[If you want to cat­e­go­rize this par­tic­u­lar screed in the Aarne-​​Thompson Rant Type Index, I think it might be an RT71.789, the “Dark Witch at the Chris­ten­ing”. One of my favorites, as you no doubt know by now. We attain mas­tery by prac­tice, after all.]

It was the first anniver­sary the other day of my Mom’s death. It was also about the same time in 2004 when my wife’s Dad lost his leg to a stu­pid GP who didn’t pay atten­tion to per­sis­tent com­plaints from a knowl­edge­able diabetic.

And that was also the year when I bought my first Plus­tek Optic­Book. I began buy­ing and scan­ning Pub­lic Domain books when our par­ents and friends started dying. We’ve run out of par­ents these days, and our old friends—the ones from the Great­est Generation—are get­ting scarce on the ground. But that said, I keep scan­ning a book a day when I can, because it’s the right thing to do.

I try to stay busy. Peo­ple in my posi­tion seem to say that. I try to stay busy.

But my obses­sion with scan­ning books isn’t really the focus of this piece. Nor is the obser­va­tion that peo­ple keep on dying, Oh-​​woe-​​is-​​me. I’ll have plenty to say about the for­mer in a few days; as for the dying, they will man­age them­selves with­out any advice from me.

No, we gather here today to talk about the over­lap between the two, in my life and my wife’s life. And as is my wont I am going to gen­er­al­ize from that dataset of two exem­plars, treat us as type spec­i­mens as it were. Because I see a pat­tern coa­lesc­ing out there in the world, or at least I want to see that pattern.

Even though I don’t know what the actual out­come will be, I know it’s some­thing you might con­sider “bad” and I want you to have the oppor­tu­nity to under­stand before it really kicks in and stuff starts to break. Future his­to­ri­ans will always get it wrong, call­ing it some­thing about wars or com­put­ers or classes, when it was in fact the notion of a “career” implod­ing on itself, and biol­ogy beat­ing cul­ture back into place.

But at least it will be writ­ten down here for peo­ple to ignore.

Right: So first, peo­ple die. You might know that bit.

Increas­ingly, it’s young peo­ple who are tak­ing care of their dying older par­ents. They’re dying in chronic care sit­u­a­tions, and long-​​term home hos­pice care. And—excepting cases of dementia—caring for your own par­ents in their last months is some­thing you do for your­self. Nobody who’s ever been in one likes a nurs­ing home these days, out­side of dire emer­gen­cies, and so if you can afford to care for your loved ones you will.

And so we see a resur­gence of fam­ily care­givers, work­ing at home, and espe­cially among the mid­dle class.

Now I hate to break it to you, but as it hap­pens when you spend three or four or a dozen years tak­ing care of your dying rel­a­tives you won’t get a special-​​colored lapel rib­bon to wear, and there is no mag­net for your car. Nobody else really acts like they give a damn, frankly.

But from first-​​hand expe­ri­ence I’m here to say that in lieu of sur­vivor sup­port net­works and redemp­tive life-​​affirming-​​though-​​glib sto­ry­lines, you might get mas­tery. You might not ever be able to explain it to any­body… but it can be there.

More peo­ple are tak­ing care of their loved ones, and I think more peo­ple all the time are falling into this odd and unsought state of “mas­tery”. They are in other words un-​​joining your club, and join­ing ours. I doubt we’ll ever be a major­ity, but demo­graph­ics being what they are, you’re all in for a sur­prise over the next cou­ple of decades—whether you’re one of us, or one of those left behind….

If you’re among the dying, I’m sorry to inform you that there will be no sur­prises. Try again next time.

More peo­ple are in this sit­u­a­tion because par­ents are hav­ing their kids later.

There’s the thing the new hip lit­er­ate late-​​career fertility-​​treated pro­fes­sional Mom­mies and Dad­dies don’t seem to have worked out: When your kids age up to around 40 years old, it just works out bio­log­i­cally that at that very same moment you will already be tread­ing down the Road to Being Elderly.

Just because you were old when your kid was young.

