Well that’s Quantum Mechanics right there ;-D

A personal anecdote: we’re at home watching a DVD of an 80′s TV series which I liked at the time, and which has worn quite well. My spouse points at the screen and says, ‘That’s you!’. And suddenly I realise it is.

> if it changed that much since the 80’s

It certainly feels real to me, though I can find people who disagree.

> We need to start finding new things that deserve to be cared about, I think.

Yes!… Or to rediscover the hidden things.

I agree that people as a whole don’t seem to care very much about anything at the moment, but hey, if it changed that much since the 80′s, there’s a good chance it’ll change that much or more just as quickly. We need to start finding new things that deserve to be cared about, I think.

As for ‘because it paid well’, I’ve had the same thing. I recently took up Zen Buddhist meditation, and my friends have been asking me why. I (only half-jokingly, I suppose) tell them that I want to become enlightened. They just look at me funny, or say ‘I’d rather be rich than enlightened.’ I have a lot of GREAT people as friends (in my humble opinion), but that response does make me a little sad. But hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, yeah? That’s what makes our subjectivity so damn great.

Cool. In that sense, I guess being unconscious of our heroes until later on is a good thing.

As for school – well, I guess I led a fairly sheltered existence in a highly regarded school in something of a rural backwater, but yes, I had a kind of culture shock when I entered the cosmopolitan world of University and found heaps of talented people who began to say they wanted to be accountants ‘because it paid well’. Personally I put the tipping point around 1990 but I’m sure that’s a view partially clouded by teenage angst/notalgia. [I talk to older people and they insist everything's been downhill since the early seventies...] There are significant forces here to do with recession and the growth of new technologies. But I go on friendsreunited and yes, the girls in our year who wanted to be singers are, it seems, singers now for a living. Which is cool.

I have a saying about the 80′s: everything /may/ have been crap, but people really /cared/ about the crap, and I miss that a lot.

I think our heroes can be seen as embodiments of the stories we tell ourselves (be they literary or real-life), and that we can learn a lot about ourselves by examining who we idealize. And at the same time, there’s the whole “if you meet the buddha on the road, kill the buddha”, in that if we hold up someone as having achieving our ideals, we also sort of stop going further with them ourselves.

As for education, I know my own college experience (1999-2003) felt a lot emptier than what you’re describing, and I’m surprised to hear it was so recently different. Myself, and, I think, most of my friends at the time, had a much more depressed feeling, in that we (or at least I) felt that doing what we were good at wasn’t going to really get us anywhere.

Of course, I was a creative writing major at an art school, so perhaps the difference lies more in the context. But I see a lot of people my age who feel completely lost as to what to do with themselves after college. We’ve called it the quarter life crisis. And the people who I’ve seen excel the most are those who dropped what they went to school for and came up with a new dream, one born from their real world experience. College seems to have become another hoop to jump through, another part of the system to be shaken free of to find what’s important.

1. Heroes. Only with hidsight have I ever been aware of the role models I’ve had through the years. The unlikely underdog who’s been rewarded for doing the right thing. [If you can keep your head while all around you...] The beautiful freak. We’re not always aware of them, but they do their work.

2. Before FROH was taken down I commented there about how the role of education has changed over the years from my perspective. There was a simple elegance at school: everyone was good at something, and if everyone did what they were good at, everyone’d be happy. Money never came into the equation. The purpose of school was simply to find out what everyone was good at. (Not saying it worked, but it remains a noble aim). The more I think about this the more I like it. It all kind of dissolved at university in the early 90′s.