A few articles have come out recently concerned with the trajectory we're taking, particularly choices being made by young adults. But we need to acknowledge the upheaval we're currently living through to have any hope of traversing it well.
Emile Durkheim wrote Suicide back in 1897, a lengthy report on the four ways people are provoked to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy is a useful warning for today:
"Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [he's talking generally of people here] are more inclined to self-destruction. .... Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. ... But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. ... Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. ... The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. ... A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. ... What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. ... He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. ... Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things."
Durkheim was looking specifically at the effect of many changes in France from 1842 to 1869, but we may be more familiar with the upheaval that happened in the 1960s and 70s with civil rights and women's right movements causing rapid change (well, after centuries of struggle, things turned a corner) that left white men directionless. Focusing just on feminism here, when you've been raised to find a woman to marry who's a great cook, who's an angel in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, and a tiger in the bedroom, then how do you relate to this new version of women? How do you shift with the times when you're still being taught that real men dominate? Many dug in their heels and refused to change, and many more floundered a while trying to work towards a better relationship with the women in their lives.
The tendency then and now is to avoid offering sympathy to any "suffering" caused by this conundrum: these poor men having to learn to actually treat women like human beings, but that ignores the difficulty of forging a new path. It's not comparable to what women had to suffer through, but it is hard to adjust when things change around us. Left to their own devices, men went into the woods with drums or swung to the extremes of "sensitivity" in sometimes inappropriate displays of vulnerability or the other extreme of force and violence. It seems ridiculous that it took decades to develop some role models and an understanding of relating to women as persons, but it's not that outrageous considering it came after thousands of years of assumed and granted subordination. It was really recently that men were allowed to physically and sexually assault their wives because they were their property.
Now we find ourselves with a bit of a backlash with some "incels" having a sense of deserving a woman, "trad" wives willing to be ordered around, and even in mature, equitable hetero relationships, women still doing most of the housework. It's a really hard corner to turn, and we're still figuring it out.
Climate, Conflicts, and Covid
Now we're all facing another corner with a much sharper edge. The future looks so uncertain and could be very different from our expectations. We've had a very long period of stability in my part of the world, and a lot of us made plans as if that stability is a permanent fixture instead of just a lucky break. There have been a few economic downturns over the past few decades, but most of us in my parts haven't personally struggled with anything like older generations surviving the Great Depression or WWII.
It might help, maybe, that we've had less time to get used to our current trajectory. It wasn't that long ago that we were canning our own food. My parents were born in the 1920s, and had lots of stories of making do. It's possible we can regain that attitude and some lost skills. But young adults, in particular, have no clear path to walk. How do you plan for a future that is so unfathomably uncertain? It's not just political upheaval we're all feeling, but the burgeoning realization that what we see on the news happening elsewhere isn't just other people's problems. Severe weather could hit us at any time, destroying our homes and businesses, and food shortages are likely on the horizon at some point, while so many more illnesses are returning to take a toll.
Aside: One of the markers of the earliest signs of civilization is occupational specialization, so we can't all go full homesteader. We have to pool our talents and work together under some type of organizational structure that can best collect and distribute resources. That's what we have right now! Sure, it could be better (i.e. more socialist), but I'm very worried we'll soon elect someone who will destroy Canada the way some premiers are destroying the provinces: privatizing essential services to benefit the wealthy and screwing over the rest of us, virtually decimating the lowest economic quintile.
Kids Today!
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal looks at these young adults managing this anomic situation. The headline asks, "Many 30-somethings today are in a better financial position than their parents were at this age. So why are they having such a hard time growing up?" Inside, they say,
"What researchers once called a lag is starting to look more like a permanent state of arrested development. ... The longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all. A third of today's young adults will never marry. ... The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever had kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%."
The article suggests 30-somethings had some bad luck entering the job market in a recession followed by a pandemic, but median wages and overall wealth of this demographic are up compared to 25 years ago.
"This age group is in a better place financially, on average, than their parents were at this age. ... Young adults are significantly more pessimistic about the future than prior generations were. They see the world they are going to live in 20 years from now as really screwed up"
Ya think??
