Generation X, or the 13th Generation, was left holding the bag of the Baby Boomer's decadence -be it sexual decadence, economic decadence, cultural decadence (can we get another Beatles anniversary?), or entitlement decadence (yeah, we know Social Security won't be there for us).
The McMansion bubble is another unsustainable legacy of the Boomers. Isolation on a cul-de-sac in a house too big to be practical.
Of course there is a next generation reaction to this: The Tiny House Movement. It's practical, sustainable, and anti-materialist, though as a movement it fetishizes the poor economic situation inherited from Boomer leadership of the country. Whatever you gotta do to rationalize your situation I guess.
If the Boomers sought to throw off all previous constraints of civilizational habits and morals and "Start from Zero", as Tom Wolfe documents, the Xers will reboot on their own in a practical way, in order to maintain some sort of civilizational continuity.Mitchell became intrigued by the idea of a condensed living space five years ago after he lost his job, so he decided to sponsor the Tiny House Conference in Charlotte in 2014.Mitchell has now found another way to cater to the Tiny Movement crowd. He runs thetinylife.com website which chronicles his efforts to build his own structure and provides tips and resources for others."It's doable, you know, and it's all about a lifestyle change and a shift in what's important in your life," said Teal Brown, Wishbone Tiny Homes.Plenty of others have discovered tiny houses and there are an estimated 4,000 of them now in the U.S."I looked at my budget and I realized that housing was a lot of that cost and that's when I found tiny houses," said Mitchell.Mitchell became intrigued by the idea of a condensed living space five years ago after he lost his job, so he decided to sponsor the Tiny House Conference in Charlotte in 2014.
Mitchell has now found another way to cater to the Tiny Movement crowd. He runs thetinylife.com website which chronicles his efforts to build his own structure and provides tips and resources for others.
"It's doable, you know, and it's all about a lifestyle change and a shift in what's important in your life," said Teal Brown, Wishbone Tiny Homes.
Plenty of others have discovered tiny houses and there are an estimated 4,000 of them now in the U.S.
"I looked at my budget and I realized that housing was a lot of that cost and that's when I found tiny houses," said Mitchell.
- See more at: http://charlotte.twcnews.com/content/news/around_carolina/706979/popularity-of-tiny-homes-on-the-rise#sthash.w09U6yRu.dpuf
Mitchell became intrigued by the idea of a condensed living space five years ago after he lost his job, so he decided to sponsor the Tiny House Conference in Charlotte in 2014.
Mitchell has now found another way to cater to the Tiny Movement crowd. He runs thetinylife.com website which chronicles his efforts to build his own structure and provides tips and resources for others.
"It's doable, you know, and it's all about a lifestyle change and a shift in what's important in your life," said Teal Brown, Wishbone Tiny Homes.
Plenty of others have discovered tiny houses and there are an estimated 4,000 of them now in the U.S.
"I looked at my budget and I realized that housing was a lot of that cost and that's when I found tiny houses," said Mitchell.
- See more at: http://charlotte.twcnews.com/content/news/around_carolina/706979/popularity-of-tiny-homes-on-the-rise#sthash.w09U6yRu.dpuf
Tom Wolfe on The Start From Zero, and anticipating what is happening now- The Great Relearning:
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.
The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point, the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside–quite purposely–were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets, or as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the relearning–following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero–seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.
