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Millennials, Gen Z, and Our Times
If the 20th century was a slum, the 21st may turn out to be a slough of despond.
Many members of my young generation are basketcases — ever teetering on the edge of breakdown, strangely aware and unaware of their own condition. Some seek redemption in politics; some immerse themselves in subcultures and fandom; some wallow in their self-loathing. Most simply drift through life, shrugging and LOLing and YOLOing in that familiar digital way.
Because I’m more than willing to be sucked into the black hole of Millennial despair, I’ve spent a bit of time, in recent months, lurking in the post-liberal-right universe. It’s been instructive. Among young traditionalists, the prevailing nostalgia is not quite the same sense of longing that produced the Trump voter — not a nostalgia for the postwar suburb, but a nostalgia for life in a thriving market town circa 1880. These people, by and large, don’t yearn for “good factory jobs” or blame the world’s problems on immigration and outsourcing. They yearn for the shire, and they believe that economic processes have homogenized the meaning out of life. They see capitalism as a Faustian bargain — all the objects a person could want (and then some), acquired at the cost of community, family, and meaningful work. Such people decry the suburbs, the decadence and vulgarity of popular culture, the unpredictability and unreliability of service jobs, and the virtual necessity of two-income households. They even decry the average American Christian’s way of life, which they find uninspired and isolating. They say they want families, but that they don’t have the time or support to raise them. They say they want love, but that they don’t know where to find it. And so on and so forth — ennui for pages and pages.
I’ve also spent some time talking to self-proclaimed socialists. (I am at a university, so what choice do I have?) Oddly enough, these socialists claim to be enemies of centralization. The centralization they lament is not the political kind — not the administrative state we right-wingers love to bash. Instead, they direct their ire at the economic order, which they, like the Christian traditionalists, perceive to be impersonal and alienating. They speak wistfully of “workers’ cooperatives” in much the way arch-Catholics speak wistfully of the close-knit, Latin-mass parishes of yore. The post-liberal right and radical left have a strange sort of symmetry.
Brooding and uneasy young person that I am, I’m inclined to agree with some of these complaints. But I part ways in the move from hand-wringing to policy-making. Even if our economic system is to blame for our miseries (and I’m not convinced it is), it doesn’t follow that jettisoning that economic system will bring the old institutions roaring back. Perhaps our pre-industrial forebears really were happier, but in seeking to emulate them, we overlook one crucial fact: they knew nothing else. As Aristotle noted, all humans are creatures of habit and expectation; and our habits and expectations are those of a liberal and capitalist society. Depriving unhappy people of material prosperity won’t make them happy; it’ll make them unhappy and poor. This is because happiness emerges from proper habituation (or virtue, if I may use that un-PC word) — something most modern people have gone without. Breaking up Amazon won’t change that.
What to do, then? Nothing. I don’t think anything can be done. Marco Rubio and the First Things crowd can suggest all the industrial policies they want. They can throw out as many proposals as they desire, comforting themselves with the thought of “doing something.” In the end, it’ll amount to little more than nibbling around the edges.
All we can do is reflect on our peculiar situation as victims of our own success.
Published in Culture
Go to church. Volunteer.
Good post. I’m not inclined to attribute these problems primarily to economic issues, though I agree that economic difficulties, particularly those faced by young people and the working class, are very difficult and have many consequences.
I was particularly interested by the discussion in the article that you linked, which was posted by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, though it was actually a letter from an Evangelical Millennial. He attends a church (Southern Baptist), but has little connection with the people there, most of whom are older and live in a wealthier suburb. His closest personal connections are with his non-Christian coworkers at a coffee shop, with which he reports a “thriving community of solidarity and support,” though “[t]hey almost all fully embrace woke ideology and left-wing politics,” are “all-in on feminism . . . and regularly espouse anti-male sentiments,” and “[m]any are really into astrology/tarot and other vaguely witchy things.”
He calls them “my pagan coworkers” and reports that “most have a negative view of Christianity as an oppressive, patriarchal, bigoted religion.” And yet, “[t]hese people feel more like family to me than most people at my own church,” in part because he lives farther away from the folks at his church, and in part because the folks at his church are married with children.
I find this so very, very sad. This young Christian’s closest connections and sense of community derive from his personal relationships with anti-Christian pagans, based on things such as helping each other move, watching each other’s pets, movie nights, and going to bars.
Frankly, that’s not the way that a young Christian is supposed to be living. I don’t blame this young fellow. He’s stuck in a pagan culture. The overall culture has shifted significantly in this direction, but my impression is that the shift is much more pronounced among the young. I think that this is principally a result of the radicalization and feminization of the education system.
Young people are not taught to prioritize marriage and family. They end up living like Ross, Monica and the other kids from Friends. They are not shouldering responsibility, their priorities are all wrong, and they’re stuck.
I don’t want to blame them too much. They’ve been taught to despise traditional values — actually, even my generation (GenX) was taught much of the same. It’s really tragic.
If you take a look at the linked piece, you’ll see that the writer has done precisely that. But it’s not enough.
And if he convinced his friends to do the same? Maybe it would build his community more.
