The rise in unhappiness among the young
It’s almost a cliche now that unhappiness has been rising among young people. Surveys indicate that it’s a real phenomenon, and the suicide rate has increased sharply.
Social media is often blamed, but as this article describes, the research on that is conflicted and unclear.
There’s an “all-of-the-above” quality to theories about why this is happening. Pressure about grades, social isolation, the declining role of community and religion—you name it, it’s been theorized about.
My own observation, for what it’s worth, is that in addition to all that, two somewhat contradictory forces have combined to feed into the feeling of angst among the young. The first is the idea, fostered in part by social media, that other young people are having a lot more fun than the somewhat-depressed teen looking in at them from the outside. Of course, as the 120+-year-old poem “Richard Cory” describes, looks can be deceiving, and those who appear to be having fun often suffer secret grievances, sometimes of a very serious (and even suicidally fatal, in the case of Richard Cory) sort. But it’s appearances that other people see, and comparisons can be harsh and—well, depressing:
…he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
Along with this idealizing of the more-perfect lives of others as viewed in social media, there’s an availability of communities online that glorify (perhaps unintentionally) and instruct on self-harm. There are many websites for what’s known as cutters and for anorexics, for example. These can become arenas for competition in who can be most symptomatically extreme, or for instruction in better ways to outwit authorities (for example, gaming the weigh-ins for anorexics), and that cannot be a good thing.
It used to be that teens who were gay had a hard time, and those were felt they were transgender were quite isolated and alone. There was little information and acceptance, and that was not good. But now teens are confronted with an almost constant barrage of information that could have the effect of making young people almost constantly question their sexual identities even if they otherwise wouldn’t be having doubts. Not good either.
The article mentions something political as well, and it’s quite a statistic:
Sixty-one percent [of young people] have a favorable view of the word “socialism”…and 50 percent would prefer to live in a socialist country. This radicalism should concern many readers. But perhaps young people are flocking to socialism not out of intellectual commitment, but because they are looking for somewhere to belong.
I’m not at all sure those polls are accurate, but I am pretty sure that young people are far more inclined to favor socialism than older people are. Yes, there’s a desire to belong—what I’ve called the “circle dance” (after Kundera). But there’s also a profound ignorance of history and economics, as well as a concerted drive in education to teach young people that the US and the Western world are evil, wrong, and bad, and that they are guilty as participants of the culture to which they belong. This almost certainly plays a role in feelings of gloom, as well as looking to something like socialism for a way to overcome that guilt and make amends.
50 percent would prefer to live in a socialist country.
Looking for Daddy to pay for stuff. I would be willing to make a small donation to help with air fares. One way, of course.
First of all “Socialism” is a bait and switch term, because while students are being sold on supposedly benign Socialism, or “Democratic Socialism”–as practiced in, say, Scandinavia,** what those who are indoctrinating them are really after implementing is some form of far less benign Socialism leading to Communism, or Communism itself.
This longing to live under Socialism has been taught, it isn’t spontaneous, and this longing couldn’t exist if students were taught what actually happened in countries where Socialism/Communism was tried to be implemented.
First and foremost, students should have been taught/equipped with a very broad and firm grasp of what took place in the old U.S.S.R., and in Communist China as well.
Next, I might add, of what happened in Nazi Germany, since the acronym NAZI stands for the “National Socialist German Worker’s Party” ; the Nazis were Socialists too.
I note, as well, that you never see Pol Pot’s Cambodia included as an example of trying to implement Socialism/Communism. But what else was his policy of driving city dwellers out into the countryside to farm (and to be executed or die) supposedly as a way of trying to restructure society into a classless, agrarian egalitarian one, starting from “Year Zero,” than an attempt to impose Socialism/Communism on the country of Cambodia and it’s people?
Then, of course, there are the examples of both Cuba and Venezuela.
I have seen far too many Lefties praising the “progress” and wonderful conditions in Cuba to last a lifetime.
An honest look at and recounting of the implementation of Socialism/Communism in those two countries, and the conditions that have resulted, should also be taught to students.
Honestly, fairly, and thoroughly teach all of those examples in detail and in depth, and then see how many young people would like to live under Socialism/Communism.
