R.I.P. Generation Gap: Are You A "Grup?"

Do you live your life the way you did when you were 22?

Trendspotters have zeroed in on 30- and 40- somethings who act like they're in their twenties ... and like it that way. In musical preference, fashion choice, work style, and attitude, they're not going to have their parent's middle age.

According to a Reuters piece by Sophie Hares ...

Rarely seen in pin-striped suits, grups of either sex can easily be spotted in discreetly branded battered jeans, T-shirts and old-school trainers, while blasting the latest Raconteurs or Flaming Lips tracks through permanently attached iPods.

And they may be dressing that way for a while. According to the editor of GQ, Dylan Jones, "We are already seeing 60-something men who buy the same clothes, listen to same records, see the same films and browse the Web in exactly the same way as 20-somethings."

"Grup" originated in an original Star Trek episode about a planet where feral children never grew up. The phrase was picked up in a New York magazine article this April that identified the trend. In that piece, Adam Sternbergh listed some synonyms: yupster, yindie, and alterna-yuppie. He fleshes out who he's talking about:

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.

... This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up (a real paycheck, a family, the warm touch of cashmere) with none of the bad parts (Dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree). It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.

He proposes that the trend is driven by older Gen-X'ers, who were sidelined in pop culture by Baby Boomers for so long. Are they now extending their early adulthood to make up for lost time?