Given that this weekend looks like it’s going to be pleasurably slow and uncomplicated, I’m going to try to do two things in the next 96 hours:

1) I’ve already planned to eat at home this weekend. My goal is to eat as close to the close-to-Paleo diet I’ve been aiming at following.

2) I want to be sure I get in a single good, solid workout each day. That’s three (or four, depending upon timing) workouts, without making any compromises.

I’m going to update this entry with my progress (or lack) rather than make new ones over the weekend… Wish me luck!

Sunday update: Mixed bag so far…I’m eating much healthier except that I’m meeting friends for dinner each night and that’s throwing things off. Exercise has been good and positive – feeling good from getting active each day for three-in-a-row. I’ve also been getting up early each day so that I’ll be more likely to stay in the groove once work starts again on Tuesday.

Related posts:

1. Weekend Trivia (24-Feb)
2. Weekend Trivia & Trek vs Sex?!?
3. A 50-Hour Day (day 8 & 9)

I need a hobby for fall and winter, something that prevents me from sitting in front of a television or computer screen for six months…something that results in things that persist and are fun to make. Now, I’m not the kind of guy to take up painting and while there are a ton of cool exercise-related toys, I’ve already got all of those that I need and it doesn’t answer the ‘creativity’ issue. I want to do something creative…not something that is only an excuse to buy more crap.

I went looking for hobbies that are easy to do indoors, would give me a creative outlet and that don’t cost thousands of dollars to pursue. I also wanted to find something that wouldn’t require me to take a ton of classes or that involve dangerous machinery. Thus, no chainsaw ice sculpting, no deepwater sub-zero scuba diving, no Public Square base jumping, no Cuyahoga Valley National Park heliskiing, and so on…

I went a’googling and found the Maker Shed, a joint out in California that has all kinds of awesome geek-out project kits, books and components.

I was really tempted by a book called “Make: Eccentric Cubicle” but decided that a cubicle-sized guillotine wasn’t a great professional message to send to my co-workers. Instead, I picked a book, “Make: Electronics” from the list of books they publish. I received it yesterday and I’m very impressed by it. I suspect there will be a few updates this winter that show silly things I make…like a device that flashes an LED on and off. But really, my main goal after reading the book is to have a refreshed understanding of basic electronics, letting met get a more interesting kit to put together this winter.

Both the Maker Shed and SparkFun have some really cool kits or components that would allow for making wearable electronics that use conductive fabric, create devices that are WiFi enabled so that they can update Twitter or Facebook or whatever, or make other in-house devices that can sense a person entering the room (better than the Clapper!) and so on.

I’m not sure what I’m ultimately going to do, but I’m going to find something that is easy, requires a minimum amount of unbroken time to complete and, when done, is somewhat durable (so no spidery tangles of wires and such).

Exciting!

Related posts:

1. The Problem(s) with Paleo
2. Completionist
3. I Told You So

The Good
Since starting my 40-by-40 effort, I’ve been working out more and more regularly and feel some new routines being established. The brain is starting to re-wire itself in good ways. This has been shown by my body composition scale that indicates I’ve gained four to five pounds of muscle since starting. Excellent!

The Bad
For every pound of muscle I’ve gained, I put on an equal amount of fat. This is the exact opposite result that I intended. I would have been happy keeping my muscle mass constant and losing only fat. I’m really concerned about body composition more than I am about bulking up.

The None-of-the-Above
This isn’t as bad as the start of my quest-for-health. I really tanked at first, so it’s possible that I’m really just looking at weight I put on at that time

The upside is that extra muscle mass means it will be easier to lose the fat as my metabolism is some fractional bit higher. If I keep with the workout routine, other good physiological changes will also kick-in making it easier to lose the fat.

I just need to remember that I can’t workout and then eat anything I want because…I’m not 16 any longer. Bummer.

Also: Any experience with these?
I have several friends who are absolutely hooked on one of two workout systems. One group loves the CrossFit stuff. The other group loves the PX90 stuff.

Anybody have hands-on experience with these? What makes you love them?

Related posts:

1. 40 by 40
2. Neither there nor there
3. Zen Body, Zen Mind

The “debate” over building a Muslim community center near where the World Trade Centers stood is tiresome.