** I note that those Scandinavian countries, that are held up as shining examples of how beneficial Socialism is, are faltering under both the weight of their Socialist policies and the required budgets, and their deliberate welcoming of hordes of hostile, unwilling to integrate Muslims.
Things are not going to end well for the countries of Scandinavia.
Two accounts of changes in sexual behaviors which appear to me may bear on the kernel of the difficulties: 1) https://mobile.twitter.com/lisawade/status/1112077460542099456
and 2) https://m.theepochtimes.com/the-secret-to-lasting-love-is-sexual-inequality_2797066.html
No wonder at all. A life without purpose is a torture. The first generation whose life is so comfortable that they literally have nothing to want must be the most unhappy in history. They are godless, and this depraves their life any higher meaning. I know this all too well, being in different stages of depression since adolescence and up to my middle twenties, when I discovered transcendence. But this happened only after clinical depression so deep that it required hospitalization.
Perhaps if they did some work, they’d get some of the positive feedback doing a good job can provide.
I definitely think a big part of it is the lack of personal interaction and connection. This is greatly exacerbated by social media and just the internet in general. And probably more directly the smart phone of the last ten years or so. The sight of people immersed in their phones while sitting in silence with multiple other people is just bizarre.
The other issues mentioned are part of it also the fake lives put forth on social media make it seem like we all are losers in comparison and also the lack of independence of young people to explore and experience new things only drives them to their devices even more.
I’m curious about the strain added to the teen years by the probing, questioning, and out-right promoting of gay/trans life choices. I’m old. I admit it. But thinking back to the experience around “sexual experimentation/discovery” in the 60’s-70’s, I have to think that new complications aren’t making things easier on teens, especially those at the margins or those that Sarah Hoyt calls the “odds.”
I think social media is a problem. Even my son’s kids, who are heavily into athletics, spend a lot of time staring at iPhones. My nephew and his son came out last year about this time from Chicago. He was going through a difficult divorce and he needed a break. They stayed a week. The son loved Arizona and wants to come back. The son, however, who is a nice kid but has seen a lot of stress, spent his time staring at his smart phone. Not social at all, although he loved going to the shooting range. They were out of Chicago in late March so anything was an improvement.
We played outside until dark every day unless we were doing homework. I feel so sorry for these kids.
I think a factor in both the unhappiness and the attraction to socialism is: the proletarianization of many kinds of professional work. Here’s something that Peter Drucker wrote, presciently, 50 years ago:
“Individually he (the knowledge worker) is an “employee”…but the knowledge worker sees himself as just another “professional,” no different from the lawyer, the teacher, the preacher, the doctor, the government servant of yesterday. He has the same education. He has more income. He has probably greater opportunities as well…This hidden conflict between the knowledge worker’s view of himself as a “professional” and the social reality in which he is the upgraded and well-paid successor to the skilled worker of yesterday underlies the disenchantment of so many highly educated young people with the jobs available to them.”
Related thoughts and further Drucker excerpt at my post TechnoProletarians?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/52410.html
I plan on posting about this again in the near future, with an emphasis on the connection between work environments and pro-socialism beliefs.
How about all the young people who have gotten a degree that they–and their parents–have been told is the key to a good job and upward mobility, but find that they can’t get that good job or that mobility, and are stuck in what is basically a dead end job?
Then, to make things even worse, having to continue living with their parents because they are unable to move out on their own–or to buy a car, marry, or have kids–because of the crushing burden of having to try to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars they borrowed to pay for their essentially worthless degree?
It would seem to me that situations like this would make for a whole lot of “unhappiness.”
Then there is the isolation that technology and electronics have ushered in.
The lack of religion, it seems to me, also has a part to play here.
In the past many more young people could find solace in religion, could place their predicament in a religious context, see that others in the past–as recorded in the Bible–also had their problems and obstacles, their bad times.
They had their faith to fall back on, and likely a friendly pastor to give them advice and support. Now, for an increasing number of the young, that source of support, solace, and encouragement is gone.
Socialism, then becomes a panacea, something to make things right again, to fix all their problems–free everything, “fairness,” and equality too.
Who could resist?
Also: a lot of kids are under extreme pressure, from around the 6th grade if not earlier, to organize their entire lives around getting into a “good college”…hobbies not picked because they’re something you like to do, but rather because someone thinks they will look good on a college resume.
