WELCOME!

This is a new blog chronicling the stories, adventures, diabolical nightmares and mid-life crises of me and my Generation X friends...now there is GenY we have effectively become the EX Generation, approaching 40, so many experiences under our belt, some amazing, some funny, some serious, some dysfunctional and tragic but to me they are there to be shared in all their crazy glory.

We were the first generation to use Mac for our HSC essays, to save money for backpacking, to try en mass to break old rules in order to create new ones and to explore unchartered, unmapped territories of society, business and relationships with ourselves, our families and our new world. We were all prepared to put our hearts, minds and souls on the line to embrace a world we knew little about for a chance to make a long lasting impact...serious dreams fuelled by passion and creativity!

Life for us in our 20s was about the freedom to do everything, be anything, adopt a new 'future' existence, take on the world and try and beat it...there were so many possibilities that we saw and coveted and it fed our restlessness...we were overseas, satiating our voracious need for knowledge and experiences and most of us tried very hard to ignore structure and expectation Our lives were like a drug, spontaneous, free and exciting and we never really learnt to deal with our boredom!

By our thirties we were one foot back with the Boomers and one foot in with Gen Y...we still had the cockiness & the adventure spirit but were a little tired of having created so little in spite of our worldliness. There was pressure to settle down and we felt ourselves sucked back into traditional paths. We started living with either the burden of expectation or the guilt of secretly craving to do things our own way. Many of us faltered, some of us failed and we became tired from 10 years living with ourselves being driven mad by the very things that we'd escaped as 17 year olds. We focused on creating our legacy while desperately holding on to the days when we could wake up and choose to do whatever the hell we wanted.

Now we are FORTY-ish EEEEEEK!!! I look around and we are in a tiny bit of a crisis it would seem...unfulfilled, restless, desperate to keep our options open, even more desperate to experience everything we forgot to when we thought there'd be more time. In many ways we are 17 yos again...craving freedom (albeit sadly this time often from the families we created rather than the ones we inherited!). We are creating and trialling new models & systems for everything in record time and trying to save the world we once explored with no eye on the future.

Many of us are single and entirely independent, completely set up and therefore not the least bit desperate, though we really hear the clock ticking for some reason! For a generation who has done so much we talk a lot about our dissatisfaction, having not achieved enough, not having enough money...we want a legacy but working endlessly is giving us the shits. We are a bit too old to be having babies but what the hell we are going to do it anyway because we CAN have everything...just watch the media where everyone it seems is gorgeous, ageless, ridiculously rich, 6-kids-no-partner-no-problems.

We want security + freedom in everything we do...we still chase eternal youthfulness in looks, attitudes, sex and we are unprepared to compromise or evolve. We both compete with and desire Gen Y because they seem a little bit sharper, a little bit tighter and a little more adventurous. In them we actually recognise ourselves, the way we were when we were on fire and before we GREW UP!!

Ahhh...there are so many stories. My Mum always says "You could write a book about the last 20 years of your life" and so the story starts here...