Obviously, one reason it is tiresome is because we have this whole “Bill of Rights” that says you can worship in any way you want, as long as you aren’t breaking any other laws.

The whining and crying of television/radio entertainers or of straw-hat shysters gubbing for votes, saying that it’s “insensitive”, need to grow a set and move to the important issues…maybe, for example, to the crashing economy or budget-busting wars or … I know! How about to what they believe and whether it is actually grounded in what they claim is the source of that belief!

Knowing and Believing are Two Different Things
There’s a tradition in the United States of celebrating the “common man”, “common sense” and all things “common”. I honestly believe this is a noble tradition, rooted in the ideal that we are all created equals. Each person, no matter how great or small, is entitled to the same rights and possesses the same responsibilities as every other citizen of this great country.

However, this tradition is regularly twisted into a populist marketing message by people who seek power. From the nativist Know-Nothing Party in the 1800′s to the nativist Tea Party of the 2000′s, the tradition of forming parties against something (rather than for something) in defense of the “common man” is continuous story. Usually, the leaders of these movements trade on the fact that most Americans are willfully ignorant.

From Wikipedia (weakness of this source is noted, but I think this is safe) the Know-Nothing platform was:

The platform of the American Party called for, among other things:

1. Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
2. Restricting political office to native-born Americans of English and/or Scottish lineage and Protestant persuasion.
3. Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
4. Restricting public school teacher positions to Protestants.
5. Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools.
6. Restricting the sale of liquor.
7. Restricting the use of languages other than English.

American Dream, indeed…and quite an overlap between then-and-now.

(Side note: the Know-Nothing party comes from the phrase “I know nothing” that members were encouraged to use as answers when questioned about their party. Today, we have a political candidate who admitted to a reporter that she only wants to answer the questions SHE picks and a cable news entertainer who is “coincidentally” holding a nativist-themed rally on the same day of the year that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech. Know-nothing, indeed…and one heck of an American tradition!)

Thus, it’s not surprising that we’re having a discussion about an “anti-democratic and violent” religion building a community center near where a terrible tragedy occurred. It’s also not surprising that people are writing about how “anti-democratic” movements shouldn’t be allowed in our country.

(Side note: Catholics had been considered “anti-democratic” because, you know, there’s that whole problem of the Pope being the absolute authority, even over secular government institutions…and this anti-Catholic rhetoric continued in the United States through the 1960′s.)

First, don’t bother knowing what you believe…
There are two trends that I have been thinking about, causing people to ignore really thinking about what it is they believe…

The first trend is the all-too-American hostility towards intellectual pursuit. The concept that it’s better to believe what “makes sense” and to assault what you don’t understand has a rich history in our country. The book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life documents the history of Americans to be suspicious of and often hostile towards intellectual pursuit.

Never-you-mind that “American ingenuity” is the often-cited reason for American economic and military success in the 20th century. Ingenuity is apparently not intellectual. I guess we just got lucky engineering and building television sets, automobiles and nuclear bombs.

The second trend is the appropriation of Christian ideals by political parties to advance secular agendas. These groups trade on the fact that in our society, from the 1800′s onward, many-to-most Christians don’t actually know what they believe.

Don’t believe me when I say this? That’s OK. I’m not a pollster. However, George Barna is an evangelical Christian and runs a Christian-focused polling company that specializes in finding “surprising” facts such as: most Christians think the quote “God helps those who help themselves” is from the Bible. (That last link has a TON of interesting survey results about the nature and character of Christianity in America, today.)

Or don’t believe me, but believe the book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t that details how most Americans, Christians included, do not understand their own religion as illustrated by the fact that most Americans cannot name even one of the four Gospels.

Seriously?! How can you be unable to name JUST ONE of the Gospels and still call yourself a Christian?!

Or don’t believe me, but believe the book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free that describes in great detail how current American culture glorifies ignorance and stupidity as a virtue and condemns intellectual pursuit as dangerous and subversive.