Also: a lot of kids are under extreme pressure, from around the 6th grade if not earlier, to organize their entire lives around getting into a “good college”…
That might explain it for some of the children of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie. That’s 15% of the youth population.
Art Deco…”That might explain it for some of the children of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie. That’s 15% of the youth population.”
Surely, there are multiple causes for the phenomenon we are discussing.
Among those who *aren’t* in the “professional-managerial bourgeoisie”, the feeling of “no future unless you’re a college graduate” probably plays a role.
Here is a story that impinges on the current generation’s confusion about sex, family, religion, etc.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/modern-family-modernity/
As pointed out by the blogger, there are two ways to look at this.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
David Foster,
I think you have posted the Drucker quote before, but I still can’t make sense of it! Could you please further define what Drucker means by ‘professional’, ‘knowledge worker’, and ‘skilled worker’. Because that short excerpt does not make it clear.
Back to Neo’s main post. Yes, there is kind of ‘perfect storm’ of pressures on today’s kids. There’s way too much harmful information and modeling out there. Social media is dreadful. But there have always been people who have prettier, richer, easier lives – or so it appears… I think there is something much deeper going on though, and that is that so many of our kids are forced to live with some pretty big lies. Their parents tell them they’d die for them – but they can’t stay married for them and give them what they most need, a stable home.
Their parents tell them they are the most important thing in their lives – and then leave them in child care all day, or schools that tell them their country is a terrible place.
The culture tells them childhood is a time of sacred innocence – and then bombards them with decadence. And their parents can’t seem to do anything to stop it.
They’re told they are unique, precious and special – but they know perfectly well they wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t been ‘convenient’, too.
And the ‘culture’ approves of that.
It’s not this way for all kids and all families but for many, many, kids the difference between what they are told about their lives and how things really are is crazy making. No wonder so many of them are tatting up. They’re scrawling their psychic pain all over their bodies for us to see.
So many lies – they might as well be living in the old Soviet Union – no wonder socialism sounds good.
Anomie is a bitch.
David Foster I think your right. Boiled down they are living in an atmosphere in which every decision, in their view, is potentially disastrous.
Sergey,
Glad to hear you worked through your struggles and have embraced life.
The hair trigger landmines the Left has very deliberately sown throughout the dating scene and relationships between the sexes has got to contribute mightily to the unhappiness of today’s young people.
P.S.–I can see why this souring of relationships—more tentative than ever, and now infused with heightened doubt and danger—would make any number of young men just give up on dating and marriage; it’s is just too risky, and just not worth it.
This blow against family formation, happiness, and social cohesion, this increase in dissatisfaction and despair, is exactly one of the outcomes that the attacks waged against Western bourgeois societies by the Gramscian Long March were designed to bring about.
I can also imagine that video games play a role here, and their allure.
Why participate in and prefer actual life—in which you may not be that impressive, and attaining success is hard and not at all assured—when, in a video game, you can be handsome, powerful, strong, and successful, mow down your enemies, fight demons, see incredible sights, have adventures, get the girl, rule over your own kingdom—all with, apparently, no real danger/cost to you.
Then, of course, we have the attacks against “toxic masculinity.”
Honestly, adding it all up, I’m surprised that a lot of young guys these days just don’t head off for some quiet, deserted island to get away from all this crap.
gratitude is a seldom used word
I think Molly makes some important points. Home life especially in younger years no longer gives kids a base. When I was a kid, we spent most weekends with relatives and during the week we played with kids in our neighborhood. As I grew older, I babysat for lots of cousins. Long-term relationships were imbedded in me.As I grew older, I had boys as friends.What I see now is that more and more kids spend time on various sport teams, but their families don’t relate. Everything is fragmented, and you have to play by the rules of the groups you associate with.
In my own family, the poorest stick together and help one another. The richest never do anything together; they have no family traditions. How can you build a life on that?
Orson Wells said that Anything you say about America is true. I think this agony the article and comments are describing is very true, but there are also pockets of the country where children are having a ball being children, and are anticipating adulthood with some relish.
