Up With Grups by Adam Sternbergh

I'm a New York Magazine convert. Having read an incisive take on the global social phenomenon - The Grups, here's a quick summary on the 9-page article. Bona fide Grup in the near future, here I come.

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NY says: Let’s start with a question.When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times?
Mich says: Does an MP3 phone count? Mich is desperately awaiting the arrival of Nokia N72.

NY says: It showed up in the early eighties as “the Peter Pan Syndrome,” then mutated to the yuppie, which, let’s face it, has had a pretty good run. Later, it took the form that David Brooks called “bourgeois bohemians,” or bobos (as in Bobos in Paradise). Over in England, they’re now calling them yindies (that’s yuppie plus indie), and here, the term yupster (you can figure that out) has been gaining some traction of late. And as this movement evolves, something pivotal is happening. This cascade of pioneering immaturity is no longer a case of a generation’s being stuck in its own youth. This generation is now, if you happen to be under 25, more interested in your youth.
Mich says: 26 can't be too far away from this benchmark, eh? Strictly adhering to the calendar, Mich won't be 27 till the end of the year, so yeah, she's still 26! =D

NY says: No wonder Grups like today’s indie music: It sounds exactly like the indie music of their youth. Which, as it happens, is what kids today like, too, which is why today’s new music all sounds like it’s twenty years old. And thus the culture grinds to a halt, in a screech of guitar feedback.
Mich says: Back then, Green Day, Nirvana, Backstreet Boys, Take That, Soundgarden, Coldplay, Savage Garden and the likes were the rage. It's not my fault that most of them are still pumping out albums these days, non?

NY says: This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.
Mich says: I forsee myself dressed in Mango for the next decade. At least.

NY says: A number of trends have nudged us in this direction, from the increasingly casual dress codes at work to the persistent marketing of counterculture “rebellion” as an easily attainable, catchall symbol for cool. So why would anyone dress up anymore? A suit says, My mother made me wear this to go to a bar mitzvah. The Grup outfit says, I’m so cool, and so damned good at what I do, I can wear whatever the hell I want. At least when I go out to brunch.
Mich says: Corporate wear has pared down a few notches within this decade. Teachers no longer have to be stuffed in staid high-waisted skirts nor frumpy frocks. -cheers-

NY says: Of course, when you’re 40, with a regular paycheck, yet still want to resemble a rock star who resembles a garage mechanic, well, what’s a guy to do? Status symbols still have their uses, especially in the world of clothes. And this is where the $200 ripped jeans come in. Or $450. Or $600. You want the tattered jeans, but you also want the world to know, I can afford the very best in tattered jeans.
Mich says: The extravagance of $400 jeans in the past (remember Roccobarroco, Iceberg, Versace, MCM, et al?) has now been replaced by $150 Levi's. Hey, that's a savings of nearly $300, no?

NY says: Grups don’t avoid having kids. Grups love kids. In part, though, this is because Grups find kids to be perfect little Mr. Potato Head versions of themselves. Of course, there’s more to Grup parenting than simply moulding your kid’s tastes. You must be vigilant that you don’t grow up and become uncool yourself.
Mich says: Does working with kids count? -ponders-

NY says: But isn’t there something unsavory in the idea of your kid as a kind of tabula rasa for you to overwrite with your tastes? Less a child than a malleable Mini-Me?
Mich says: Every generation is an extension of its predecessor! Think of it as an additional plug-in. Next!

NY says: The last time teenagers weren’t expected to rebel, it was because they were heading off to work in the coal mines at age 13. Can we really expect to be cool parents and also raise cool kids? Is this youth big enough for the both of us?
Mich says: The media propagates the notion of eternal youth and you blame us for falling victim to consumerism?

NY says: For a Grup, success isn’t about how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk, or boogie-board, away. You see, it’s not that Grups don’t want to work; they just don’t want to work for you. In a recent Money magazine poll about bosses, 54 percent of the respondents said they wouldn’t want their boss’s job no matter how much money you paid them. Fifty-four percent.
Mich says: Amen to that, freedom at work ranks high on my priority scale.

NY says: There’s that tricky word again: passion. What’s with the Grups and passion? It’s all anyone wants to talk about. Passionate parents, passionate workers, passionate listeners to the new album by Wolf Parade. And I start to realize: Under the skin of the iPods and the $400 ripped jeans, this is the spine of the Grup ethos: passion, and the fear of losing it.
Mich says: That's true. Mich will only pursue that which intrigues her. She does not understand how one can partake in anything without an inkling of passion. Well, at least Mich is passionate about English and that makes her job easier.

NY says: Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch.
Mich says: Uh, yeah. Whatever.

NY says: Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. Just how easily a bona fide, by-the-book adult can be made to wonder where it all went wrong, and why you ever bothered to grow up in the first place.
Mich says: I don't know about you, but carrots are really tasty. =)

NY says: Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth—or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?
Mich says: An adapted model of the Grup would be the best compromise - to balance work with play. Now, that's maturity. Heh.