I’m posting this as yet another ‘stub’.

Indulge me a little bit here. Talking Head’s dance interlude aside, the sentiment and lyrics of this track strikes hyperreal nerves. This track is twenty years old and still struggles with all of our middle class, bourgeois aspirations. Compounded with my Mad Men obsession and simultaneous crash course in Feminist history (I’m currently reading Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) and the uber-timely post on Huffington Post about modern woman’s happiness (or lack thereof) there seems to be an issue worth looking at closely.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been deeply engaged in conversations with friends, or just people of my generation about the pursuit of happiness. We’re still parsing out our answers. However, the key question for my generation at present, prior to our economic woes, has been, is this it? All the hard work, staying in school, brand name education, mountains of student loan debt, inevitable marriages and mortgages, the job… and we still find that we still trying to find our bliss. I’ve had too many conversations these past two years where people from my generation still feel that something is missing once we achieved some measure of success in our careers, or in owning a home or condo, or marriage or baby. There is this lingering longing that kinda hangs in the ether, some gnawing sensation that says that the individual desires something more that brings them closer to wholeness.

Friedan referred to it in the context of mid 20th century housewives as ‘the problem with no name.’ I’d even posit that ‘the problem with no name’ in early 21st century America cuts across gender, class and ethnicity. I think the problem with no name lives is present in the lives Generation X and the millenials as we try to determine our economic and cultural future going forward.

Same as it ever was? More later.