Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for June 24, 2023

Like Arlo, I believe we are all outliers here, probably each for their own reasons, but in unison for the pleasure we do take here.

Ugh. Stop grouping Millennials and Gen Zers together.

In many ways Arlo has always been ahead of his time.

Early gen X here, but I love being at home and when I was still working, I preferred my WFH days to the ones at the office.

As a boomer I can attest that on Oct. 11, 1975 we stopped going out on Saturday nights.

I make a point of going out every day, if only for a walk. I really don’t think it’s healthy to stay inside all the time. If you live in the suburbs, why do you have a yard if you don’t enjoy it? If you live in the city, why are you paying a sky-high rent if you never leave your apartment?

“If I said I was going out, I’d be a liar…”

I spent my whole working life paying for my house. I have heat, A/C, a fireplace, a pool, a hot tub, and multiple flat screens with wifi. I couldn’t be more comfortable anywhere else. I want just to stay home and enjoy the fruits of my labor. You have my permission to call me a hermit.

I now people, including myself, who are a little of both!

To those sitters in the family, there is a natural progression. It goes like this: Chair – Bed – Box. Get out of the chair. You get the point.

Wheres Gene ? Haven;t seen him in a long time.

I prefer staying home. It’s getting to the point where I dread sticking my nose out the door.

Well, Gene and his family sure don’t come an visit anymore so they must be staying home. If Arlo is such an outlier why doesn’t he take Janis to visit?

Don’t you mean “unicorn”?

Because gen z and millenials haven’t moved out yet.

It’s okay so long as you’re not an out and out outlier.

Born in ‘51, wife born in ’62. We prefer to stay home as far as eating and drinking. Our friends come here or we go to their house. Restaurants on occasion. For leisure we RV, see the country and the US. We both love hunting, SCUBA (were instructors for 25 years), hiking, biking, occasional skydive, and visiting family. Bars nope, don’t like stupid people.

57 years old. Been car-free for well over 15 years— both living in the USA and when living over seas. Worked from home for 15 years. Am completing my MFA degree online. And yep… every new friend or romance that I’ve met in 20 years, I’ve met online. It’s not so much a generational thing, but the fact that Introverts like myself prefer peace, our own spaces, and our own pace of doing things.

Gen X here, and I don’t remember the last time I went out that didn’t involve groceries. Even my husband doesn’t leave the house aside from work, although he will sometimes go fishing if the riverbank is not crowded.

Arlo and Janis never go anywhere.

This whole thing about generations is nonsense. Families have generations because people have to spend some time getting to a certain age before they can have children. That’s what create the gaps in births that we call generations.

Populations have no such thing. Young people are being born continuously, literally minute by minute, not at intervals of ten to twenty years. There is no meaningful difference between the experience of someone born in December 1999 versus someone born in January 2000. The so-called “lines” generational commentators love to draw are not lines at all; they are broad gray zones with very fuzzy edges and they do not stand up to close inspection.

People buy into these notions because they have a snap-pop-psych appea l— “People born between 1998 and 2018 are blah blah blah” — because they present attractively simple ideas about annoyingly complex problems — “Why does he act that way? Millennial!”— and because they mesh beautifully with pre-existing biases and prejudices, particularly likely to be expressed in such terms as, “Back in my day…..”

The fact is that if you gather up a broad sample of people born in any given year, let alone any given decade, you will find just as much variety among them as you will among a similar size group born in any other year or millennium, with just as many similarities and differences within the group as you find between that groups.

I don’t know, I’ll leave the house for work and when I get home I won’t leave again until I absolutely need to. I was born in ’53.