Opinion: Are we the people our parents warned us about?

Years ago, I watched a car disappear into the gloom of a winter inversion with a bumper sticker that said, “We are the people our parents warned us about.”

It faded into the gray as I read it, but it has lingered in my mind ever since. Is that really who we have become?

More to the point, is that who we want to be going into 2024? And, what the heck did the owner of that car mean by that, anyway?

I don’t mean to sound a dour note on the verge of what typically is the most hopeful holiday of the year. Americans are optimistic people, and that is on full display every New Year’s Eve.

Often there is a logical disconnect to our celebrations. We tend to harp on all the bad things that happened in the year that is passing, with a collective desire to throw it out and start anew. And yet, we pass beyond midnight united in the belief that the next year will be better, even though nothing has changed except the number on the calendar.

And yet, that optimism is important.

One number, more than any other, should give you hope for the future. It’s 346,152. That’s how many patents the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted in fiscal 2023. Each one represents a new idea or invention designed to make the world a better place. Each one is a resounding note of optimism; a belief in the future.

Looking backward, it’s easy to see the arc of progression that has steadily improved life. Looking forward, the view is a bit fuzzier, with 2024’s blurry promise of political rancor and potential violence, with continuing wars in Ukraine and Israel and a host of other uncertainties.

And yet that bumper sticker seems to put it all in our own laps, not in the lap of a distant world leader or a faceless economy.

What types of people did our parents warn us about? Given the wide variety of cultures and backgrounds, one might expect an array of answers. But I’m guessing there are some common refrains.

We were warned to avoid people who are selfish, who care more about satisfying their own needs than worrying about ours, or who want to use us for their own gain. We were warned about people who eagerly pay for today’s pleasures with debt. We were cautioned against people with shallow thoughts, who didn’t think seriously about life’s big questions.

We were told to beware of people who were unkind or who valued material possessions above relationships.

A recent LendingClub report found that 62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, including 42% of those who earn more than $100,000 per year.

As of early December, the nation had seen 591 U.S. corporate bankruptcy filings for the year, according to Reuters.

The Federal Trade Commission reports that social media has become “a golden goose for scammers.” Between January 2021 and June 2023, losses to scams on social media totaled $2.7 billion, the FTC said.

By those measures, many of us have indeed become people we were warned about. But while it’s easy to read too much into a simple bumper sticker, this one seemed to prod us into thinking a bit deeper.

For one thing, it was phrased in a way difficult to ignore in the early 21st century. It didn’t say, “You are the person my parents warned me about.” So much of our public discourse today focuses on how other people could better live up to our expectations, how others should think and believe as we do or how we need to ignore people who challenge our own biases.

But it clearly asked us to search carefully in a mirror, and to look at our interactions with others, especially with those closest to us.

Unlike most holidays, New Year’s forces us to come face-to-face with our mortality. We tend to strut into the future with our resolutions held high and a noisemaker on our lips, but we secretly do the math — one more year since graduation, marriage or some other distant milestone; and one year closer to retirement or some other marker along the pathway we all follow.

Yet we forge ahead, thankfully certain in the unspoken truth that it’s not too late to change, and with the conviction that the future will be a sum total of millions of small decisions people make each day — decisions that, we can hope, are grounded in a moral ethic our parents planted in our hearts long ago.