wo years ago at my fifth college reunion, the almost unanimous response to the question "What do you do?" was, "I just started/finished law school." Nobody knew what to make of my "I've been living in a yurt in the mountains of Arizona. Before that I was traveling across the country helping to research a book on alien abductions. Oh, and in between, I don't speak for three months at a time."

n the '80s the dhamma (Buddha's teachings) had been relegated to various communities outside mainstream culture--or commodified. "It's so Zen!" was commonspeak on my college hallway. Meditation had become a business. Yuppies wore tie-dyes.

nstead, in the '80s we spent a lot of time indulging in sensory pleasures, in spite of the "just say no" campaign of the times. Almost every teenager I knew had sex and took drugs (not the mind-expanding '60s kind, but the "fun" ones like cocaine and ecstasy).

he '70s of our childhoods had been a nonstop media teach-in on buying happiness, starting with the images of sugar-coated cereals we watched along with our Saturday morning cartoons. When we were teenagers, kids from my class background had computers, stereos, cars, and expensive clothes. In the '90s my generation is more than a little disappointed to discover that all the hard college work led to underemployment and McJobs. But still, I think, consumerism reigns. And so does the attitude that we are somehow exempt from kamma (karma).