A family dinner with a great conversation

Monday night we had dinner with my family in remembrance of my Grandma Ellie, who passed on Feb 23 last year. It was a great evening, with a lot of wonderful conversation. We talked about her and what she stood for, and how she gave us this amazing gift: she taught us how to important it was to keep together as a family. This is becoming true even more now that economic reality makes it so hard to stay on your own.

What was really great for me though, was the conversation about how we got to this place as a country. I brought up the articles I had been seeing about how "upsetting" it was that Americans will be forced to lower their standard of living, and how completely odd it is to me that this is seen as a bad thing. Mom brought up a lot of interesting ideas that totally helped me to understand how me got here.

The one that really got me was this one: that parents want a better life for their children than they had. Sure, it sounds great on the surface, and it totally makes sense in context of human history but really, how long that can continue? And in terms of survival and material things, that's been the case. Every generation has more stuff, and less of a struggle for survival (as a group, anyway).

Since I'm not a parent, I'd never thought about it that way, but that little thought drives so much of cultural momentum. So of course, we talked about changing what "better" meant. Instead of more stuff, larger houses, cooler cars, what if better meant a more meaningful, fulfilled and sustainable life? Which (my Mom said) was exactly the direction they were trying to go in the 60s. But something happened. She was so confused about it, and had no idea what happened, or when it did, but everyone kind of forgot what they had believed in just a few years earlier.

I can relate a bit, since the same thing happened to my college age idealism for a while, but at our dinner table we agreed it was a conundrum. This huge movement for whatever reason just fizzled. It was our chance to change at our own pace. Now its too late, the change is more forced, and more painful.

Still, at the end of the dinner, we were all very clear, what's on the other side of this is in fact a better life. Just not the type of better we are used to.