(Side note: the author of that book on religious literacy, Stephen Prothero, also addressed the fact that more Americans think Obama is a Muslim now than when he ran for president. Is this proof that most American citizens prefer willful ignorance to informed and literate understanding of the issues? If you can’t get a simple fact like that straight, despite it being amazingly easy to confirm…then what the hell is wrong with you except that you choose to believe something false?!?)

So we have an unbroken thread of willful ignorance in American culture that extends into the sphere of religious belief and that ignorance is exploited by politicians for their own political gain. It’s a well-documented fact in our history and its here again, today.

Shock. Amazement. Surprise. Yawn.

What do I think?
I believe that successful democratic ideals must be based upon the Cosmopolitan philosophy that says that values are not static, but are a conversation. The ideals must recognize that the best way to strengthen your own beliefs is to investigate, discuss and even confront (in a civilized manner) people who have different beliefs. By confronting these beliefs, you have an opportunity to go back and explore your own beliefs, assumptions and values.

The problem is that, as with the debate about the Muslim community center, people attack different beliefs rather than find opportunities to strengthen their own.

To quote myself:

The funny thing is that most cultures share the same values. But conversations are difficult. So people who agree upon a value still wind up in a disagreement because people:

1. Don’t share the same set of values (overlapping sets, but not identical)
2. Use the same value concepts in different ways, causing confusion
3. Give different weights to the importance of shared values

During conversations about value-related topics, people get bogged down in the mechanics of the conversation (hampered by the three items Appiah lists) and bogged down by talk of individual moral opinions, rather than note the differences and constructively move onwards in support of the agreed-upon shared value.

I think that in this event, we have an opportunity to investigate the complicated religion that is Islam. In this event, we have an opportunity to decide what we believe and understand what overlaps and what diverges with that of Islam. We have an opportunity to say “Islam isn’t one single thing any more than Christianity is one single thing” and to recognize, respect and consider how this fact should influence our actions to prevent terrorism by recognizing its complexity and to strengthen America by reinforcing the democratic ideals that we all share and agree are necessary.

We have an opportunity to be Americans, to find the common ground that unites us while we avoid the temptation to fragment ourselves into a million tiny pieces…which, if you ask me, is as un-American as it gets.

Related posts:

1. Values are a Conversation
2. Wisdom is becoming
3. First, Own Your Own Crazy

During my 40-by-40 effort, I’ve been struggling with some behaviors that I would normally call habits and that are the key obstacles to reaching my goal.

One set of these habits are small and subtle things. They are almost reflexive actions that I perform before I realize I’ve done something that deviates from my intentions. A second set of habits are huge sweeping sets of activities. When I decide to pursue the set of actions, it’s a deliberate and knowledgeable departure from the path leading to my goals.

Why do we call both of these things “habits”? If you go look at the legion of websites and self-help books that exist to coach people to “change their habits”, how do any of us expect one answer to such a variety of behavioral issues? Can there be one answer for the tendency to eat too-large a serving at dinner and the same answer can also answer why I don’t jog every day?

Doubtful.

After the last two months, trying to get my behaviors back into line with those that support good health, I have decided that the word “habit” is a crock. It is a bogus idea.

Bogus, dude.

Here’s the key: Habits aren’t external to me. A habit isn’t something I can change as easily as I can change my underwear. We might pretend that changing a habit is as simple as changing a schedule to make time for exercise or to change the kind of food we buy so that we eat healthy stuff instead of junky stuff.

If it was so easy, we wouldn’t lament how difficult it is to change a habit. We wouldn’t need a concept like “habit” that promised, if we just manipulate it like a Rubik’s Cube, we’d be healthy happy sexy rich people. (Breaking news! 20 moves to a new healthier life, solved by Google supercomputer!)

No, habits don’t exist because “habits” are actually a collection of behaviors that are ingrained in our brains. The word doesn’t actually point to anything specific. It’s a sloppy word, that means “we need to change something but we’re just not quite sure what we’re changing….so we’ll call it habit.”

Instead of habit, we need to think about how our brains are wired up.

The subject of “brain plasticity” has been written about in several popular-science books in recent years. I’ve read a few, but my favorite is The Brain That Changes Itself. The book details how our brains create or weaken connections between neurons that correspond to and control our behaviors. These connections are altered through experience, which we often can pick through actions we consciously follow.

