I’ll be turning 68 this month, I’ve been retired for several years now, but still in fairly good health and relatively prosperous. Like many people in my situation, I’ve been spending a great deal of time trying to make sense of my life, coming to terms with myself and comparing myself to my contemporaries and my generation. How do I fit into history? How did my people do, in this time and nation?

So I sat down with a piece of paper and came up with a list of criteria. How many people have I known personally for the last fifty years, that is, people I am still in contact with on a fairly regular basis? What do we have in common? Where did we come from, where are we now? Only a few names fit this description; because of the selection criteria, many are family and all are near my age, We represent a remarkable generation in history and have lived through interesting times together. We are also, of course, a temporally and geographically isolated group, so we can’t consider ourselves as being typical or representative of the global population. What does this non-random and related cohort have in common? What can we learn from them? What kind of lives have they lived?

My half-brother Orlando is the youngest, seven years my junior. He was born in New York City. He has been married three times, and has two children by his third wife. The eldest is apprenticed to a butcher, his youngest is an operating room nurse. Orlando has a degree in history, has worked most of his life in the hospitality industry as a restaurant and hotel manager, and has sold used cars for a living. He is currently a mortgage broker. His wife (who looks eerily like Lt. Ripley in “Alien”) is a hostess at an upscale resort in Florida.

You already know me; I studied science and math during the hippy era, served a hitch in the Vietnam-era Navy, and have worked most of my life in high tech, including a spell in Silicon Valley. My brother and I come from working class roots: my Dad, who died when I was four, was a sheet metal worker, my Mom a secretary. Orlando’s father was a cigar factory worker. I have been married for 34 years, no children. My wife is a housewife.

Cousin Robert’s family also comes from Tampa cigar-factory roots, and he is also ex-Navy. He studied English and History in college, but spent most of his youth working in the building trades, working his way up from Apprentice to Master, and eventually becoming a Union organizer. After retiring, he started a second career as a school teacher, and after retiring to a happy life of double-dipping from that, he has started a third career as an adjunct professor of history at the local University. His wife is a public school administrator. They have one daughter, who owns and operates a dance studio for children.

My other cousin, Rudy, is from more blue-blooded roots. His father had a PhD in education and owned a small but respected private school in Havana. Rudy left Cuba in the early ’60s, and was followed to the US by his parents 5 years later. The family was destitute, wiped out by Castro. By that time, Rudy had joined the US Army and, because of an aptitude for science and math, completed a training course as a cryogenic technician. Rudy never went to college, but became a nuclear power plant employee, eventually working his way up to a position as a Senior Shift Supervisor. He is now retired, but is occasionally brought in as a consultant or to teach courses. Rudy has two children, both college graduates. One is an attorney, the other is a physical therapist. His wife is, coincidentally, also a public school administrator.

I met my friend Roger in middle school, although he was originally from New Jersey. We were in the same graduating high school class. Roger earned a Bachelor’s degree in Organic Chemistry from Stevens Tech in New jersey, and a Masters from Columbia, all financed by scholarships. His father was a TV-radio repairman and his mother a housewife. Roger has been married and divorced twice, no children, spent most of his working life as the Chief Chemist at the local sewage treatment plant, and is now retired. He lives a solitary life in the country, his hobbies are gardening and playing acoustic blues and folk guitar, which he does infuriatingly well.

My other friend is Chris. Although originally from Ohio, we met in college, where he majored in Chemistry. He was also a working class kid who financed his education with the GI Bill. Chris also served in Vietnam, in the Army. Chris married twice, had one son, and is now retired. He spent most of his working life operating and installing air-quality evaluation and monitoring programs for EPA.

And that’s it. Those people have been my fellow travelers for the last half-century. All between the ages of 60 and 70. We are mostly from working class roots, mostly educated in State Universities, and mostly retired (except my brother); modestly but comfortably, on work pensions and Social Security. All of us (except my brother) own our homes. Three of us managed to send our kids to college.

I think this is a pretty representative group, considering the small size of the sample. But it occurred to me that for kids from working class families born in the 21st century, this is a hopeless dream. I don’t think people today are more stupid, or lazier, or less ambitious than they were fifty years ago, but the times around them have changed. The interesting, comfortable and rewarding lives my contemporaries led are simply not possible any more for most people. College is rapidly becoming out of reach except for the wealthy, and without education, a squalid life of dreary service jobs and temporary casual labor seems the only option, if any work is available at all. And when the truth finally sinks in, that we can’t all be entrepreneurs or venture capitalists or coders, fashion bloggers or sports journalists; there is going to be one hell of a social price to pay. In our parent’s day, there were good jobs in industry and manufacturing, and many lines of work were open to those with no formal education, but with several years of on-the-job experience a real career was still possible. There was hope for a better future, at least for the kids.

But not any more. We may be the last generation to have it good, the last one to benefit from the New Deal and the postwar boom. Our new technologies are not the skilled-worker-hungry industries the Industrial Revolution or the Gilded Age spawned. in fact, they are deliberately organized to employ as few workers as possible, and designed so the average skill level of those workers is as low as possible. The technical elite class that makes the whole thing possible has room only for a few highly overspecialized drones, who can be quickly cast aside when they no longer serve a useful purpose. Wealth is no longer created mostly by human labor, it now arises from automated systems and overseas investments. The factory work is now done by machines, or by a working class living in Asia.

The future is no country for old men.