Of Gen Z, ​“The Rusty Years,” & The Mess We’re In

A revealing clash of the generations began in an unexpected way, as almost all such clashes do, and in the quietude of a Volvo showroom.

I had dropped off my car for repairs at the Gengras dealership in North Haven and taken a seat at a table near the new cars for sale, where I would wait for the time it would take to fix, in Volvo-speak, my broken POT-B14E511, otherwise known to us in the civilian world as a tailgate part.

Then, while engaged in my morning ritual of trying to pronounce myself a ​“genius” by solving the Spelling Bee game on The New York Times website, I noticed a fellow customer heading my way. He said, ​“Mind if I sit at here?”

“Not at all,” I replied. ​“Please do.”

At the heart of my burst of common courtesy was this: I was eager to once again get my old nose stuck in the business of a stranger; this has always been part of my job as intruder of private spaces and investigator of human nature. It is a mission that has given me, over many decades, plenty of satisfaction, as it has always seemed to me that life, at its best, is recapturing those heart-pounding scavenger hunts of our youths.

My first instinct, given my sudden companion’s prominent gray beard, fatigued expression, and wary pastel eyes that had seen the light of many days, I presumed, as mine have, was to quiz him on the nature of growing old. But he struck first.

“Nice hat,” he said, nodding toward my boonies lid on the table. It indicates my status as a Vietnam War vet. And then he said what is obligatory and rote these days under the circumstances: ​“Thank you for your service.” He seemed to mean it, though, and it’s true that people of my generation are more attuned to the legacy of that prolonged and wretched affair.

I said ​“thank you” in reply, because ​“You’re welcome” seems inappropriate. So would have, ​“Well, it was a long time ago and, heck, I was one of the lucky ones who returned from that war without wearing a body bag or with fewer limbs than are usually prescribed for young men.” So, I merely added, ​“That was a hard time in America. Kinda like we’re having now, with the country so divided.”

“I think it’s a little different these days. In fact, not like it at all,” he said.

“Aha,” I thought, I was likely to be invited into a moderate to severe discussion of American politics with him likely taking the side of a president whose name I can’t even utter without breaking out in hives.

“Well,” he said, ​“it turned out that 50 percent of the country wanted him and 50 percent of the country didn’t want him. Which means that either way we’d have a mess.”

On behalf of my own comfort level, I didn’t press further, but instead asked about the work he’d done. He said he had owned a construction company, and now his sons run it, and he is mostly free, with the exception of ​“How do we do this?” emergency calls from the boys, to carry on with this new stage of his life, what he calls ​“the rusty years.”

I liked that image of rust, but it of course required me to stick my nose further into his past. ​“Your health is OK?”

He went on to say three weeks earlier he’d undergone heart bypass surgery.

“Wow,” I responded. ​“You don’t look any the worse for wear,” knowing that recovering from open-heart repairs usually lay a patient out for many weeks.

“I heal fast,” he said. I felt it wasn’t appropriate in that moment to pull out the tale of my own heart surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital, as I had the benefit of having it done, and a new aortal valve installed, through the groin, a procedure only mildly off-putting, and that kept me in the hospital only two days. A procedure that my wife, Suzanne, refers to as ​“drive-by surgery.”

My new companion at the table told me he was mostly free now to carry on with his vehicle addiction; that aside from his Volvo he has a BMW sports car and a pickup truck. And that he travels back and forth from a small town on the Gulf coast of Florida where he loves to fish.

If I thought at that point in the conversation that we had very little in common, I should have reminded myself of what I’ve learned over the years, that if you, as the prying inquisitor, keep your interview going, and are patient, you’ll find connective human tissue, and that, when you do, you will be rewarded.

“I also write a little,” he said. ​“Novels.”

“Really?”

“In fact I kind of predicted where we’d be today when I wrote one of them.” He went on to describe the premise of the book that he titled 2025.

“The idea is that the world would become so dangerous and uninhabitable that there would be a secret U.S. government plot to nuke the world while its leaders run to safety on the island of Atlantis, the fictional Caribbean Island.”

Clearly, if he and I were not exactly on the same page of political thinking, we were apparently in abutting chapters.

“When did you write that?” I asked, thinking it must be a recent project.

“Forty years ago,” he replied.

“My God.” Just by happenstance, I’d experienced the common human connection: the one between Volvo customer and someone inspired by George Orwell. ​“Who published the book?” I asked.

“Oh, I never tried to get it published.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” Then he took out his cell phone and began scrolling through it. He said, ​“I also wrote quite a few songs. Never did anything with those either.” He played one for me, ​“Broken Promises,” written in country style, that seemed catchy and quite worthy of release.

