Superheroes

An elderly gentleman came to seek counsel yesterday about his grown-up son (who had been my pupil once) who is pushing thirty, with a pregnant wife, still sitting at home virtually doing nothing and feeding off his father, having given up four jobs in a row within five years because they were ‘ill-paid, boring and humiliating’. By an odd coincidence, I was reading the cartoon strip titled Luann in my newspaper yesterday, and there I read about an elderly American couple worrying about exactly the same thing: a son who in an earlier age would have been fending for himself for at least a decade already sitting at home, living off his parents still, and playing idiotic video games online where he regularly ‘saves the world’ as some sort of ‘superhero’.

I was musing along with some of my readers in earlier posts on both my blogs about the tendency towards homogenization all over the world, and too many features of this process are alarmingly similar, such as this one. First, parents bring up pampered brats, waiting upon them hand and foot, not teaching them basic responsibilities and manners, indulging their every whim to the limit of (and sometimes beyond) the parents’ ability, telling them that all they need to do is to get ‘good marks’ in school and college and then a ‘bright future’ is waiting for them… and then the same parents discover to their chagrin that either their children have become ‘successful’ in nothing more than the pettiest middle-class sense (doing nondescript jobs for modest salaries just like millions of other nonentities, all dreams of becoming rich and famous quietly buried, slowly burning up with disillusionment and frustration), or worse, they are useless parasites with bloated egos, who won’t go out to work unless they can start off as CEOs or superstars of this or that variety, much preferring to let their parents keep on maintaining them and their families in turn, as long as they can. And many of these parents are actually too scared to take them by the scruff of the neck and throw them out on the streets, either because they ‘love’ their children too much still ('Suppose he commits suicide?'), or they are worried sick about what people might say, or afraid that their children may actually turn upon them …news reports are becoming increasingly common about desperate old parents going to the police and courts to seek ‘protection’ or ‘support’ from their adult offspring. What monsters we have created in vast numbers by trying to be cleverer than our parents were!

I don’t care what my daughter does after she’s 24-25, so long as it’s not something shameful or criminal, but she has known since she was 10 that laziness and greed will never be indulged, and she must be able to stand on her own two feet. If she cares to look after her parents in our old age, that will be a huge bonus, of course. But she must get off our backs at least. And try to do something that is personally satisfying if not also socially useful, whether or not that makes her rich. Having her back at home with us now and then must be an unadulterated pleasure, never an obligation or burden. If things work out that way, I shall consider myself both very successful and very fortunate indeed…