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| Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions in 1943 |
It's paralyzing to look to the future without any clear path to follow. We can look to the early 30s for how people managed when jobs were scarce and seasonal, and how government helped to save the day. We can learn from how people failed to prevent the atrocities when they saw signs in the late 1930s, and we can look to how we managed to eradicate diseases in the past to fix our recent blunders. But some of the upcoming problems are unprecedented. We've managed food shortages in the past, but only by moving food from one area to another. What happens when most of the current agricultural land stops producing? How do we keep building and re-building after storms destroy areas when we're short on lumber? And what do we do as we watch leaders make some of the worst decisions for a sustainable future. In Ontario, we can't seem to find any mechanism to stop Ford's plans to pave over farmland and wetlands!!
The article acknowledges "climate change, political polarization, AI, and a growing resentment of corporate power," but also points to expectations as part of the problem: "Generations before us didn't expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations." And later it's mentioned that the student debt load has more than doubled over 20 years.
A shift in attitude and expectation can be seen in one perspective from a parent of an adult who lives at home like "9% of those aged 30 to 40": "They want their daughter to have the freedom to pursue the life she wants rather than feeling, like they did, they she should submit to any job as long as it pays something."
I'm not sure if this is a better way to parent, but my folks didn't pay for things or help us out too much for fear of making us complacent or incapable. Between high school and university, I lived in a cheap, run-down house with a gaggle of friends and worked 12-14 hours days at a job I despised for three years, spending on nothing more than rent and food, in order to save up the 1/3 downpayment necessary to buy a house. Keep your eyes on the prize! Beyond any economic changes, I'm not sure how many kids would be willing to do that today. Come to think of it, however, I didn't know anyone else that was willing to do it then, either! I'm just an anomaly, so that's not key to it all. And there aren't many jobs that offer 1.5 time pay and allow limitless overtime anymore.
Another issue young adults face more today is being paralyzed with options, which makes it harder to know what to do. It's not just options for types of jobs or locations, but options for entertainment that seem necessary: "Inflation has raised the price of small luxuries, such as her Spotify subscription, but she doesn't want to give them up."
Change is Coming by Choice or Force
Roger Hallam wrote about a similar phenomenon from another angle yesterday, starting with a discussion from decades ago with someone's explanation of how useful slavery was butting up against Hallam's strong belief that everyone deserves basic human rights. A lot of us believe we deserve luxury vacations:
"Today we hear people say that they know flying is 'bad', but life is hard, and they need to fly off to take that holiday break; they need to fly for work It's just more convenient, a big help. But as we move into 2025, it is now clear we have reached 1.5°C of global warming, and unless there is a massive decrease in emissions by the relatively rich of the world, then hundreds of millions of mainly black people will lose their fundamental freedoms; their livelihoods and their lives. To fly then, like slavery, has to be absolutely immoral. It is wrong. Of course people will say that flying is different. Buying a slave was a direct act of violence while, when you fly, the harm is indirect and the violence is not real. Slave owners used to have a similar argument. They said violence only applies to action by whites on whites, and so violence to blacks did not count. But how people see morality changes. ... We have to realise that violence is violence regardless of whether it is direct or indirect. ... People don't know exactly who they will destroy, but they do know their action of emitting carbon will destroy innocent lives. This change in what we see as immoral is our next civilizational challenge. Just as in the past people had to understand that all people have basic rights, so we today have to understand that indirect harm violates those basic rights. ... Given the level of violence that we are now inflicting by creating carbon emissions, 99% of the time flying has to be seen as being as unacceptable as owning a slave. To think otherwise is to hid behind your privilege, just as slave owners did, to avoid accepting that what you are doing is obscene. ...
We have entered a new metaphysical reality where we are all the same. It is now an objective physical fact that everyone faces destruction from global climate breakdown. We need then to challenge not just the patronising story of 'us' giving up stuff for 'them'; we need to challenge the whole era-long-story that givng up stuff is, in fact, a cost. ... It can become the right thing to do, the new fashion, the new way to live. We can celebrate having more by having less. It's a choice. We can change our metaphysical outlook just as we can change our morality. In fact, we will have to change how we see the world in order to see some things, like slavery and now flying, for what they truly are: obscene. Doing so is now a matter of life or death.... for all our lives."
He focused on flying in this one, but there are many things individuals can do that can hit a tipping point of change. Yup, if we all stop flying it'll destroy the travel industry with a huge domino effect likely more pronounced in less developed countries. We need a long-term plan that helps people shift industries -- like training tar sand employees to work in renewable energy. It's complex, but not impossible. And it has to start today.
