Category Archives: Sailing Through Life

About the Gen Zs

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The Gen Z generation is comprised of children born between 1997 and 2012 or today aged 13 to 28. A number of polls and an associated study have been performed by Walton Family Foundation focused primarily on expectations for the future and the degree for discerning possible career routes. Some general observations:

⊗ High school students primarily trust their parents for guidance about their futures after graduation but also rely heavily on teachers and other school resources.

⊗ Parents are having limited postsecondary conversations, particularly about alternatives to college or a paid job.

⊗ Gen Zs and their parents know relatively little about most postsecondary options.

⊗ Schools are an important resource for postsecondary guidance, but they are not adequately informing or preparing many students.

⊗ Despite limited knowledge and conversations, many Gen Z students are at least somewhat interested in non-college alternatives.

⊗ Most high school students, including seniors, do not feel prepared to pursue their preferred pathway.

Some statistics:

⊗ One in four high school students feel very prepared to succeed in college or
apply for a job, and those who don’t plan to pursue higher education are notably less
optimistic and prepared than their peers.

⊗ 47% of parents — including about one-third of parents of high school seniors — say they are not frequently discussing post graduation plans with their child.

⊗ Only 15% to 25% of parents know a great deal about any other postsecondary option besides college and paid salary positions.

  The plight of Gen Z is like a fish knowing where to go in muddy water. Their useless government is bouncing into a dictatorship; education has been underfunded for decades and does little to prepare a student for the real world; career jobs are not only scarce, whole industries are disappearing in the arts, white color desk jobs, and iterative labor industries like factory work and truck driving; the economy is definitely in trickle down mode. Property in Hawaii is being bought up by billionaires – local citizens are being forced to migrate; job tenure is no guarantee for fringe benefits.

In 1938 the minimum wage was begun at $1.00/hour. Had the minimum wage kept up with inflation, the minimum wage would be $22.35. Today it is $7.25. If the U.S. doesn’t end up as a dictatorship, it definitely will be an oligarchy – with the help of computers.

A Gen Z stands looking across the horizon of this battered society and has to wonder, “What is my role?” . . . “What is there to believe in for a lifetime?” . . . “How will I survive?”

Smoking among Gen Z has been dropping for the last several years; Gen Z are beginning to trade in smartphones for flip phones; marriage and children are being delayed. The future is hitting them in the face.

The ‘ocean of life’ looks pretty stormy right now.

Ancient Mariner

 

Oh, to be a gardener

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Mariner hasn’t been a “dig your fingers in the dirt” gardener for two years. He has been too busy. Nor has he planted vegetables or engaged in the sport of keeping ahead of weeds – and rabbits for that matter. He has been busy with what Monty Don (popular gardener on YouTube) calls ‘hardscape’. Hardscape has to do with garden design and  making that design actually exist. It has nothing do do with actually handling plants.

Hardscaping involves identifying where garden beds and other activities will be laid, It involves preparing those beds by amending soil, perhaps laying borders and walkways, maybe even putting up barriers to ward off deer and rabbits. It involves building fences and storage sheds. The design may even call for arbors, gates and laying water systems. It may require moving massive amounts of dirt to establish tiered gardens.

This hardscaping has dragged on because mariner can no longer lift a 2x12x8 piece of lumber; he used to pick up two cinder blocks and chuck them in the truck, now he needs a hand truck just to move one cinder block along the ground. He has a trope he tells everyone: “Mariner belongs to a union that requires him to work eight hours a day but he has 2½ days to do it.”

For all that introduction about hardscape, this post is about paying homage and respect to those plants that already exist in his gardens. Some plants like lilies, iris, spirea, rhododendron, peonies, cone flowers and evergreens have carried on since he moved to the property a over a decade ago.. They bloom and grow in their seasons despite rambunctious weeds, punishing rabbits and disturbed soil. Spiderwort, found in a nearby park, is a slender plant with a small, lovely blue flower. It has expanded in its place despite overcrowding by other spreading plants that should have been pruned.

Cone flowers carry the untended beds through the summer as if they were part of a first-class public garden. Even Joe Pie Weed (a misnomer) grows to a splendid six feet and blooms into the fall.