In Olden Times, like the first half of the 20^th Cen­tury and every cen­tury before that, Mom and Dad would typ­i­cally be barely teenagers, and grandma might be as old as you are com­pared with your career-​​delayed kid. Hell, there could be four or five gen­er­a­tions over­lap­ping in a sin­gle lifetime.

But for careerist pro­fes­sional smar­ty­pants who wait until a few gray hairs have been accepted upon their brows before the kids? Unless the tran­shu­man­ist crowd gets crackin’ pretty quick and we all upload our con­scious­nesses to com­put­ers on Sat­urn like, this week, guess what? You will start your morbidity-​​and-​​mortality extrav­a­ganza right smack in the mid­dle of your kids’ nascent “careers”.

Like I said, my Dark Witch rant is not on the theme of woooo—you’re going to die!! Get some­body else to point a bony fin­ger at that grave­stone for you.

No, it’s far more inter­est­ing to me to point out that as your chil­dren come of age, your career cul­ture is going to die. And you will have killed it, by wait­ing to have your kids until your own (final) careers were done.

I like when cul­tures die. It’s inter­est­ing, it’s fun, it suf­fuses me with glee. It means we get new cul­tures, and I am the xenophilic kind of guy.

I have evi­dence. My wife and I both popped into the world at the head­wa­ters of Gen­er­a­tion X, specif­i­cally in the first year of that nom­i­nal cohort (or the last year of the damned Boomers, but I dis­avow those who claim it). Who­ever named “our” gen­er­a­tion did so ex post facto; I think it was prob­a­bly a colum­nist who had maybe heard of Dou­glas Cou­p­land but never read his actual book. But it’s a catchy moniker with which to paint the req­ui­site broad strokes: we’re TV-​​watching, computers-​​but-​​not-​​Internet, Walkman-​​toting, ironic, ennuitic, self­ish, undirected—all that stuff.

Oh, and flag “undi­rected” for later, for me, OK? Make a lit­tle note.

The Web of His­tory is plaited together like bad macramé from scratchy arti­sanal strands of Named Gen­er­a­tions some ass­hole his­to­rian has dyed in bland 70s col­ors in an old alu­minum saucepan. It’s not writ­ten by “the win­ners”, it’s cut and pasted from ran­dom Wikipedia arti­cles by their interns, and never copy-​​edited. In other words, I’m here (again) to say (again): No. Not so fast, Bucko. It’s more com­pli­cated than it sounds, and more interesting.

I slice the sit­u­a­tion differently.

Despite being born at the advent of Gen­er­a­tion X, I’m a crap rep­re­sen­ta­tive. I’m here to say we—and the point is we’re def­i­nitely a “we” now, and not just my wife and me—are some­thing very dif­fer­ent from a “gen­er­a­tion”. More of a grow­ing sub­set that’s an echo and a con­se­quence of a quite dif­fer­ent externality.

See, unlike most of “Gen­er­a­tion X”, my wife and I were born to old par­ents. For exam­ple, my Dad was born in 1908 in a town now sub­merged beneath the Colum­bia River; my Mom was born in 1923 and grew up dur­ing the Depres­sion. And yet I was born in 1964.

In our day it took a divorce-​​and-​​remarriage play to get the num­bers to work out this way, and a lot of crossed fin­gers regard­ing Down syn­drome and the like. But the inevitable actu­ar­ial con­se­quence is that our par­ents started dying when we were in grad school and get­ting good and set­tled in our pension-​​earning “career” tracks.

All the kids of old par­ents will have that. Doesn’t mat­ter whether they arise from old-​​fashioned remar­riage, or careerist delay, or the mir­a­cle of in vitro spooge-​​mixing. Old peo­ple with new kids just plain tend to die when their kids are younger.

I imag­ine social sci­en­tists and psy­chol­o­gists and crap have said we “suf­fer” more because of this. They’ve prob­a­bly got a new DSM V cat­e­gory for “Sad sur­viv­ing chil­dren of elderly par­ents” all lined up. But they also have a cat­e­gory for “argues with physi­cian over diag­no­sis” and “sasses teach­ers too much”, so fuck ‘em.

Life is suf­fer­ing. Dude who sat under a tree said that a long time back. Learn from it.