I reacted to this in my reliably childish way, wanting to scroll through my phone to play him a snippet of the most recent song that I wrote and recorded, ​“When We Called Them the Tribe,” a ditty about the change of name from the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians. But I understood this would interrupt my mission of the morning. Moreover, one of the disadvantages of old age is going to dinner parties in which someone raises a point, say, about the politics of France, and without letting that person finish, another says, ​“The last time I was in Paris — what happened to me was interesting.” Interesting? The forced listeners would be the judge of what usually becomes an ego-centric demonstration.

In short, most people underestimate the worthiness of personal inquiry, the very quality that makes us human beings, or at least provides the juice it requires to live a life in which curiosity leads to perpetual fascination. In my conversation at the table to that point, for example, initial intimations of stereotype gave way quickly to heart-to-heart recognition of each other, even though as an experienced construction expert, he might have been expected him to react without great enthusiasm that I have served on the Yale University faculty.

Because I help teach the rare course for undergrads that comes with a tutor who meets with students every week, my job, I get to know these young people in a way that other faculty members can’t. And, I come to understand not only their achievements and potentials but their fears as well, one of them being that they’re somehow not measuring up in what we’re trying to teach them, creative writing, as opposed to other formal forms required in the college, and so often they are inspired to write on very personal matters. So, in effect, I become not only their writing teacher but their therapist as well. In my conversation at the Volvo dealership, I began to feel that way.

My new acquaintance had done quite well in his life, of course, without my intervention.

The business of construction, there was very little that he didn’t know. But that creative part of him — his music, his novels — though completed in what was obviously a need to express his view of the world, tapped into his own insecurities.

I mentioned that in my teaching I find a good deal of insecurities in the student body, not only about the present but the future as well. This point led him to a talking point that I’d heard often.

“Kids today want it all served up to them. They want it instantly. They don’t understand that cars we have and the houses we have took a lot of time and hard work to get.”

There was some measure of reality to his point, I thought, but both of us shook hands and said our goodbyes when the service department was done with his car, and I couldn’t begin to fill in the context until a few days later.

We had an overnight visit from one of our grandchildren, Petey, who had reached the age of 26, just on the edge of Gen Z, and over a meal at Caffe Bravo I brought up my conversation at the Volvo store, giving Petey the highlights of those comments about young people. ​“What do you think?” I asked.

This was not an idle question. Petey is a bright young man who excelled as a student at Gettysburg College, became fluent in Mandarin, lived with a family in a remote part of China, and has been employed since by an international firm that has recognized and rewarded his intelligence and contributions by giving him a good salary and making him, even at his young age, a supervisor of workers around the world.

So, in this dinnertime inquiry, I wasn’t expecting what I heard.

“He’s right,” he replied, about the retired construction company head’s observation about young people, ​“but his reasoning is wrong. Most people my age are scared as hell because they see no middle class life for themselves. It used to be that people went to work for a company and stayed forever, earning their pensions and gold watches. Now, there’s no such opportunity for our generation. Even when we get raises in our jobs, we can’t keep up with the cost of living. Half of my own pay goes to pay the rent on my 400-square-foot apartment [near Boston]. I think ours will be the first generation in modern times that won’t ever be able to own a house. Ever. And yet older people have the impression we’re all a bunch of loonies who live only for today. If they were in our shoes, they’d do the same thing.”

As I later learned from a report of a survey in The New York Times, fully half of the young people who qualify as Gen Z feel as Petey does, that their lives will not be as comfortable as those of their parents and grandparents have been.

Peter went on to say that the relatively few young adults who had become at that age financially independent had done it through social media, hitting on ideas that turned them into influencers with millions of followers, and then capitalizing on that, turning certain young people into media stars with huge profits. ​“Most of us will never be able to do that,” Petey said, ​“though we envy those who do.”

I thought back on my record and outlook as a 26-year-old. In many ways, that time, the early 1970s, was no piece of quiche, the trendy dish of the era. As a war veteran, I had of course seen life as a tentative state. And when at the age of 27 my wife died of brain aneurysm (with my reluctant help), that twist of fate had sent me into a mental and physical tailspin.

But even so, notwithstanding the feud I had with my boss at the newspaper in Akron, Ohio, the office chair I sat in would turn out to be — wherever that chair was shipped around the country — my comfy sanctuary seat, my old shoe, my place of refuge, my unquestioned idea that I would succeed, and get that pension and gold watch. (I never did get a golden timepiece, though I received something as lovely — a gold ring in recognition of a public art project that my Sunday magazine staff and I had created at Northeast.)