Every tree has cared for itself despite lack of pruning. There are apple, pear and cherry trees; there are dozens of shrubs holding forth without TLC. Despite the grotesque abuse by humans over the centuries, plants demonstrate why they’ve been around a lot longer than animals!

Ancient Mariner

Old folks are like annuals.

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The advantage of living in Nosey Mole’s tunnels is that it is quiet. The environment is stable and unchanging. Just as once in a while Nosey pokes his head above ground to check on things, so to has mariner. But they are brief moments to check that normalcy prevails around the tunnels.

What mariner sees is his small town. True, normalcy seems to prevail; citizens are living lives within the scope of normalcy, all the houses are still there and the pleasures of electricity, water and labor-saving inventions prevail. But what mariner perceives as normalcy across his lifetime no longer exists.

For folks born in the 1930s and 1940’s, the world of the 21st century is not ‘normal’. The big war ended while these folks were still young. What emerged was an era of bright sunshine, happiness and stable family life. Things like amusement parks, movie theaters and shopping districts were every day outings. Pleasantness often pushed the realities of existence aside. True, the realities of haves and have-nots existed but what was different was the sunshine. It seemed brighter. When the Sun rose in the morning, it was a new day to be experienced.

The first disruption to the sunshine was the Viet Nam war which, in hindsight, was the first sign of imbalance in the world’s political/economic situation. Now there are clouds in the sky – clouds that are omens of change and disruption. In mariner’s town, the sixties were the last years of a town-centric economy, a bustling social environment and a self-contained feeling of living in the sunshine.

Clouds gathered over the next twenty years then Reagan introduced cold weather. Those war-years folks weren’t at the center of society anymore. Unions were forced out of existence, corporations became gigantic but were no longer required to provide full retirement to their employees, democrats became white collar and forgot their roots. Farms became too large to be based on a single family economy. Computers began their march against social dependency.

The first hard frost was the disruption by the virus followed by a withering Congress, then came the age of Trump – the beginning of winter.

The sunshine is gone today. There is no warm, invigorating sunrise. Children of the war years are not indigenous. Culturally, they are withering – even as they continue to live their own reality.

Children of the big war are like annual plants – a life experience that does not extend into the present winter.

Ancient Mariner

Take a vacation

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Mariner and his wife have just returned from a ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan. We don’t recommend it. The pleasures of visiting with family and friends is diminished while packing, unpacking, repacking and driving become the dominant experience.

We did indeed enjoy our time with friends and family (and the Maryland crab cakes, gardens and an excellent restaurant overlooking a classic inlet full of sailboats). It is a bit of tradition for mariner and his wife to stop at a Cracker Barrel when we travel. His order of fried shrimp was so large it served as lunch and dinner the next day! As to gardens, every visit had a garden! He confiscated some Sweet Woodruff plants when visiting one of his friends.

It is too bad that driving dominated our vacation experience  It is mariner’s opinion that driving, with all its consternation, still is better than airplanes or trains – haven’t tried rockets yet because they are too expensive. We have sailed on cruise ships but that is subject to “been there, done that”. Instead, charter a 40-foot sloop and sail to your destination.

Back to driving, it is so intense on the interstates one dare not reach for a drink or snack on the console. There are trucks that gather in groups to dance a strange square dance; there are left-lane abusers staying in the fast lane while driving five miles under the speed limit; there are drivers darting in and out of lanes at very high speed and within inches of other vehicles; change lanes at your own risk; on some interstate routes traffic has reached the saturation point. If one likes high speed, drive in Kentucky – the slow lane crawled along at eighty miles an hour!

But the real distraction is road construction. It was so bad along route 70 across every state between Iowa and Maryland that he and his wife chose to return home through West Virginia and Kentucky, crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis. It was even worse – between Lexington and St. Louis, one side of the highway was being rebuilt from scratch; backups were close to a dead stop for twenty miles!

Unlike other future prospects which mariner sees as uncertain, he relishes the day when all cars are driverless and must obey the instructions of the interstate computer. Will the speedsters even want to drive when forced to a predetermined speed limit?

All this considered, the time with friends and family was worth it. However, we won’t try another ‘dash in, visit, dash out’ vacation plan.