What hap­pens is that you stop being part of your Gen­er­a­tion. My wife and I are not really part of any Gen­er­a­tion, X or otherwise—we’re a demo­graphic subspecies.

If you needed to name us, it would be OK to call us the Hob­by­ists.

Those of you who are not us should fear us. I meet more of us all the time; I like us, because we’re inter­est­ing and talk­ing with the oth­ers among us suf­fuses me with glee. I over­flow with glee, in fact, until I end up stand­ing in the pud­dle. Do you have any idea how hard glee is to get out of the rug, by the way? Just remem­ber: club soda.

“Hob­by­ists”. I won­der if you think that’s a pejo­ra­tive term, a word you say “mere” in front of, like “mere ama­teur”. You go right ahead think­ing that, Pink Boy.

We chose to stop our lives.

We got off the merry-​​go-​​round career cycle.

There is no lad­der to climb. We have no pen­sions, no tenure, no tick-​​mark job descrip­tion for the forms you fill out when you join pro­fes­sional soci­eties. I am trained as a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist and oper­a­tions researcher, but I scan books, hus­band com­mu­ni­ties, do AI research in my spare time, sell antiques on eBay, trade stocks, edit and pub­lish­ing print mag­a­zines. My wife trained as a mechan­i­cal engi­neer and has an MBA from a top-​​ranked school, but is a film-​​maker and pho­tog­ra­pher, and so on.

And we are not old.

What hap­pens when your par­ents die and you pause to care for them while it’s hap­pen­ing, it isn’t some kind of sym­bolic rebirth or spir­i­tual vision quest or any of that crap. It’s an inter­rup­tion. You spend your days wait­ing. Days, weeks, months on end. Wait­ing for some par­tic­u­lar prob­lem to improve or get worse, wait­ing to hear results from doc­tors, wait­ing to change the sheets again or to serve another pud­ding cup at 3am.

And while you wait, you play video games for a while, or you do cross­words, or sort socks a few times. You buy a bunch of extra tow­els and then you get damned good at fold­ing them all.

And then after that’s used up, when you’ve got all the badges in your iPhone puz­zle game of choice, you step back into your hob­bies. The things that were never allowed in your “career”, the ones you put off back in your (recent) youth so you could focus on the stuff your supe­ri­ors demanded of you.

You learn again to write, pho­to­graph, pro­gram, dig­i­tize, archive, read widely, weave, sculpt, paint, engage, play, cook. You Make. Mind­fully, over and over again, you Make. “On the side”, to while away the time, it may seem. You can­not work in the tra­di­tional way; you may as well be retired or in the hos­pi­tal yourself.

Your career will wait, you say.

But then here’s the other demo­graphic facet that the hon­ored vet­er­ans of our Many Recent Wars will already tell you: The wounded and the sick no longer die. The old no longer die.

And so you will keep Mak­ing. Your career will wait.

It’s Gladwell-​​glib, but even a stopped clock is right three times a day: Odds are good that you will spend at least 10000 hours at your “hobby”. You will become a Mas­ter of it.

And even­tu­ally you real­ize your career can still wait, and will keep on wait­ing, and then you’re free.

I hear some think­ing out there: Awe­some! You’ve dis­cov­ered a sec­ond career!

These are the peo­ple who should be embar­rassed to hear them­selves say that, but who never seem to real­ize it. Maybe they’re dizzy from the merry-​​go-​​round of their own life his­to­ries, their careers and the unques­tioned sense they’re get­ting some­where.

They don’t see the glint in my eye, which you know of course the sign of ris­ing glee. So I ask them, “Why?”

They never have an answer. Often they’ll trot out the old “Some­body has to pay the bills!” canard.

“Why?”

It dawned on us slowly, but I don’t think it will be that way for all those who fol­low: my wife and I can do what we want. That is not a “career”. There is no “career”, and there never was.

What we’ve mas­tered is not a hobby, though I think you ought to call us Hob­by­ists. What we’ve mas­tered is doing what’s needed.

I don’t think this has a commonly-​​accepted name any more. “Slack­ing” is Barbara’s word, and I approve. Or you could call us “retired” and be close. But is it really “slack­ing” when we work 12 hour days, every day, in our enthu­si­asm? When we have launched a dozen busi­nesses in as many years, when we talk daily with cor­re­spon­dents around the world, with peo­ple who actu­ally see this mas­tery and rec­og­nize it and with whom we are happy to share it for free?

