A No Net Life

“So, how’s my great work life Balance and not being the disappointed panda going?” you ask, perhaps because you notice I haven’t blogged in a while.

“Funny thing,” I reply, “they went the way of all good resolutions; the floating somewhere out there in the ether. Work has picked up, and then my wife broke her shoulder and I’ve been having to help her out with her business on the weekends. There hasn’t seemed to be much time for me.”

I’ve drawn a bit, but I’ve only managed to complete one design done over the last couple of months—a design I’ve titled “Gen X No Nets”.

This may have been inspired by a night out with Ben Elton, when he pointed out that we Gen Xers are now the establishment being railed against by the youngsters. But work relations also has had me thinking about generational differences too.

I know the later Gens take the mickey out of Gen X because we always talk about how we went through life without the safety nets that children today have. We didn’t have helmets and seat belts. We had no nets around our trampolines and we went ranging around the streets without being tracked on our mobile phones.

Sure more of us ended up injured, some of us ended up dying. Some of us ended up in some not so great situations. I like many others, am grateful for some of the changes—I don’t want to see my own child go through some of the traumas I’ve seen, but studying the behaviour of my team mates over the last months has me wondering if perhaps we didn’t get a little more than a freer childhood from those lack of support nets—an acceptance that sometimes you have to try an fail, and pick yourself up and try again to make progress.

Now, I don’t really want to bag out Gen Y and Gen Z, as we Gen Xers aren’t perfect, but there are times when I just want to shout at them “Give it a go. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it might even fail, but we’re going to get no where if we keep talking rather than doing!”

My evening with Ben, and a trip down memory lane reminded me we may not have known as much as kids today do about the world, we certainly didn’t have access to as much information, What I did have was a bike and dirt tracks to ride on, and the knowledge from experience that if I fell off going over a jump, I might hurt myself, but I could also pick myself back up and try again until I found a way over, through or around that barrier.

I love my Gen X t-shirt, and I wear it with pride—not to brag that I did things without a net, but to celebrate what doing things without a taught me about life.

Why not check out the new design?