it, no one can. Both my son and daughter are very hard workers, and while I am proud of them, I also worry they work too hard and will not be able to have enough time or money to just enjoy life.
The one saving grace the younger generations have, I hope, is they are savvier than we were. They have seen how we, their parents, got screwed and how it affected them, and they will not be so willing to take it lying down. I pray they find a better way to survive and thrive and to balance work with play. I hope and pray they will take a wrecking ball to the cement ceiling of this Wall-Street rigged system and replace it with a new and equitable economic system in which they will get a fair return on their investment of hard work and education.
Photo Credit: Josh Hild, Instagram: @joshhild
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