In other words, the tendency to sit on my couch watching YouTube videos is strengthened every time I do this. Similarly, every time I go for a run, I strengthen that tendency. In both cases, by repeating the action, I am creating neural connections (or letting other connections weaken or disconnect) that later urge me to some specific behavior.

Thinking about habits as something external needs to be changed. We draw energy and attention away from the real problem – that by acting we change our brains, and these changes make acting easier. Or: The real problem is me, not a habit.

It’s not that I need to change my Pepsi-drinking habit. It’s that I must start drinking water. It’s not that I need to stop eating at restaurants. It’s that I must start buying and cooking healthy food for myself. It’s not that I need to break my habit of couch sitting. It’s that I need to stand up, go outside and run.

I’m not changing a habit. I’m acting.

Most importantly, I realize I need to act differently for each specific thing I want to change. I need to cut down on the total number of habits I am changing…errrrr…rephrased: I need to pick some very specific actions to train and to focus on these before I move onto a new challenging action or set of actions…

(And if you want to think about it in another way I recently discussed, habits are illusionary values while action is a rate.)

Related posts:

1. Neither there nor there
2. Power Mist
3. Advice

Breaking News!!!!
Over the weekend, I looked through twitter’s list of personalized and suggested feeds that I might find interesting. I guess the list is based upon what my friends follow. If true, let me say that some friends are hiding things from me. (I’m talking to you, whomever it is out there following Justin Beiber!)

One suggestion was “CNN Breaking News” and to try it out, I hit “follow”.

A selection of the results I got in the last two days:

• Entertainer #Wyclef Jean not on Haiti’s approved presidential candidates list
• Authorities find stolen Van Gogh painting at Cairo airport, arrest couple
• Blagojevich says he hasn’t ruled out return to politics.
• Four U.S. troops killed in #Afghanistan
• WikiLeaks founder says he’s been targeted by smear campaign
• 33 miners trapped in a Chilean mine are alive inside a shelter, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera says
• Suspect kills 2, wounds 3 in apparent dispute over ‘estate issue’ in central Virginia
• Ex-cop in Philippines who took tourists on bus hostage threatens “drastic measures.”
• Recall of half a billion eggs largest in recent history, FDA chief says. Smaller recalls may be needed
• Nurse charged with murder in deaths of 5 newborns killed in fire in Romanian intensive care unit.
• Company to pay $52.4 million in 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse.

One of these items are news, if “news” is defined as information I can use to make better decisions. But even that one, about how the egg recall may be too large, isn’t on-target. It’s not how to avoid eggs that might be contaminated. It’s about the bureaucracy that recalls eggs and other food products. Thus, all I know now is that the food that is recalled might not actually be dangerous because there is a social good (recalling potentially dangerous food) that is taken to an extreme (recalling 500,000,000 eggs).

I unsubscribed.

What about my local news twitter feed? Maybe that’s closer to news, if we’re still using the definition of it being something more than morbid entertainment about who is killing whom in far-away places or who is getting killed in tragic accidents? Let’s see…from my local news twitter feed we get:

• How United, Continental negotiated a ‘merger of equals’: The long-discussed merger of United and Continental
• Brunswick police release photo of a woman wanted in a bank robbery
• Harvard Refuse executive Stanley Lojek charged with bribery
• Astronauts’ muscle grows weak in orbit; study says they should eat, exercise more
• Ohio State Buckeyes: No sweat for Andrew; Maurice Clarett wants a tryout
• Want free tix to Coheed and Cambria? RT this tweet!
• LeBron James’ hatred doesn’t fit supposed crime
• Palestinians warn they’ll quit peace talks if Israeli settlement-building resumes
• A.M. News Links: Teen busted at a strip club; torso-murders suspect scratched; store clerk stares down robber
• Offering some tips for Tiger Woods: The Book of Norman
• FDA commissioner says agency needs more authority on food safety

Nope. Nothing.

People ask me why I don’t pay attention to the local paper or news channels or CNN. Other than financial market data and weather, what news that these jokers publish actually matters to me? If I want entertainment, I’ll watch something that’s honest at what it does…not something that pretends to be serious but is nothing more than entertainment when you boil it down to it’s actual value and the respect it shows both me and the topics that it reports.