I’m not sure I agree. There’s a tendency to blame single people for being single — as if being single is merely a lifestyle choice. But being single is the default condition of humanity. It’s very, very hard not to be single, particularly when one never meets other eligible single people and never learns the social habits which, once upon a time, led to marriage and family.
There’s one good place for a Christian to find a spouse, and that’s college. After college, the pool shrinks to almost nothing. Churches tend to be dominated by families and the elderly, and workplace romance is verboten nowadays. Young people with similar interests and values are scattered so widely that their chances of meeting each other are almost nil.
Despair, if you follow tradition, is a sin.
A life well-lived is full of exciting expectations. Millennials wallow in self-pity, their expectations eroded by cynicism and circumstances. They have college degrees but no skills. They have college debt but worse than that, they have credit card debt, and both act as economic anchors foundering their futures. And worse yet, they have tender feelings, made worse by overbearing parents who cannot sever their apron strings. A generation ago, most young people were driven by pride and a need for independence to leave the family home no matter how sordid the options. I moved into an ancient and crumbling triple decker with way too may occupants. Lingering nestings were driven from the nest in those days, a burden to aging parents who needed to prepare for life after retirement.
The word I hear is how unfair things are. Where’s that promised lucrative career that follows college? Where is my soulmate? Why do I still sleep in the same room I slept in in middle school?
Too many millenials are stuck in a middle school mentality. Let’s face it; they are slow to face adulthood. However, now that the gray hairs are emerging and Mom and Dad are seriously talking about downsizing, the millennial generation is starting to perk up. This probably has something to do with a robust economy, but it also has to do with internal clocks, biology and a general sense of independence.
It’s about time. Every generation has to grow up eventually. So drop the self pity, take care of your finances, get to work and expect something of your life. The rest is easy.
If only it were.
I feel sad for these Miniver low-achievers. The change they seek is within. One can admire the Medieval monk working in his cell for God and easily overlook the part where he would otherwise likely starve to death. His spirituality was in part pressed upon him. We like the look of the past, but it really stunk, literally and figuratively. Our monk was dogged by the cold, plagued by vermin, and eaten by infestations. His meals were ascetic mostly because of access, not choice.
wrt to families and not having time to support /raise them, I say poppycock! You make the time because the kid demands that you step up. And you quit hanging out with your friends for movie night. You’re lucky to have time to get to church every week to nod at the other parents who have achieved actual adulthood and have meaning in their lives – the family is the meaning.
This has been a Shut Up and Color in Safespace™ production, and was brought to you through a generous donation from BoomCo: The World is Ours™.
No actual Millennials were harmed in the making of this rant.
Part of the problem is the illusion that it used to be easy. Certainly it would be easier during one era or another, but it was never easy.
Worse, the assumption that it was easy is the worst kind of envy because it doesn’t act as a goad, it acts as a reason to not try; dwelling on whether the system is rigged against you is far and away more destructive than any rigged system could ever be.
This is true. Life was never easy. But people had practice in navigating life.
Running a marathon is not easy. Even the best of athletes is invariably reduced to a panting, sweating, jelly-legged puddle by the end of the thing. Still, by virtue of training, a runner knows what to expect and how to cope with it. For him, running a marathon may not be easy, but it is routine.
The day-to-day realities of ordinary existence used to train. They didn’t make life easy; they made it routine.
Hmm. You’re not wrong, though part of the advantage was fewer options.
Women married and men worked because those were far and away the best choices of the few choices. Considerable social pressure was put on the young to go that way. Which was torpedoed with glee during the ’60s and ’70s which has made everyone so much happier and content.
It is also true that the hippy free-love dads and professional-first moms aren’t much for guiding their children towards marriage and self-sacrifice.
Hoo boy. I have a lot of questions. Let me see if I can get some of them down.
Can Ricochet sign you to an exclusive 5 year deal? Do you know any other people who are this smart and want to subscribe? Will you join my church? Are you starting a revolution and need a cadre with hardware store skills?
Ha! Thanks. I’m flattered.
Alas, I’m not starting a revolution — not any time soon. I’m more likely to run from a crowd than join one.
The system is rigged against you. That is just a fact of life. The issue is people feel they are special and not required to navigate a rigged system.
The first three things I mentioned are hard; working, being responsible with money and having goals. If you tackle those things, it’s amazing how despair fades away. You become resilient to life’s setbacks.
Women are attracted to a man with his act together who takes on life with a plan. If you live with your parents to bank cash, that’s one thing. If you do it to maintain a lifestyle on minimal income, that’s quite another.
In one of Heinlein’s SF books, a Martian is asked (by an earth person) why he and others of his race just sit around all day, rather than building anything or doing anything.
The Martian’s reply is: “My fathers have labored, and I am weary.”
Psychological truth there, maybe, and not just for Martians…
I read this and I think, “there’s just not enough suffering in the modern world.” Suffering (or even struggle), once alleviated, leads to gratitude. Gratitude is the foundation of happiness.
I am in the 50s, so I have to get into my way back machine and remember what my 20s where like.
My 20s were hard. I was single during my 20s. I met my wife a few months after turning 30. I A few weeks into the relationship I felt a sense of relief. All of the, to quote Art Garfunkel, “Looking for the Right One” had come to an end.
Yes. There are advantages to being young. But lots of disadvantages too. When I was in my 20s, I hated my job. I had never had a job that I enjoyed. Working was worse than eating stale pizza. But I felt like I had to do it until I could find a better job.
Then, again, when I was 30, I found a new job (a few months before I met my wife). Suddenly, I was happy. In my opinion, if a man has a woman he loves (and she loves him back) and a reasonably good paying job that he doesn’t dread, he’s got it made. Maybe that’s oversimplifying. But for me those two things have made me so much happier.
Getting back to the current young Americans. I have a very young cousin who is 30 years old. He is doing great. He has a PhD in engineering and a great job. A few years ago when he was still working on his PhD in Texas, he met his girlfriend (now wife) and they now have a one year old baby girl.
It wasn’t always this way with my cousin. He was always an exceptional student. But he went through high school without a girlfriend of much of a dating life. But he hung in there and now it’s all good.
My cousin, like me, in an atheist. But I have a very religious friend who is a few years older than I am. We met in Church back in the early 1990s. He was religious enough to not consider even dating a woman who wasn’t Christian. But Catholics and Presbyterians and all kinds of “Christians” didn’t count as “real” Christians.
So, this limited his dating options. But when he was 47 years old he met a 31 year old woman. They had a long distance relationship for six months, got married and now have 3 kids.
So, I think happiness might very well be “out there” for most of the millennials, just not right yet. These things take time.
Well that’s been my own experience. Most of my close friends since college and after, while not pagans, were lapsed Catholics mostly from from Catholic families where it was religion was a habit without meaning. Because we had other things in common and they were very nice people in general I didn’t realise how deep the anti Christian feeing was. It took the referendum last year for me to see how much anger and bitterness some of them had. I lost some friends.
Perhaps I could have cultivated some practising religious friends in college, but I would have thought of friendship as a spontaneous thing that just happens through circumstance. I didn’t realise what an endangered species we were becoming in the late 1990’s so that I shouldn’t expect to meet people with similar values to me when I worked in a bookstore or went to niteclub. Besides I didn’t really know what my own values were. Maybe I was the one that wasn’t right about things. To be honest I still don’t know. I’m the one single at 42 while my group of anti-christs are married with kids or otherwise settled.
Hey, K. See your way to listening to my PoMoCon podcasts–you may find people worth following.
This is a good point that this generation is missing – reason without faith includes the head, but leaves out the heart. It’s the selfie generation, and chucking all the conveniences to live off the land will still leave despair if there is no connectedness. Churches and community services provided that in those pre-industrial days, as well as taught an outward focus, rather than inward.
A bigger picture emerges from the line, “breaking up Amazon won’t matter.” I just ordered a new book called “Don’t Be Evil” by Rana Faroohar. These younger generations may be recognizing the very things that are creating the despair and rejecting them, and that is a good thing. You just have to experience the misery to get to some solutions.
Tragic and long term consequences on society a.k.a. The Demographic Winter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZeyYIsGdAA
A friend of mine and I have formed a non-religious “community.” About 9 years ago I adopted a total vegetarian diet (no animal products of any kind) for health reasons, not for animal rights. So, “vegan” junk food like tofuturky is not included.
In 2017 I was in the process of leaving a Woke Leftist Presbyterian Church where I was on the board of elders. I was on the Board of elders for this Church even though I was reasonably new to the church and have never been entirely convinced of the central claims of Christianity. I was attending a Left leaning Church even though I have always been a Right of Center guy because my wife wanted to attend. But then she became disillusioned with the church too, for different reasons.
Right at this time I met a woman, Sue, online at a healthy-nutrition based web site. Her mother had recently had a heart attack and she wanted to redouble her efforts at healthy vegetarian eating in order to end up like her mother. We decided to form an eating group focused on healthy vegetarian eating.
Each month about 25 to 35 of us “healthy eating vegetarians” (no potato chips or Oreo cookies allowed) gather together for a meal. Each of us brings an entrée or a dessert dish.
There are 2 heart attack survivors in the group. Sue’s mother is not one of them. She still eats unhealthfully. But we encourage each other to continue on our healthy eating ways, even as we are tempted by Outback Steakhouse and Red Lobster and BBQ restaurants.
So, people can, through social media, start up communities where people are bound together. Our group is not very religious. Most of us are non-believers. But it’s not the main issue. Regardless of our views about Zeus or Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, people gather together in the quest for staying away from kidney failure or being a stroke victim.
Hiking clubs are another form of community that doesn’t have to center around the divine. Same for board gaming clubs.
In response to Heavy’s comment above and the Post, it isn’t all gloom and doom because social media says it is, and that includes millennial, Gen-Xers and whatever X’er category you are – people always find a way. Interesting how with the big tech giants and everything going apps and automation, the younger generations are seeing value in community, small co-op type businesses, eating healthier, being responsible for the environment, this is all pushing away from group-think – consume consume – and robotic cooks! So keep at it! The pendulum swings back for a reason.
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