Ancient Mariner

Medical treatment

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Mariner is a decrepit old man. It seems the medical industry does not understand that a different set of ailments and treatments exist for the ancient class. He admits he has some ire about the situation so he let Amos write this post. Mariner has edited out foul language and libelous accusations:

֎ The suspicions began in 2006. Mariner’s brother went into the hospital to receive a pacemaker. While he was hospitalized, he contracted Clostridioides difficile or shortened, C-Diff. It is a bacterial infestation that attacks the large intestine, causing 10-15 bowel movements per day and loss of body water. For the worst cases, death is the only outcome. His brother went to a hospice for a few months then passed away. On his death certificate, it said cause of death was “kidney failure”. No, it wasn’t kidney failure, it was C-Diff!

Mariner suspects the medical industry uses this misstatement policy to avoid lawsuits. After all, it is general knowledge that C-Diff most often is contracted in hospitals.

֎ The job of primary care physicians (PCP) is to sell prescriptions and placate the patient’s anxiety. PCPs never fix anything. ‘Fix’ means heal it, symptoms gone, life returns to normal. Prescriptions often may influence physical disability but never fix it.

֎ Chiropractors are a lot like PCPs. They focus on joints and do a great job of making the patient feel better for awhile. But the patient will be back with the same ailment. It wasn’t fixed. In ancient patients, sometimes chiropractors branch out into special treatments almost like astrology. Still, nothing is fixed.

֎ PCPs often will send the patient to a ‘specialist’. Common examples are pulmonologist, cardiologist, ear-nose-and-throat, allergist, urologist . . . The specialist has a better set of prescriptions because they are limited to the special treatments the specialist will provide. Specialists may even offer minor surgery. Still, there may be a small improvement but it isn’t fixed. The patient is stuck with a lifelong dependency on the specialist – because the disability will never be fixed.

֎ Physical therapists are another specialty where being fixed is not an option. Mariner offers a personal experience: Told to visit a physical therapist by his PCP, he went to a hospital with all the equipment and routines necessary. First, he was guided to a swimming pool where he was to walk back and forth in waist-deep water. “Wouldn’t it be more effective if I swam?” he asked. “No, we don’t want you to hurt yourself.” was the response.

Then mariner was led to a gym with all the typical equipment. He was asked to step sideways along a bar and ‘to hold on’. After that, he was taken to a wall contraption with blue stretch straps he was to pull toward his chest. Finally, he asked when the therapy would begin, you know, sit-ups, weight lifts, deep squats. “Oh”, she said, You must be one of those ‘all in or go home’ types.” So he went home.

֎ Surgeons. Like just about every old folk, mariner has back problems. There are many ways to improve things with different types of surgery. Mariner did not hold back and went to an internationally known clinic. After dozens of tests and interviews, the final analysis was that four surgeons sat with him, each offering one of four options. One was needles, one was braces, one was intervertebral repair (disc), and one was welding vertebra together. Every one of the surgeons cited high risk of failure and restrained physical ability afterward. None would say it would be fixed. So he went home.

Being fixed by medical treatment is not an option.

Ancient Mariner

 

It’s not just albums

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Mariner’s family and friends have experienced some shuffling in the last few years. A close family member passed away as did a few friends. Other friends have moved. The children and grandchildren live in far away places, leaving a lot of possessions in the wrong house. Family deaths have required a search through ancient mementos and meaningful collections.

But finding family photo albums isn’t enough. Today, recent photographs, correspondence and historical documentation are found on primitive computers, cassettes, CD Discs, old camera filmstrips, extracted memory cards, and old memory towers. Plus, thousands of important documents and family information still on our own computers have been lost for years. After his grandmother died, he remembers finding a small box that had dozens of handwritten correspondence between his grandmother and a broad range of family members.

Mariner’s wife recently super-cleaned the attic and found about a half dozen cassettes. We had no choice but to purchase a cassette reader and discovered a golden collection of family events recorded for posterity. This motivated mariner to go through his dusty-in-a-box CD collection. There were hundreds of forgotten jewels of family history, trips and meaningful moments. He had to buy a CD player in the process.

So his advice to readers is don’t be satisfied because you have a shelf full of photograph albums. Unlike old collections which may be lost in the attic, photographs taken by a smartphone are as safe as the smartphone is dependable. Today, smartphones capture 92.5% of all pictures; the typical smartphone user stores 2,795 photos in their camera. Further, few paper copies of important documents exist – they may be on our computers somewhere – maybe.

