Perhaps as after-thought:

I miss the magazines of the 90s and 2000s. I still carry my copies of "Whole Earth", "Utne", "Yes", "The Sun", "No Depression", "Kyoto Magazine" – although none of them were exactly mainstream or glossy magazine. Still I like to leaf through fashion magazines ("Harper's Bazaar" still my favourite) when I'm at the newsstand at the train station. And obviously I miss the times when magazines had various formats and ... well, the times then were more playful and ideas seemed to sparkle on every page.

What I resent is the mix of weepiness and entitlement (the latter bordering on arrogance) of people in whom I miss a sense of, well, gratitude for the luck they have had to live in magnificent times. Times when we were neither bothered about gadgets or the realities of war at the next border, where there was time and playfulness to try out ideas, to just indulge in the luxuury of playing with the arts and our daily self-expression as well as self-obsessions. Where we actually thought about the future as something better to achieve, and where the present – and that seems even more important – breathed the air of possibility. Where the idea of endless summer – not that I am personally into festivals and heat and people but you get what I mean – was not a threat that we're already runnig out of groundwater in spring, when we lived only slightly bothered by practical constraints and all the niches were plentiful.

The ecology of niches. The manifold of niches that seems to have shrunk considerably and now bestows a sense of drag and an not rich with scents but the stale fug of Victorian workhouses.

I've never been a real boomer, being too young for that, but even I enjoyed happy times. And what I miss in articles like the one in the post I now reply to is a lack of gratitude. Gratitude towards life, peers, possibilities, the exuberant fun everybody (or at least many) have had. Do you really think this could have been an endless summer? Did you really think that this merry-go.round would provide a retirement plan with which to retire safely and comfortably? How much privilege did you take for granted to think that was an eternal bliss?

Privileged we were, and I come think that privilege, when unacknowledged and appreciated with gratitude, will take away the splendour that comes with it. Privileged people are bitter and resentful because they lack gratitude. And offering gratitude is the first step to change ways of living and career paths.

In fact, it's the lack of gratitude that makes people like those interviewed in the article, wary and resentful, clinging to a better past while making those times all about them.

Don't grow some spine –and that didn't come out more clearly in my first post –, don't grow some spine, grow some gratitude.

And spine will grow from that.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten