Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive. How do you expect them to feel? This is amplified on social media and shown with "proof" from all corners of the world.
We've evolved from a place where hearing about bad news from the tribe was an advantage. It allowed us to adjust our life to take into account risks _seen_ by other folks in the tribe. On a world scale that is broken, but our brains haven't adjust yet. If you're in the US is little value in knowing there was a shark attack in New Zealand, or a mass shooting in London.
The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.
If someone is living a sad, scared life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem (again, social media makes this incredibly easy). Kids are unbelievably impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about random atrocities in the world does no good for their psyche.
this ignores the harsh realities for life as a young person in the west.
Sure, they are not scrounging for food nor is there widespread famine but politics is increasingly polarised. There is a climate problem looming and the youngest will deal with it, western citizens or otherwise.
Economies are tanking, job markets are topsy turvy not to mention the real estate problem in a lot of western countries.
These problems, while not as dire as the problems faced by those in the developing world, are still problems. You cannot hand-wave this away by comparing one's lot in life to that of a person with no limbs. That is unfairly reductive.
The challenge, as you point out, is how to deal with this information and that is where i feel modern society has failed.
There is the matter of proportionality. There are challenges and problems, some worse than prior generations and some better.
Putting the comparison aside. It is not healthy or helpful to teach children that they are doomed, the situation is hopeless, and their their future is destined to be miserable.
I wouldn't tell my child "your life will suck, and you would be better off dead" every morning when they wake up. Pessimists preach this, and children believe it.
They are seeing it every day on blast from every source of media. It's not just kids. Its young adults choosing not to get married or have kids. The reality is grim.
Progress is relative. Even if the young generation isn't that bad compared to the 1700s, it's bad compared to what it could directly be related to, which is the previous generation and the era of good and plenty and western hegemony.
I'm not claiming that people tell their children this verbatim. I agree that this is what they are effectively being blasted by from media sources and this is very detrimental.
I also think that the pessimism is vastly overstated. Constant comparison is a recipe for disappointment just as much as if you compared your life to a celebrity on social media. There are still vast sources for happiness and life satisfaction that are untappd
On an individual level, yes, I agree. But this is against human nature - which is to compare. It requires strong mindfulness to overcome and this is not available to the general population.
This isn't "they have a BMW and I have a Corolla." The basic things are further and further out of reach.
Again, if you say to someone "well at least you aren't a slave" they'll scoff at you. We've progressed to a certain point and are on the verge of regressing if we haven't already.
>The basic things are further and further out of reach.
I assume you are talking specifically about middle class American issues in the last couple decades. Even so, this is really really hard to separate reality from imagination, and avoid the biases of looking at the negatives and ignoring the positives. You really have to take a deep dive on specific topics.
I often hear people talk about home ownership as a prime example. Home ownership is indeed lower today than it was 10-15 years ago, but people ignore the fact that tons of people that bought houses when it was easier were foreclosed on and lost them! Home ownership is higher across all ages than they were any time before the 70s and within a few percent of where they have been since. [1][2] At the same time, the country has urbanized, moving to cities where it is much harder to own a home[3].
People also have a major bias due to social mobility. For people who's parents owned a house and they don't, it seems like everything is falling out of reach. They don't have the perspective of the equal number of people who are in the opposite situation, where they are homeowners and their parents weren't.
It is really really hard to make an apples to apples comparison of "quality of life" across generations.
For example, you can look back just 10-20 years and see significant progress in civil rights, homicide rates, and social services. Medicaid didn't even exist before 65' and has undergone a number of large expansions since. It is easy to forget little things like 2+ million boomers were forcibly drafted to go fight in a foreign war.
How do you weigh that against a completely different metric like the homeownership for people in their 20s. I make this not to say that things are easier or harder, but to say that the entire process of general comparison is impossible, because people experience only one life and the grass is always greener on the other side.
I do think that when you look at the specific topics in detail, things are not nearly as bad as the pessimists proclaim.
I think the single biggest factor working against the happiness of younger generations is a lack of community, in person social interactions, and relatedly mental health. This is where the numbers are very clearly showing a huge difference for younger people.
I'm not so sure your data supports your conclusion. On homeownership, you argue more are moving to cities - but that supporting article doesn't address ownership, it just says "moved to." Not "purchased property." The first article pretty much disproves your point - young adults are delaying home purchasing, and only catch up 5 years later. Which is consistent: young people can't afford the same thing until much later. The homeownership rate is inconclusive as well. It pretty much supports the huge drop in owners living in their property the last decade. This DESPITE extremely low interest rates. The 80s it makes sense because of high interest rates - in a period of low interest rates, homeownership should have exploded. it didn't.
Now as interest rates rise and houses are still overpriced, the difficulties will multiply.
> People also have a major bias from due to social mobility. For people who's parents owned a house and they don't, it seems like everything is falling out of reach. They don't have the perspective of the equal number of people who are in the opposite situation, where they are homeowners and their parents weren't.
Social mobility is key - but social mobility has significantly slowed down. There is a stark divide with millennials - the college educated have done just about the same as boomers, but the non-college educated have done worse.
> For example, you can look back just 10-20 years and see significant progress in civil rights, homicide rates, and social services. Medicaid didn't even exist before 65' and has undergone a number of large expansions since. It is easy to forget little things like 2+ million boomers were forcibly drafted to go fight in a foreign war.
You can go back and forth with qualitative comparisons. Boomers didn't have a global pandemic or a recession that matched 2008. Inflation now is matching the 80s, so that argument goes out. Iraq and Afghanistan exist, and the largest attack on US soil was committed. Oh, the cold war? Yea Russia is still threatening nuclear war and we have the largest war in Europe since World War 2.
In any case, the numbers that matter prove the point: generations are not doing better than their predecessors for the first time in a long time. Millennials are slower to homeownership, slower to marriage, have to get more educated to compete, etc. These are all quantitative.
The pissing contest doesn't matter much if people are storming the capitol. People are unhappy, for good reason. Telling them they're just alarmist is just sticking your head in the sand. There's a reason fascist politics are back and socialism is gaining ground - people are struggling, more of them are, and more are becoming desperate.
I relied on the ownership charts for my ownership claims and the urbanization chart for the urbanization claims. For total ownership we are talking about a 1% difference from 10 years ago and 4% down from the all time US peak which was a historic bubble.
For 20-25 home ownership we are talking about a 5% change from bubble peak and maybe a 2% change from the average the last few decades.
It does suck being on the downward trend, and this is quantitatively lower than the peak rates. It qualitatively sucks that low interest rates didn't help. I personally think this is because homes weren't built in urban areas where more of the population resides due to zoning.
At the end of the day, we are still talking about a couple of percent difference so far. I share the concern that things could keep going and get worse
To put it in perspective; children in the west use phones with lithium mined by children in poor countries, and wear make up with mica mined by children in poor countries. Not saying that makes their problems invalid, but gratitude has been scientifically proven to increase happiness and we do have some things to be grateful for. Unfortunately telling people to me grateful is for some reason seen as annoying to most. I'm no Christian but that was one big positive of Christianity-- the focus on gratitude and skills to help one ensure stress and unhappiness
Of course there are challenges and problems. There always will be. The important thing is to teach the youth and give them confidence that they can solve these problems instead "hand-wave" them away in a negative way as pessimists tend to do.
There will always be trials and tribulations. The ones that solve those are the ones that truly believe they can. The more blind optimism we instill in folks the more confidence they will have to try and tackle the seemingly impossible (they never are) problems.
Dude, you blogged about being super thrilled about your garage door opener. Don't let the rest of us drag you down, but also don't presume to have figured the exact mental attitude that leads to successful outcomes. Not everything is peachy keen.
Man that was a good day! No one is dragging me down, nor am I saying everything is peachy keen. I do however think it's important how we present ourselves, and our problems to the youth both IRL and on social media.
"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."
Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. Sorry it can't just all be sunshine and roses like you prefer, but women in this country are about to lose a fundamental human right, so maybe "looking on the bright side" is not the appropriate disposition for these times.
Sure it is. It mostly always is. Of course we have more work to do for women, POCs, whatever the other oppressed groups are out there, but ignoring and brushing off the progress made in the last century is sad. We've made great strides and will continue to.
Climate change, increased Cost of living, etc. - Do you really need data for this? About the abortion thing, just visit the page of a random media outlet. It will be among the first 10 articles.
These are problems, yes. But how did they "wreck the world". It is these kind of outlandish takes that are pervasive on social media and give no context or relativism to the current problems of the world.
Of course we have problems. There will always be problems. Instead focus on giving the younger generation confidence that they can solve the problems by being optimistic about these things. I'm not saying to ignore these things. But instead recognize how good we actually have it, and how powerful and creative we are in solving insanely hard problems.