What have we become? I don’t know. When­ever we’re in a “go around the table and intro­duce your­selves” moment, the folks who know me all grin when it gets to be my turn. I never know what will come out, whether it’s one of the projects or a deep philo­soph­i­cal thread that links sev­eral. In all cases it’s con­tin­gent and mean­ing­less, except that it helps calm down the few who are savvy enough to be concerned.

I try to do what’s needed. Because when you’re car­ing for the dying, you learn to do what’s needed, and what’s right.

On the Shuhari scale, we’re unques­tion­ably Ha-​​level whatever-​​the-​​fuck-​​this-​​is. Prob­a­bly not Ri, but who knows? I’m loathe to call it “wis­dom”, but some­body recently accused me of that. I did my best to prove him wrong, and he got over it even­tu­ally. But it might be “expertise”.

We ate our careers. Burned them up. Remod­eled and recy­cled them and gave away the pieces. A “sec­ond” career would be like hav­ing a sec­ond brain­wash­ing, a sec­ond kind of cancer.

We sat for a hand­ful of months in a cool, quiet, dark room. Car­ing, wait­ing, think­ing, lov­ing, despair­ing. All the things you do. And also along the way mas­ter­ing a hobby, because there is no work but The Work when you’re car­ing for a dying parent.

Then a few years later, we did it again. And that time we both mas­tered some dif­fer­ent hobby. I don’t even remem­ber which, now.

And then a year or so ago we did it a third time… and we started to learn what mas­tery itself is.

We don’t get a pretty rib­bon for sur­viv­ing a commonly-​​accepted nar­ra­tive arc. We get no pen­sion, and we have no health insur­ance or “employer” or retire­ment funds to speak of. Politi­cians and pub­lic pol­icy folks have no idea that we exist.

A year ago I would wake up in the mid­dle of the night like when I was a startup founder, pan­icked about how ridicu­lous this all sounds within the old cul­tural frame­work. What will we do? Some­body has to pay the bills.

But you learn to do what’s right. And you learn how to learn what’s right. And that’s OK. We make a liv­ing; we have no careers.

Peo­ple ask me for help all the time, and I am happy to give it. Tech­ni­cal help, advice, just con­ver­sa­tion. My wife Bar­bara and I are sur­pris­ingly able to help peo­ple with their busi­nesses, with their tran­si­tions from employed to free­lance, with their social entre­pre­neur­ship, with their busi­ness plans, with their soft­ware archi­tec­ture and online com­mu­nity man­age­ment. When they lis­ten, they seem to appre­ci­ate it.

But in the end, we are undi­rected. Just like our Gen­er­a­tion X was sup­posed by its pre­de­ces­sors to be. We sound like “slack­ers” or “retirees” to folks still on the merry-​​go-​​round.

But unlike youths we are also mas­ters, and unlike retirees we are not our­selves old. And I think, look­ing at the demo­graphic curve, that we’re bellwethers.

What else is there for some­body like us to do, but to tear apart the merry-​​go-​​round and see what makes it tick? There’s prob­a­bly some use­ful stuff in there that can be salvaged.

Maybe we can try to fix it. Maybe we’ll just break it to see what hap­pens. We could do that.

Or maybe we’ll help your chil­dren, the ones who will be sit­ting in the cool dark rooms in a while watch­ing, lov­ing, car­ing for you, and learn­ing hob­bies. If we wait, then they will do it surely.

And yes, maybe there are other ways to reach this state of career-​​less mas­tery, to jump or be pushed from the merry-​​go-​​round. I wouldn’t be sur­prised. This makes you feel bet­ter how, exactly?

In any case, be sure we’ll do what’s right. You’re all look­ing dizzier all the time.

Update: Bar­bara is sit­ting in her evening chair and reads me “How Older Par­ent­hood Will Upend Amer­i­can Soci­ety”, appar­ently from the New Repub­lic. Small world. There you go; another face of the same stuff, from the stand­point of an older mother.