Petey added that young people are counseled nowadays to stick with companies long enough to get healthcare and IRA benefits, but always be on the lookout for better opportunities, and take advantage of them as pilots of their own destinies, that no company is going to look out for their welfare, or invest in their futures.

I thought back to when I was finally released from active duty, and went back to work in Akron, where I had previously had been a reporter covering three of the city’s suburbs. I had gone back reluctantly, after not being able to secure an interview at the Washington Post, which I thought might give me some credit for military service.

So, a little dejected, I had a conversation with Akron Beacon Journal editors about what my new job would be. It was interrupted by a message that came from the newspaper’s editor, Ben Maidenburg. He wanted to see me in glassed in office.

Maidenburg was a looming presence in those years, a tall man with a deep resonant voice who had last spoken to me only because, on my first day of a tryout on the State Desk years earlier, he walked from his office to where we sat, and shouted, ​“Who the hell is parked in my goddamn parking space?” I recognized at that moment that I hadn’t gotten my tryout off to a good start, and that here was a man to be paid attention to. 

But in the visit to the newsroom post-Army tour, his tone couldn’t have been more different. He lit a cigar at his desk, and asked me about my Vietnam service, and then said he had looked forward to my return to the newspaper. Really?

“I know you’ll want to buy a house and start a family, which will be expensive, maybe even in the $30,000 to $35,000 range, at least on the west side,” which is where most of the newsroom employees lived. ​“We’d like to give you a little help. We’ll give you a check for the down payment and you can pay us back over the next few years — say, $15 a pay period — with no interest charge.”

That scene was a sharp contrast with Petey’s view of corporate life. But even as I thought of it, I recalled the struggles over the years — perhaps akin to the construction company owner’s struggles — to get established, to stay positive in a largely negative world and challenging business, to overcome a general record of mediocrity in other pursuits and try to home in on what I eventually learned I could do best – build a magazine and attract a host of satisfied readers. As the years passed, I became more and more confident, so much so that my manners in dealing with bosses sometimes didn’t live up to propriety, at least until in middle age when I learned the art of the work-around, and other manipulations.

Even so, there was never any doubt that I would climb the socio-economic ladder. I had started in the newspaper business at a wage of $99 per week. I ended full-time employment in 2001 with a weekly paycheck of $2,300. And, at the age of 57, had no doubt that, because of the knowledge I gained during those office years, I could survive in ​“retirement” by becoming a freelance writer and editor, a vision that turned out to be prescient. Only once did I earn in a year’s time what I had received in my final year as a Sunday magazine editor. But I was always able to pay my bills, and despite the inevitable rejections sent to all who carry on independently, managed to buy houses as well as Saabs and Volvos.

Was that in Petey’s future? He mentioned briefly facing the issue that has little currency in Washington, D.C., these days. Climate change is something caring and brainy young people know is an existential danger, and that old pols ignoring or denying it now are not the ones who will have to pay dear prices for it. Petey will, as will his generation, and those younger than him.

I often describe Petey as someone three times as smart as he needs to be, and also someone who is empathetic and kind, so if he can’t succeed and prosper, who can? 

We have lived through an era of enlightenment and terror, of war and relative peace, of previously unimaginable events (polio epidemic, assassinations of JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, RFK, city riots, 9/11, and Covid), and yet have endured and, in so many cases, come out ahead.

Maybe that’s our legacy. What is our duty, then, other than to make sure we’re not driving around with defective POT-B14E511s?

I inherently know it in my work helping to teach creative writing at Yale. Quite against stereotype (snotty and snooty undergrads), almost all of my students over the years have been like Petey: thoughtful, humble, and often unnerved. They and their families have paid huge amounts of money to get an Ivy League bump-up on professional expectations. So the expectations are not just great; they are supersized.

The young people are also aware of their student loan burdens, the uncertainties of the job marketplace, that health care in this nation as overseen by profit-making insurance companies is hit and miss and expensive, that fellow students they know, the ones who are considering a variety of offers from wealthy companies, are most often those who study business, finance, and computer science. Where is the place for young people, as many of my students, who do not follow that lucrative path, people who, like scholars in the decades before them, that learning history, literature, and the fine arts is in itself qualifying achievement. Or was.

So, two interviews in the space of a few days. The Volvo guy says he’s ​“rusting away.” The latter sees no likely route to his own rust belt.

I had wondered why the 2024 presidential election surprised so many people. In the space of a few weeks afterward, I had discovered what the pundits didn’t anticipate.

Allegations of society’s persistent racism and sexism aside, there is no doubt of this: that for old or young, insecurity thrives, that the status quo is not good enough, that while some people can rest quite comfortably on their laurels, most people are scared, and as such, open to buying snake oil. The forever human temptation.