What I find notable is the collapse of an entire social stratum, the one made up of an inefficient and unproductive professional/managerial class, whose pretenses are being punctured, and whose children are failing to rise to equivalent positions. It’s a displacement similar to the fall of the apparatchiks after the USSR’s collapse, or fill in the blank for other societies. It is the children of this class who are suffering these dysfunctions, for the most part..
The interpersonal relationships that are required to raise normal, healthy people do not scale. Tribal/community bonds can not be replicated or replaced by technology. Humans need face to face interactions, extended families and the normal give and take of friendships.
The population of western nations is larger and more in flux; people move away for school or work. The bonds of healthy community activity are fading away because of technology or left wing infiltration (fraternities, Boy Scouts,etc). Kids don’t play outside as much and do not form bonds with kids in their neighborhoods; instead that join “communities” online that are not a replacement and often lead to young people being bombarded with extremism of the political or sexual variety.
We have generations of young people, mostly men, growing up in a broken, over scaled society where they find no place and no purpose. Their social lives exist online instead of in person. The very institutions that were in place for generations to help develop boys into men have been completely corrupted or destroyed.
Western civilization will not begin to heal until it reduces immigration to halt the population churn and raise wages, starts to break apart large cities, and revamps the social safety net to put healthy family formation first. Conservatives must embrace family friendly changes in law and abandoned the wildly stupid idea of every man for himself. The family and community is the basis of a stable nation, not the individual. It’s about time that the modern right gets on board.
It’s the natural tendency of the young to be stupid, hence the old saying that a man who at age 20 is not a socialist has no heart, a man who at age 40 is still a socialist has no brains.
This problem is made worse because the government and the globalists have weaponized education and other methods of indoctrination. The government never existed in 6000 years of human history that wanted subjects who could think for themselves. Governments want subjects who follow orders and do what they’re told and don’t ask questions or complain or make snide and snarky comments.
If you want to improve life for kids and everyone else, get government out of education of the young. Tell the government to put the kid’s education down and back away slowly.
I plan on posting about this again in the near future, with an emphasis on the connection between work environments and pro-socialism beliefs.
I think we commented on this before. Doctors have traditionally been conservative because they were small businessmen, and lately women. We ran our own “cottage industry” as Teddy Kennedy described Medicine. Obamacare has changed that. Most doctors are now employees and they are employed by croups that have non-doctor “managers” to pay bills and function as an HR Department. As a result, I expect that doctors will join the Socialist proletariat as “knowledge workers.”
First the kids are taught what an evil country America is. Next, for the white kids [still a majority?], they are told they, as a race, are evil.
Next comes “Democrat Socialism”, where somehow [unicorn farts?] everything will now be free. Why work? Everything will be free. Why strive for success? Failure is rewarded. Success and acheivement are signals that you have used priviledge and oppression to get ahead.
When I was a teen, American greatness was apparent by placing a man on the Moon. Now, people tell teens America has never been great, and a MAGA hat [even the very thought of a Great America] is racist and fascist. Oh, and America can NOT place a man on the Moon anymore.
It all started to go in the dumper with the advent of TV on the ’50s. Video games are just personalized TV. Boys, especially, are vulnerable to the small screen because of their native abilities to discern small moving objects. Those making their livings in the video industries are helping us all to eat our seed corn.
But enough with metaphors . . . .
Another excellent post.
Also more thoughtful and provocative – in terms of making one think and consider the content ( not as trolling ) – comments.
It’s a great example of what makes this website one of the places I inhabit daily.
Molly Brown…”Could you please further define what Drucker means by ‘professional’, ‘knowledge worker’, and ‘skilled worker’.”
By ‘knowledge worker’, Drucker means people like engineers, programmers, financial analysts, operations research specialists, etc–typically employed by large corporations or government agencies, although there are more self-employment opportunities for these people today than they were when Drucker wrote.
By ‘professional’, he means the traditional professions such as medicine or law: traditionally self-employed or members of small firms, although this has changed for medicine, as Mike K wrote above.
‘Skilled worker’ would include people like machinists, patternmakers, locomotive engineers, etc…usually not degreed, but with significant experience/traiing.