The entire culture has to evolve away from a capitalistic profit motive that hinges on speed, efficiency, and an achievement orientation that has spilled over from getting that promotion into displays of our collections of the best and brightest things and events, and move towards something much more collective, slower, and less accumulative if we hope to continue even just a few more decades. We've needed to do that for decades, pretty much since neoliberal capitalism of limitlessness and deregulation took hold.
But it's hardly surprising that young adults aren't moving out and having kids. One 30-something adult in the WSJ article explained, "I'm still figuring myself out as a priority."
Altogether, young adults might have more money but also higher debt loads, with parents that tried to make their lives easier so they didn't learn how to struggle, and who gave them everything they asked for so they didn't learn how to live without, with schools that bestowed participation trophies upon them so they didn't develop a sense of self-efficacy or a sense of self-empathy as they never found what they could and couldn't do, and all under a growing blanket of CO2 that they didn't start but most also didn't oppose, instead taking advantage of every convenience because they were never taught not to, and with expectations from media constantly pointing to the million things they should want and should aspire to be, which makes finding their own self, separate from it all, so much harder.
None of this is their fault, absolutely, but IS their problem.
If the automatic response is, "But this is how I was raised and this is what I learned to do, so I can't be expected to do anything differently," then that implies an inability to elevate the self beyond simple training, like an animal without such a large prefrontal cortex or a programmed automaton. We're better than that.
Dumbing Down the Electorate
A recent blogpost explains why college enrollment is declining for men, and points out the shift in male to female ratios from 2:1 in the 1950s, to 1:1 in the 1990s, to 2:3 now. The author suggests the reason is that there was a tipping point of women in the room that led to "male flight":
"For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! ... When the number of women hits 60%, the men who are there make a swift exist, and other men stop joining. ... When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important. Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice."
This also helps to explain the anti-intellectualist shift. If women love learning, it must be lesser than, and no longer worth our time. This image from the article mirrors some concerns in the WSJ piece and Hallam's perspective:
"I'm not going to listen to you" is seen by some -- this guy, at least -- as the epitome of masculinity, but really it's just petulant. It's de Beauvoir's description of childish adults who "try to escape anxiety by outsourcing the responsibility of freedom to an external authority." We can feel more free, a sense of radical freedom, once we accept responsibility for our place in it all. It means accepting some guilt and remorse, but that can help us get unstuck enough to enable movement towards better action in the future.
I do think this young adult paralysis came about from how we parent and school and entertain our kids, and it will be hard to overcome the training on top of staring down the face of uncertainty, but it's not impossible.
It starts with acknowledging we're in difficult times, which is scary. Realize that the future might not look like anything we've done in the past or it might be a mix of options that pre-dated us, so we have to be more open and less judgmental around what might not look good to others, and focus more on what will works best for the species (i.e. act with foresight, measuring carefully, instead of acting for dopamine hits from "likes" on social media). Being aware of what's driving personal decisions can help: How much do you really need that trip in order to relax or how much are you going in order to post pictures or tell stories afterwards to prove you're worthy of people's time in order to forge a sense of belonging? It can be useful to think a bit before any purchase. This new future might mean that kids live with their parents forever. It's already looking like our population will decline, which isn't a bad thing from a big picture lens as we're currently heading towards almost 10 billion in the next 25 years. What else?? We have to accept that what we're doing isn't working while avoiding the extremes of fearful isolation or enraged violence, and there's just no more time for digging in our heels, refusing to budge.
Out of the 70s emerged tons of hetero guys who do housework without feeling like a victim or saviour, and go to school despite the number of women in the room, and they treat women with the same respect they treat male friends without even thinking about it! They just get that women are people in a way that didn't happen so effortlessly in the 40s and 50s, that couldn't have happened as effortlessly. We hear more about the fringe, the incels and chads, but they're not the norm.
Change is hard, but something positive could come out of this current state of anomy. We're at the forefront of it all, so we get to choose the direction it all takes! It's all a bit unnerving to think about, but we're not alone. Imagine a future with fewer things but more community, and consider what it would take to get there. Lots of people have written about things that need to happen politically and commercially to stave off disaster, but there's lot of room for idea of what it will actually look like personally to live through it all. We need to imagine it before we can live it.