Note that I’m totally serious about this. I’m not asking this rhetorically.

What news that we get from our various papers and channels actually matters? What is there that doesn’t involve food, sex, fear or greed and isn’t couched in the most manipulative forms so that we anxiously pay attention while they sell ads or whatever?

I’m thinking “so little it’s not worth it” but that feels wrong, as if it is some extreme form of misanthropy. Yet, I can’t actually find evidence to refute the position.

A little help? Anybody? Anybody?

(And let me argue this: I have hidden or blocked or unfollowed people on twitter and facebook because they published so much meaningless crap to their feeds/walls that they became untolerably annoying. I don’t see a distinction between a person who floods their feeds with useless text and these “news feeds” that do the same.)

Related posts:

1. Conspicuous Minimalism
2. Que tal?
3. Poop Throwing Monkeys

I’m fascinated by how people have this tendency to speak in generational terms. They speak about how “a generation” was “the greatest” or “the lost” or with other metaphors that suggest that these generations – huge collections of unrelated individuals – somehow are thought to have acted as a whole.

I think that this is silly. Generations are not created because some mystical spirit has taken hold of a few million people and guided their every action. Generations exist because the people born at a certain time and in a certain place share some experiences using the same technologies. Zeitgeist is the environment projected upon humanity.

At the moment, there’s a ton of angst about our economic slump and in such times, simmering generational rhetoric rises to a boil. This rhetoric is almost always aimed at the generation just emerging from college, the age when an individual is expected to make the transition from irresponsible youth to fully-responsible adulthood. The rhetoric cries out that the new generation is ill equipped to handle the problems of the age and that the new generation doesn’t appreciate what has been handed to them.

You can see this in the present, as the NYT publishes an essay called What Is It About 20-Somethings?. You can see it almost twenty years ago when the Atlantic publishes an article called The Lost Generation to compare Generation X to the Lost Gen. The best example, however, is 90 years old and is titled “‘These Wild Young People’, By One Of Them”, written by John F. Carter. I’ve mentioned Carter’s article in the past and it’s one of my all-time favorites because it captures the entire generational falsehood with one of the best paragraphs of all time:

In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, ‘way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. “So simple that a child can run it!” But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages. Now, with loving pride, they turn over their wreck to us; and, since we are not properly overwhelmed with loving gratitude, shake their heads and sigh, “Dear! dear! We were so much better-mannered than these wild young people. But then we had the advantages of a good, strict, old-fashioned bringing-up!” How intensely human these oldsters are, after all, and how fallible! How they always blame us for not following precisely in their eminently correct footsteps!

Now, if you have the stomach for it, you can read an article by Peggy Noonan that laments how this world is crashing to an end and that our youth are all doomed and today’s politicians ignore this at their peril. She’s recently written a few essays that follow this line, lamenting how un-American it is that things might not go well, implying that it’s because people are getting weak or generations are doing this-or-that-fid-diddly-other-thing. To illustrate, here’s a fun quote from her:

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

Actually, I’ve read Booth Tarkington and it’s quaint stuff he wrote. It’s folksy Americana. Interestingly, Tarkington’s from the very generation that John F. Carter criticized in his article……you know, the generation that Carter calls out for handing over a Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up. You might even think, after reading an article by a Boomer journalist about how young’uns are losers while giving young folk a world complicated by the results of twenty years of Boomer leadership resulting in war, economic collapse, endless political hysteria in the media and environmental disasters both natural and human-made…well…there’s that little thought to consider as you digest Noonan’s ideas and ask yourself if this is really something new or unique when compared to the days of Booth Tarkington and John F. Carter.

But really, we all know that this stuff isn’t new and it’s certainly been discussed in great detail in very recent years (at least, recent in generational terms). In fact, it’s so not-new that it supports my argument that this isn’t really about actual generations but the perception of “generations” is just a symptom of shared experience.

In the 1990′s, books like 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? and The Fourth Turning, discussed the fact that history repeats itself (or, at least, rhymes) and that we shouldn’t be shocked if things don’t all go so well. In fact, we should expect it.