As one of the other commenters noted above, a purposeless life is awful. Losing religion is perhaps the biggest factor in this. But every other thing that provides it is in decline too. Families are in decline. Nationalism (or patriotism) is a dirty word. Almost every institution that would allow people to devote themselves to a higher, bigger cause has been decimated. The State is the only ascendant replacement right now. And we all know how that story ends. Interestingly, the Lefties have explicitly made it their mission to destroy our institutions, to be replaced by the state. Coincidence? I don’t know, because I’m sure if they’re that competent. But they’re getting their wish.
Is this a white thing or do we see a similar pathology among minority youth?
Mike
Neo is using data in an inflammatory way. The suicide rate is up “sharply” she writes!
The actual rise from 2006 to 2016 (selectively chosen years?) is from 3 per 100,000 to 5 per. That is two (2) more suicides per 100,000. See her link. That may possibly be statistically significant but is not truly significant. It merits a yawn.
Opioid ODs are a much more serious cause of young adult deaths. Says the CDC, “The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased significantly by 9.6% from 2016 (19.8 per 100,000) to 2017 (21.7 per 100,000).”
The students I see at UNM don’t look all that happy to me. Those can be tough years for most people, granted, but back in the seventies I remember more fun and exuberance in college.
I find it creepy how little students interact with each other because every other spare moment their heads are down in their phones. It looks especially hard for the socially marginal.
Cicero–The CDC statistics page on suicides–statistics lag a couple years behind, so they’re working with numbers only up through 2016–says that, since 1999, suicide rates have gone up 30% in half the states in the union. *
Moreover, the highest rates of increase are generally in the states in the middle of the country.**
* See https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide/
** See https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0607-suicide-prevention.html
In order to be happy, one must be happy with what one has. Usually one needs to be grateful for these things … these materialistic blessings.
The unhappiness starts with a lack of gratitude. Those, most, kids who ARE grateful are not so unhappy.
And most of the ungrateful kids still don’t kill themselves, nor get addicted. Tho many do. Perhaps the “Bell curve” is flattening, with bigger tails at both ends, where their are more at the plus 2 standard deviation of happy AND more at the minus 2 standard deviation?
But, maybe it’s just a leftward shift of the curve, so avg happiness has gone down 5 or 10% (from a 100 avg. in 1964 with the Beatles, to a 93% avg today)?
One of the biggest reasons to be happy or not is the view of the future — will your life be better than your parents? I’ve seen reports that far more people today think their own lives will NOT be better than their parents.
When it comes to measurable materialistic things, most of the “free” things socialism promises, almost all Americans will have access to more stuff than their parents.
What they won’t have is community, and communities. We need more face-to-face interactions with other people.
And the young will probably have a lot more insecurity about their sexuality.
now teens are confronted with an almost constant barrage of information that could have the effect of making young people almost constantly question their sexual identities even if they otherwise wouldn’t be having doubts.
Security is one of those mostly non-materialistic things that the PC-Klan is taking away from normal Americans, including sexual identity security.
Julian Simon, the well-known economics/business professor who did valiant battle with the doom-and-gloom environmentalists, was also, for all his success, a terrible depressive. However, with cognitive therapy he found his way out.
I see he has provided free access to his book, “Good Mood,” describing his story and method on the web. (Such an awesome guy. Simon is one of my saints.)
Here’s the nut of his approach:
This is the mechanism that causes the sadness in depression: whenever you think about yourself in an evaluative way–which most of us do frequently throughout the day– your thought takes the form of a comparison between the state you think you are in, and some other hypothetical “benchmark” state of affairs.
The benchmark state may be the state you think you ought to be in, the state you formerly were in, the state you expected or hoped to be in, or the state you aspired to achieve. The comparison will make you feel sad if the state you think you are in is less positive than the state you compare yourself to.
–http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Good_Mood/article0.html
This is why Facebook looks so dangerous to me (aside from privacy concerns). It’s a constant barrage of people making their lives looks as great as possible (who knows what they are not showing) and other people seeing those images and making sad comparisons with their own lives.
Snow: you and others make a grave mistake when you rely on percentages. Look at the real numbers behind the percents. as I did in this case.
As an example, 15 years ago a drug-pushing medical oncologist claimed that a new treatment protocol would increase median survival in a particular case of metastatic melanoma by 50% ! So I asked him what the median increase in weeks or months was in this case, and he said “A one month increase, from two to three months.” That is a 50% increase. His protocol required daily treatment with major adverse effects. He was motivated by $, not patient benefit.