Thank you. A lot of people I know act like the problems of today are somehow astronomically worse than they have ever been, unsolvable, completely new, and in-addition-to all previous generation's problems ("nothing has improved in a hundred years!").
An acquaintance of mine told me over drinks, after complaining a lot about the current world and in all seriousness, that "I don't think there has ever been a worse time to be alive." I've heard similar sentiments, less drastically put, from quite a few people in person and all over social media. He wouldn't even backtrack after I started pushing him to seriously describe why life is somehow worse now than it has ever been.
It's infuriating, like seriously, you'd rather be born a random person 100 years ago instead of today? I can't even imagine someone wanting to be born a random person 50 years ago vs today (unless by random you mean "random middle class white heterosexual man in a western country" in which case, maybe your odds were better 50 years ago).
You'd have to be completely ignorant of almost all human history AND brainwashed by social media to come to this conclusion. Unfortunately I think this describes way too many people.
The phrase "wreck the world" is obviously referencing climate change and environmental degradation. The danger of carbon emissions was well understood in the 1980's, yet we still have a large portion of the population who believe it is some elaborate conspiracy instead of an urgent crisis. Guess what generation most of those people belong to.
I don't think anyone would choose to live during World War 2 or the great depression. The idea that all generations are the same and there problems are the same is just a worthless platitude. Never before in history has humanity had the knowledge or capability of ending itself like it does now. That can't be ignored.
>> Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it.
This is the exact kind of BS the parent comment is referring too. The world is full of problems but it’s never been better for most people in most ways.
Your comment represents the same worthless platitude.
It doesn't make sense to say "yea your life is significantly worse than your parents, but hey at least you aren't a slave building the pyramids at Giza."
The fact is it's relative. People are, in general, worse off than their parents were in the west at this point in time. That matters.
Being slightly economically less well off (although still doing exceedingly well and having lots of opportunity) is not the same thing as “boomers wrecked the world”. There are people in very tough situations and as a society we need to help them more but the vast majority of young people (and I say this as one who isn’t doing exceedingly well) need to grow up, cheer up, and start taking more responsibility for things. My parents may have been able to buy a house, but there is much much more about their younger lives that I am glad I don’t have to deal with.
Younger people will be the ones enduring a transformation of our economy as they attempt to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.
Also, not sure what "grow up" means in this context. Quietly endure injustices and environmental catastrophe instead of speaking out and taking action?
I sincerely hope you don't actually believe this. Reductionist statements like this which attempt to blame an entire generation for a world that few if any of them had any control over.
"Boomers" tried to scrape together a life and provide for a family within the rules of the world where they lived. They elected people to solve the problems that they knew about at the time, just like every other generation.
"Boomers" is just shorthand for the older generation who treated the environment like a toilet, pillaged the welfare state, jailed anyone who wanted to get high in their free time and made hating/mocking LGBTQ people a national pastime (to name a few examples).
I'd say #notallboomers but it's implied unless you're being willfully obtuse.
“Boomers” I suppose are responsible for passing the clean air and clean water act which had the effect of essentially ending pollution as we know it in the US.
They also essentially created the welfare state…
They were and are pretty bad on effective drug policy.
LGB discourse went off the rails when progressives added all the other letters. To be fair, it’s not just boomers who are deeply concerned with the political religion of queerness.
You forgot a couple letters, each of which represents actual human beings who have historically been denied fundamental rights and have been subject to violence, including state violence.
Also, your understanding of the origin of the welfare state is way off the mark. Sometimes, the best thing a person can do is spend a little time studying basic history.
Wait are we not still treating the environment like a toilet? Do people younger than boomers not create mountains of plastic trash that will be here hundreds of years after their bones turn to dust? Do they not use phones with lithium mined by child slaves, and wear make up with mica mined by child slaves? Do they monitor how much has and electricity they are using? I'm not a boomer but I know enough to know the younger generations are not ready to sacrifice present comfort for future generations
and young people know they need to fix it - by misrepresenting and blowing every issue out of proportion and throwing names around so when actual problems arise most people have little more than a deep sense of tired antipathy towards others.
We've evolved from a place where hearing about bad news from the tribe was an advantage. It allowed us to adjust our life to take into account risks _seen_ by other folks in the tribe. On a world scale that is broken, but our brains haven't adjust yet. If you're in the US is little value in knowing there was a shark attack in New Zealand, or a mass shooting in London.
The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.
If someone is living a sad, scared life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem (again, social media makes this incredibly easy). Kids are unbelievably impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about random atrocities in the world does no good for their psyche.