FAST COMPANY presents the values of Generation Flux with the same revolutionary conviction that Martin Luther did his treatises about religion. In essence, FAST COMPANY's message is that we better, no matter what our actual generation, become comfortable with chaos. Careers are not returning to that linear process of too much education, first job forever, predictable promotion, and comfortable retirement.
Instead, careers will continue just as most of them are today - probably not related to our education, unplanned, and short. That's why nostalgia or romanticizing the past can be deadly. It takes too much energy and altertness just to make it in the now.
So, I wonder: Is the reunion industry in peril? If we are to "Nuke Nostalgia," as FAST COMPANY indicates, are we heading for trouble attending, say, our college reunion. Mine is this summer at Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
From the Class of 1967, I went on to live through the Cultural Revolution which deep-sixed all my Catholic Girl values. In itself, that's enough not to return to who in the world I was way back when.
Then there was the stock market boom which made me rich, the stock market and executive communications busts which made me poor, and the mainstreaming of social media which gave me a new career.
After all that external and internal chaos, why would I want to return to a context that can't provide insight about what I should do in the next two hours to think wicked smart and create compelling copy for clients, financial information powerhouse Motley Fool which I write for, and my own four blogs which are syndicated?
Opportunity is right here, in my own home office in New Haven, Connecticut. The trick is to be in the now enough to spot it, pounce on it, exploit it. Yesterday's people and institutions get in the way.
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