Ephemera

My favorite thing! Yesterday I sorted the box of paper odds-and-ends that I'd set aside before I left the thrift store 4+ months ago.

 

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Sorting ephemera is one of many things Book's Girl (BG) hasn't gotten around to doing . . . and maybe never will.
She is a lovely person and I like her very much. Her pleasant demeanor is good for the store. But she's not a great worker in the category of Getting Things Done. (Which, technically, is 90 percent of thrift work.)
She sort of floats around.

I've noticed this floatiness in other young people too. (BG is nineteen.)
Marz says some of her young coworkers act as if they expect a GPS to tell them where to go, what to do. They're smart, they're nice--they just can't read the map and follow it on their own.

Is floatiness a hallmark of this generation (or a segment of it)?
An effect of the Internet?
"This machine will tell me exactly what."
Or that they were teenagers when Covid shut their lives down four-and-a-half years ago?
"No point trying because there's nothing."
Or, I don't know... Maybe it's an accident of the people I happen to meet.

But generations do have personalities, don't they?
Personalities follow the fashions and force-fields of the times-- maybe coping mechanisms, maybe flowering patterns.
"Oh, the sunlight shines over there, I'm going to grow all leggy and get in that."

Like the similarities --survival tactics?-- I saw in the three people all born within a year of one another (1925), even though born into very different social strata:
my Auntie Vi, President Jimmy Carter, and Queen Elizabeth II:
a "mustn't grumble" attitude, and a high value placed on self-starting hard work....
"Nobody built a bridge over that creek so I'll drag over a log to place across it so I can walk 5 miles to school and avoid getting beat at home (no point telling anyone that)."

I'm not applauding this over that. My auntie's generation's strengths were strengths, but they could be rigid in harmful ways too.
"Don't talk about your war nightmares."
But some of those strengths are excellent for AGING.

How is my generation aging? Those of us now around retirement age... (The tail end of the Baby Boomers.)

That's harder for me to see.
Hmmmmm.... Let's see. Here're a couple I'm a little bit of myself:

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow! There's an Age-Is-Just-a-Number attitude I see in my class.
This is a lie in the face of reality and can be obnoxious--"Let's go bungee jumping in New Zealand"-- but also encouraging in its own zippidyDooda way.

Where have all the flowers gone, and where are our-flying-cars? We're in a state of shock at the state of the Future. We have the Internet in our back pockets, but we still drive on the ground. Also, we shouldn't drive, because carbon.
"This is not the future we were promised."
Well, but it's one of the futures... "Jimmy Carter was right."

There are more! Ideas?
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Etymology of ephemera; late 16th century: plural of ephemeron, from Greek, ‘lasting only a day’.