You and Neo seem as alarmed about the suicide increase (?transient or atypical over a broader time frame) as others are about global warming because we have had ten warm years in a row.
Eugene Rose pointed out that liberalism inevitably tends toward nihilism.
https://www.amazon.com/Nihilism-Root-Revolution-Modern-Age/dp/1887904069
The “bad old days” are always denigrated, and many aspects of those bad old days were certainly “bad”—the state of medicine and health care back then chief among them—it was more like by guess and by God, witch doctory and butchery rather than real medical care.
But, some aspects of those bad old days—I believe—were better than they are today, and one of them was community and family.
Of necessity, early settlers here in the untamed and dangerous wilderness that first confronted them tended to want to group together for protection, and family members usually stayed in close proximity to each other; quite often two, three, or even four generations living together in the same household. Lack of convenient, cheap, comfortable, speedy, and safe transportation also played a role in creating this geographic concentration.
In this situation you most often had family and friends in close proximity—in your household, next door, around the block— ready to help you in time of need.
Generally, as well, extended families provided readily available, basically cost-free child and elderly care; you took care of your own, closely associated with each other, and stuck together.
Community was encouraged. Was, in fact, a necessity.
Since, at that time of the Revolution, 90 plus percent of our country was engaged in Agriculture, large farm families were quite often the rule until fairly recently.
But, as the wilderness started to be tamed, as transportation routes were extended, and as settlement moved westward–as we transitioned from an agricultural society, to an industrial society–those close-knit families started to move and, to some extent, fragment and disperse, and population centers started to grow and expand—we now started to develop suburbs. And new population centers were developed along these new transportation routes.
As more and more taming and settlement occurred, as transportation and communication became easier, as new towns and cites sprung up, that dispersal of families and neighborhoods increased.
Cities got bigger, and with that the possibility of anonymity in them; increasingly, it was possible that nobody knew you or your business in the big city, and community declined; you were–whether you wanted to be or not, often on your own.
Along with these developments, great economic changes occurred, and so, more recently, the standard, traditional one worker family—in which the husband went out to work and the mother stayed home with the kids and took care of the house—changed into two paycheck families. Fathers and, now, mothers spending less and less time at home and more and more time at work, and that meant less direct interaction with and supervision of their children and, overall, less family time together.
This was not a good development for family solidarity and family feeling.
Moreover, since better transportation and communication meant that jobs at further and further distances could be had, commute times lengthened, and family time often shrunk even further.
Fast forward to today in our post-industrial, technology-based society, when—due to the ease with which we can be in other state or other country in a couple of hours or a day or two, due to instantaneous communication, families can now be dispersed across the nation, or around the world.
Thus, even less actual, physical face to face family contact, time, and interaction.
The old, tight-knit families and neighborhoods are increasingly a thing of the past.
We increasingly pay strangers to take care of our children, and our elderly family members are now quite often not cared for at home, but are placed in some institution that may be some distance away.
I find this pattern of dispersal to be a bad thing.
Add in the baleful isolating, de-personalizing, and fragmenting effects of electronic devices, the culture of Political Correctness, the hollowing out of the heartland of our country, and the drug epidemic, and these bad effects are compounded and made even more destructive.
In short, we have lost our way, taken lonely, and dangerously wrong path, and no one, it seems, knows or cares enough to suggest an alternate route back to at least something approximating the more close-knit families and the community that we used to have.
Jeremy,
David Foster very kindly clarified his terms for me, can you please do the same? Who/what exactly – makes up the ‘unproductive professional/managerial class?
Who/what exactly – makes up the ‘unproductive professional/managerial class?
He can answer you as to what he means. You didn’t ask my take, but I’m giving to you anyway.
Essentially people whose incomes are derived from varieties of rent-seeking. Not all are ‘professionals’. Many are common-and-garden bourgeoisie. The rent-seeking may derive from market failures, from entry restrictions, from the manufacture of compliance costs via regulation, from public expenditure, &c. It is manifest in boosting the job opportunities or compensation of classes of people. In some cases, whole occupations are of dubious validity. In others, you have valid occupations, but some of the income stream and job opportunities are social suboptimal.