In today’s electronic world, written historical accounts are extremely rare – though mariner must acknowledge that his wife hand writes an account every year in a special binder. If any of us are famous, someone may write an account of our lives. Otherwise, don’t stop with albums; you may find a treasure in an old Crown Royal sack.

Ancient Mariner

The other side

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Mariner has had 38 distinct jobs in his life. Everything from delivering newspapers to a contract in Taiwan building a computer system for the nation’s first fighter aircraft. He can avow that jobs shape one’s ethic and one’s place in the culture. He has had luxury dinners with CEOs and generals; he has seen a dead dog in the basement of a row house with an unused kitchen and a destitute family. He could go on about a 90-year-old woman offering sex for 75⊄, confrontations with guard dogs, a bull and an armed woman – to say nothing about belligerent executives.

But this post isn’t about bar stool stories. Of the 38 distinct jobs in his life, four have had a profound impact on his ethic, philosophy of life and his role in society. In chronological sequence they are gas & electric meter reader, Methodist preacher, parole officer and coding supervisor for an insurance company.

During 4½ years as a meter reader, he visited the homes of the very, very poor, the laborer, the white collar worker, the wealthy and many homes that were converted to small businesses and one-nite motels. These visits provided a belief that the separation of economic classes is severe, unfair and ignored by society. Each culture has its own style of community interaction, behavioral mores and even its own dress code.

As a Methodist preacher, he learned that religion is a specialized form of politics. The Christian theology is not a mainstay; the vast majority of church goers accept a parochial set of beliefs born out of tradition rather than faith. The socializing effect of belonging to a community is a positive trait but the church building is more important. Few attendees abide by the Second Great Commandment.

Mariner was a parole officer for three years. The job exposed him to the more complex side of human experience. Life is made up of many stresses that present emotional injury, loneliness, passive/aggressive behavior, debt, health and stressed relationships due to mental disorder and abuse. He learned that the personal side of life has its own mores, taboos and rituals. As with economic classes, home life is given little importance by community or by society in general.

This last job is cited because of its similarity to today’s Trumpian world of work. Mariner worked as a supervisor in the data processing department of a large insurance company. Like every other business of its time, the computer language was COBOL. Suddenly, thanks to IBM and Microsoft and Apple, COBOL was dropped in favor of new technologies and coding methods. In the blink of an eye, mariner was laid off. All the other large companies had simultaneous layoffs for the same reason. Locally, he was left without a career. It took a long time to rebuild a career in another field. His learned ethic is that corporations are politically independent and feel no need to incorporate themselves into the worlds of workers. Just profit, profit, profit.

Humans are intelligent and very much a caring species. It seems to mariner that humans, like 3-year-olds, have no sense of decorum and make life difficult just because they can. Given overpopulation, environmental abuse and provoking Mother Nature, perhaps humans should clean out the pantry and start over again.

Ancient Mariner

 

Mariner warned about this

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The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago  during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient.

In other words, Colossal has decided to fire the planet’s ecosystem and take charge of the planet’s evolution process. Ain’t the mouse cute? Just think, your great grand children will be able to go to Walmart to pick from a menu what their children will look like – sort of like buying a puppy.

Well, mariner could use some hair . . .

Ancient Mariner

More about happy

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Recent posts were about finding a happy place to live. There is no question that the US is, generally, an unhappy place to live. The economic pressures putt on the citizenry are unheard of and the President already is making financial stability a disappearing phenomenon for everyone. Still, Donald doesn’t (yet) own small happy places or one’s personal memories.

Seriously, everyone must survive each day with at least a little satisfaction that life is worth living. Often, we must force ourselves to insert satisfaction into our daily life. His daughter has a supper routine where everyone around the table must identify a rose, then identify a thorn. A rose expresses the high point of the day, a fun moment, an accomplishment, or an interpersonal action. The thorn represents the opposite: a low point in the day, a frustration or failure. Even their 4-year-old must participate. Besides the benefit of sharing with one another, the exercise makes one focus on what good events feel like as well as preventing bad memories from being the only memories.

