I am a Boomer, and I Love Me My Millennials

And they don’t bark OK Boomer at me

Yesterday morning after putting my evolving house in order I left for Portland. You could barely see a few cars ahead; smoke continues to black out the sun and all the lovely scenery that invited me to move up here to enjoy. The maples are dropping their leaves in the relative darkness, only to be whisked up by workers before we get a chance to acknowledge their beauty in passing.

I was on my way to see my social media guy, JC Spears. He’s been in Portland for almost a year with his fiance. In about a month he heads east in his RV, to return in late spring. We agreed that we’d find some way to hang out for a while.

I loaded my car full of all the nut butters and snacks I can no longer enjoy, and headed north. The many bags of nuts and seeds that I can no longer consume will make their long drives much better.

JC’s been my social media guy now for several years. He’s just shy of forty, in that upper part of the Milliennial aging arc. He’s been ridiculously generous in helping me establish a web presence, identify incredible international talent to design my logo:

And he constantly feeds me stupidly ridiculously amazing lines that I steal for my titles and articles. To say nothing of the material that he inspires.

Recently he gave me this line, which promptly got highlighted:

We’re all broken. But it’s up to us to decide to live in a repair shop or a junkyard.

Such lines inform my writing, and they are a constant reminder that brilliance exists in all genders, all ages, and in every conceivable form.

JC and his fiance and I spent much of the day crammed into his RV on Jantzen Beach, being cuddled and pawed by Ollie. I was beyond grateful for and by the same token exhausted by the company, because of the high level of intellectual demand.

It’s been months since I’ve had much of any kind of in-person conversation with people who demand I think critically, which one exception: my friend Dr. Rosenna Bakari, who has since moved to New York. We of course stay in touch. Since that talk back last summer, I’ve been limited to speaking to the repairmen, the installation folks and what few neighbors wander outside in the godawful ash storm that is our world right now.

JC was referred to me by another Millennial social media person who simply could not cope with me. I’ve no clue whether it was my energy level or intellectual demands, but she was swift to pawn me off. Get rid of me she did, in that way that folks who don’t like to be challenged like to wash their hands of hard work, right to someone who revels in the hard stuff.

That she did it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she was a Millennial. Our personality styles did not mesh. However when I’ve told that tale people are so very swift to make some mindless comment about “typical Millennial.”

Really? Honestly?

While I am well aware of JC’s age, I don’t suffer the age-hate mentality that it seems all generations today love to weaponize in order to be right about how anyone but their age group is (stupid, pointless, full of shit, the Scourge of the World, lazy, clueless, fill in the blank). Generation disregard or outright disrespect aren’t new. Lately, given the state of the world and social media, it’s taken on a whole new level of volume.

Significant international travel has taught me to keep an open mind about excellence, for it shows up in so many forms and varieties that you really do have to be utterly clueless to not see it. No matter. Many of us work awfully hard to maintain such cluelessness in order to be right about how much better we are, whatever that WE happens to entail.

Yet, despite the fact that travel does indeed open both heart and mind, the same kinds of experiences exist on Medium. You can read material written by young Muslim women, African authors, aging White cranky women like me. Their viewpoints, their takes on the world and their insights are all useful if you care to press out the boundaries of your established World as You Know It.

But as the ancient mariners and mapmakers knew, beyond these known waters, there be dragons.

We operate on precisely the same premise today, albeit those uncharted territories are the increasingly dark spaces of the unenlightened human mind and psyche.

Ignorance and its dangerous handmaiden, prejudice, grow and prosper in darkness. The more varied our readings, the more genuine interest in and curiosity we invest in those whose viewpoints and experiences differ vastly from our own, the better-traveled we are emotionally.

JC is ridiculously, heart-stoppingly funny, as all brilliant people who have lived through shit tend to be. This past summer I set up twice-weekly conversations with JC. They were supposed to be about work and my website reboot.

We have only just recently gotten around to the work piece for the summer, Covid, BLM and the fire disasters have taken precedence.

I bookended those phone calls with a weekly hour with new friend Rosennab, the brilliant Black PhD whose friendship defined this year for me. We moved to opposite ends of the country, but the regular calls, check ins and the progression towards a very, very exciting potential working relationship with a client of mine are some of the best interactions I’ve had all year.

These two radically different people- one, born into trailer trash, with a conspiracy theorist grandmother, the other a Black PhD with a history of not only child sexual abuse but a long career transforming herself and others dealing with that history- are among the five people with whom I spend the most time.

Along with a few other notable friends I’ve made on Medium (and kindly by friend I mean REAL friends, with conversations that last more than an hour and deep dives into difficult shit and phone calls and check ins and other potential work partnerships that are evolving) these people inform the air around me with humor, perspective, wisdom, regular challenges, constant and most welcome discomfort-I’ll come back to that in a sec- and they push me HARD.

All of them.

Which is why they are in my intimate circle.

The other day I wrote about the importance of disagreement. We seem as a society to have entered a period, driven hard by the echo chamber of social media and our terrible sucking fear of being made wrong on even the slightest of points of contention, wherein we cannot tolerate disagreement. Medium writers block each other over trifles. Badly misguided, seriously dangerous Justice Warriors troll social media in order to cancel out anyone who dares to disagree with their POV.

The grey area of disagreement, that moving landscape on which I stand which demands that I rise above it in order to see more clearly, is one place which affords me the opportunity to grow.

So with Dr. B and JC and others whose words, work and writing sometimes cause me to squirm in great discomfort, people with vastly different backgrounds, including from other generations, these are the very people who seed my life with ideas and challenges that keep me youthful in attitude (forget my face, that’s a lost cause, and let’s not discuss my butt).

If anything, the more I push my boundaries, the deeper waters I seek to swim in. This year, as I’ve had to curtail my international travels (I was scheduled to be riding reindeer in Mongolia earlier this month, DAMN it), that exploration has been on line. As I build my home out and fill it with the treasures of trips to 47 countries, I have explored many more lands. Those of Black writers and commenters, international writers who contribute to my home pub Illumination.

I do not have to agree with these writers to read them.

I don’t have to like everything they have to say to like their writing.

I don’t need for them to validate my viewpoint to have them in my feed.

If anything the delicate and sometimes stark grey areas of our differences are precisely why I need them.

With the exception of trolls who mean to do harm, those who lob opposing viewpoints do me the honor of challenging me. When done with respect I am delighted to comb through my own conceits to see where there’s a dragon, or my attitudes or information sources are draggin’.

In about five minutes I head back over to JC’s place for tea, for laughter, for doggie kisses and to discuss business. After weeks of stress, fires, ash, injury recovery, my Millennial Moments are a lifeblood.

Got Millennials? Got diversity in your friendships, your reading, your life?

You got happiness.

OK, Boomers? (sorry, I couldn’t help myself)