After all, on a long enough timeline, everybody’s mortality rate goes to 100% and Great Depressions are inevitable. If you read those books 15 years ago, you got a glimpse of something frighteningly close to what is happening today. You could be humming along with the rhyme that is the present.

In the same vein, I head back to The Atlantic, to The Lost Generation article mentioned a few paragraphs ago, there is a quote that seems relevant to today’s political climate and to what we call Generation X.

Later on, after the Lost entered midlife with a crash (the Great Depression), they changed character completely. In families they joined their elders in protecting children almost to the point of suffocation. In the media they were the Irving Berlins and Frank Capras who pushed the culture back to practicality and community.

In politics they turned isolationist and conservative, becoming the Liberty Leaguers and Martin, Barton, and Fish types whom FDR and his white-haired Cabinet blamed for impeding many New Deal crusades. Their two Presidents (Ike and Truman) were get-it-done old warriors, known more for personality than candlepower. At the peak of their earning years they tolerated a crushing 91 percent marginal income-tax rate to support the Marshall Plan for world peace and the GI Bill for a younger generation of veterans. As elders, they took pride in having ushered in the prosperous “American High,” even while younger people accused them of being cynical, rock-ribbed reactionaries. Back in the 1950s and 1960s America’s old people were extremely poor relative to the young, yet repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to cut their benefits.

Let’s see – protecting children to the point of suffocation? Check! Isolationism? Check! We’ve got two going and, I’d suspect, we’ll see more of this as the Generation X folks get older.

Granted, this article was really comparing The Lost generation to Generation X, but what it shows is that history really does rhyme and that generations are not created by some internally generated force but are shaped by the environment that surrounds them. Oh, and keep that last line in mind about “promised to cut their benefits”…

Why? Well, I think all of this suggests that we have some good ideas about what to expect from this world and what our shape we can expect from our varying “generations”. Part of it, for Generation X, was described back there under the article comparing GenX to The Lost. For Generation Y, I think we can look at what happened in Japan in the 1990′s as described in histories of the Japanese economic and banking failures. Two books in this genre are Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection or Japan’s Financial Crisis and Its Parallels to U.S. Experience (Special Reports (Institute for International Economics (U.S.)), 13.).

Note the title of the first and how it aligns with the article about how two generations in two countries voted themselves out of benefits (or, at least, didn’t struggle as it happened). Also note that the title of the secon book is about the comparison between Japan and the U.S. is about the U.S. savings and loan crisis….NOT our current crisis! Huzzah for rhyming twice in 20 years!

Hold on! Rather than suggest you go read books that are very dry, even for my palette, you can really just read news quotes like this one, published last week in the WSJ. The quote explains what a new 20-something graduate can expect in the coming…decade? Maybe lifetime?

In short, luck matters. The damage can linger up to 15 years, says Lisa Kahn, a Yale School of Management economist. She used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government data base, to track wages of white men who graduated before, during and after the deep 1980s recession.

Ms. Kahn found that for each percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate, those with the misfortune to graduate during the recession earned 7% to 8% less in their first year out than comparable workers who graduated in better times. The effect persisted over many years, with recession-era grads earning 4% to 5% less by their 12th year out of college, and 2% less by their 18th year out.

For example, a man who graduated in December 1982 when unemployment was at 10.8% made, on average, 23% less his first year out of college and 6.6% less 18 years out than one who graduated in May 1981 when the unemployment rate was 7.5%. For a typical worker, that would mean earning $100,000 less over the 18-year period.

The impact on wages could be just as severe this time around, says Ms. Kahn. That’s because of the depth of this recession and the possibility that the unemployment rate may approach the 10.8% level not seen since the early 1980s. The rate hit 8.9% in April, the Labor Department reported Friday.

So: generations as some mystical spirit that fills a people? Hardly. A rhyme that we can follow and even anticipate? Absolutely.

And a random question, as I trail off: If I’m in Generation X and many of you are in Generation Y…and I’d assume Generation Z comes next…what letter comes after Z?

Related posts:

1. Thought for the week
2. At the rate of life…
3. Completionist