It is possible to deliberately set up a discharge of bad feelings by performing a deliberate action for that purpose. For example, play with children – the more active, the better; get outside with them and romp meaninglessly while the good vibes rise to the surface. The same can be applied with loved pets; take a walk, go to the ice cream parlor for a shared treat or toss a stuffed toy or ball. Cats like to cuddle and play hunting games with a toy or treat. Or use Zen practices designed for the same purpose – go deep and let go. Go somewhere where you have good vibes.

The challenge is to get outside the negativity that has been forced on you. The old saw about two sides make up one coin is true. If negative feelings are dominating, turn the coin over – there’s a whole new fun world there. The ability to turn the coin over at will is made difficult today by industrial distractions. One will not achieve happiness scrolling a smart phone or a television set. If one is truthful, these devices are a sedative – a lot like oxycodone and not a cure.

Discovering positivity requires physical action, change of routine and a focus free of typical responsibilities. A smart phone is not the same as walking in the woods – well maybe it can be pretended as such but that’s the difficulty in taking happiness advice from a circuit board. Go personal! Use that body of yours for fun!

Ancient Mariner

 

Best measure of national content

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Generally speaking, the way a nation measures its economic health is by measuring its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is an economic phrase that means ‘how much profit ls generated’. Since the Second World War, the US economic strategy has been ‘big is better’ leading to large, monopolistic corporations, international trade control and sustaining controlled inflation/deflation. Donald reminds us of how profit is manipulated through tariffs. As things stand today, the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world.

But something doesn’t seem right. Would it then be true that small is worse? Does this delineation lead to hoarding the better and ignoring the worse? Afraid so, that’s how capitalism works. Charity is okay as long as it is voluntary. Mandated charity (Is that like a penalty for being wealthy?) is verboten.

GDP is just one item in a long table of contributing issues as to what makes a nation happy – not just wealthy. In population polls of all the nations, the US is ranked 16th to 23rd in most polls and one source reports the US at 63rd) as a ‘happy’ nation. It is interesting but clearly demonstrative that certain elements of society play a larger role than ‘bigger is better’. Eleven of the top twelve happiest nations are dominated by a similar social structure. They are:   Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand and Costa Rica.

This conclusion is based on Gallup polling data collected over the past three years from 143 countries, with researchers evaluating six critical factors: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption both internally and externally.

֎ GDP per capita. ‘Per capita’ means per person rather than the typical use to measure a nation’s situation. This measurement is the average income of all citizens individually. It includes not only well-to-do citizens but citizens from all income levels – including those with no income.

֎ Social Support. This category includes government programs that support the citizenry, e.g., Medicare, Social Services, child care, social security, food stamps, minimum wage, etc.

֎ Healthy Life Expectancy. This category focuses on price controls for various costs related not only to health and prescriptions but also to assisted living and living conditions generally.

֎ Freedom to make life choices. Distracting issues like racism, class discrimination, sexual constraints like birth control, abortion and homosexuality, education policy, restrictions caused by disruption from zoning, home owner associations, tax and insurance policies, and corporate intrusion all impose on an individual’s desire to make independent decisions about life choices.

֎ Generosity. There are two types: government and citizenry. It is a matter of behavioral attitude for both. Governments can be oppressive and finite about social policy or they can adopt some awareness of social need and exception. A US example is the battle over minimum wage, which is far behind the effects of inflation. Food stamps and rental policies which avoid competitive pricing are other examples.

On the citizenry side, Housing Associations are notorious for constraining individual desires. Another is the atmosphere of unanimity in communities. [In a recent post, mariner alluded to the influence of a common industry and multi-generational families contributing to a unified society.] Large corporations can choose to support employee needs outside the workplace by ‘joining the community’ or simply impose their presence in a way that can, in the extreme, wipe out a whole neighborhood.

֎ Perceptions of corruption both internally and externally. This category is likely to be the real reason the US is ranked as the 23rd happiest nation. Corruption is de rigueur in the US. Since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, unions have been busted, the tax code is dangerously imbalanced, elected officials see their own security and lifestyle as more important, rental prices are not competitive, Corporate America is completely self-managed and owes no support for American society. Lest we go on . . . .

Many times mariner has heard the comment, “If Trump buys Canada, where else can I move?” Try Finland, perpetually the happiest nation in the world.

Ancient Mariner