swellshark says in response to my last post:

I’m okay with having a lover standard of living than my parents. It’s a nice place to visit for awhile, but there’s just far too much consumption and waste for me to want to live this way permanently anymore. All I know is I want to draw more and use less and see more music.

All I can say is, Amen. The biggest problem I see is the infrastructure in a lot of America is set up for “our parent’s” lifestyles: wasteful, pedestrian-unfriendly, sprawl, that’s based on inefficient, cheaply-built housing. We built roads and Target stores to feed these subdivisions, instead of building up the city centers where one could live without a car and without a half-hour commute to work by auto. (Which in turn causes families to spend less time together since they’re spending so much of their free time travelling, which leads to discontent, etcetera.)  

Can we become a generation that doesn’t run away from other people, that doesn’t hide behind our green lawns, and doesn’t escape into the basement to watch television when our sons and daughters come home? Well, I hope so. A lot of us will have to reject the lifestyle choices that our parents made.