Superannuated Man

My career at university began forty years ago. For quite a long time now, I have been teaching and advising students for much longer than most of my advisees have been alive. I’m three generations or more removed from them. (And now, I have been advising longer than some of my advising colleagues have been alive.) With the passing of those generations, I have been encouraged to familiarize myself with the pop-cultural worlds of Gen-X, Xennials, Millennials, Gen-Y, and i-Gen, as a form of professional development. I don’t, in part because I’m not the keenest of “professionals.” That orientation to the world has something mercenary and bureaucratic about it, necessary, no doubt, but unfortunate. But more importantly, young people’s worlds, like my own, are infinitely complex and not to be rightly felt and understood by interloping geezers. Instead, I’m quite resigned to becoming naturally irrelevant and increasingly uncool—not unhappily. And then retire.

They, on the other hand, are sometimes fascinated by the fact that I have lived in what they know only as history and seem to appreciate me as a sort of mystical animatronic survival of days long gone by. A living fossil, a coelacanth, a long-lived passive drift-feeder—whose primordial habits I’m inclined to admire.

One trend of the current generation I have not been able to avoid has been the film adaptation of old-time comic super-heroes. They’re everywhere these days, righting wrongs, salaciously filling out spandex, snarking on their colleagues, and saving the universe, all the while subverting cinema for older generations. I didn’t pay much attention to these graphic narrative busybodies in my own youth, but I cannot escape them now. One has even been asked, in a professional training icebreaker, to imagine oneself a superhero and identify a superpower: I, Superannuated Man, not giving a shit.

Okay, much.