Where you hunt for these truffles would be at the apex of very large corporations, in the legal profession, at the politician / lobbyist nexus, in casino banking, in and among compliance personnel, in the pseudo-professions (e.g. social work and library administration), in higher education, in industries where intellectual property law is important, &c.
Among wage-earners, where you see it is in overstaffed government offices and compensation made excessive by making it opaque. Of course, their supervisors get the rents too.
Neo, as you mentioned Kundera, these young people, probably, were crushed by The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And antidote to this is what Jordan Peterson recommends.
I have a friend whose theory is that education administration and government bureaucracy are essentially welfare for the upper middle-class so their children can have professional-seeming jobs.
Cicero:
While you’re busy yawning away at the boredom of it all, let me add some statistics and observations.
Firstly, I said the suicide rate increased sharply, not the absolute number. I assume most readers here know the difference.
Secondly, take a look here. The suicide numbers per 100,000 for age group 15-24 rose between 2000 and 2017 from 10.1 to 14.46. That’s an increase of 3.36 per 100,000. In 2015 (which we’ll use as an estimate) the percentage of the US population that was in that age group was 13.62 (see this). In 2015 the population of the US was 321 million (see this). If you multiply that out, you get 43,720,200 people in the US in that age group. At an increase of 3.36 (taking the 2017 figure, because I’m just trying to get a approximate estimate of the rise between 2000 and 2017) per 100,000 in that age group, we get an actual increase in human terms of a total of about 1469 young people in that age group killing themselves in year 2017 over year 2000. Each of those is a terrible tragedy, and it’s not an insignificant number.
I am doing the math quickly because I am in a hurry (very busy today), so if there’s an error there I apologize for it. But those are the figures I get.
I have a friend whose theory is that education administration and government bureaucracy are essentially welfare for the upper middle-class so their children can have professional-seeming jobs.
Essentially? As in all of them? I’d like to hear your friend’s brilliant plan for running schools without administrators and implementing public policy without civil servants.
Snow, part of the way back is towards more focus on the family, normal husband-wife families with children.
Part is to further restrict abortion, and better support all mothers: those married and those not married.
Part of it is to define what “fair taxes” means, in a measurable way. I now look at total income of those in the top 10% over those at the median (50%); and also at the top 1% over the median. A “Fair tax system” has the income of the median taxpayer going up FASTER than that of the top 10%, and the top 1%. Changes need to keep being made until the income ratio of top 10%/ over 50% is getting smaller, rather than larger.
This will mean a lot more wealth taxes, and might mean a bit slower economic growth.
The big BIG cultural shift needs to be in support of family bonds, and duties, over individual freedom. More incentives to get married, and stay married; probably meaning more problems for those choosing to get divorced.
The thing is, in the current culture, such changes are and will be unpopular, so they won’t happen.
People want the security and bonds of family, but want the unbounded freedom of individual action. Real bonds really reduce the freedom. Most voters want both. Both together don’t, and won’t, happen. Two real goods, but in a trade off: more bonds and meaning in life but with less individual freedom.
Getting rid of Fed loans for colleges that haven’t hired at least 10% of their last 100 professors as Reps would be a huge, good start. The college establishment is terrible, and deserves defunding.
Art Deco:
As you know there is a difference between implementing public policy and setting policy without input from the public, or in spite of input from the public, as in response to votes of the people and changes in the administration.
Examples are civil servants who adhere to the “we be rules” of administration. They do not serve the public. Nor do corrupt apolitical bureaucrats that serve themselves.
I’m going with an analogy. That is, referring to the numbers of college kids who threaten to turn into piles of angsty glop on the sidewalk in front of the admin building because a professor’s father worked for Boeing. Or the CIA. Or was a general.
Two possibilities: One is this is a dance. They pretend to be near to self-harm and the admin pretends it needs to help them…..deplatform a speaker, make fabric softener available for free….. And both sides wink at each other.
Or, they really do believe they, scions of H. Sap who spent a million years coming up the hard way, are that weak. And it happened in the last fifteen years.
And that there is social credit to be gained by advertising weakness, the weaker the better.
Okay. Kids can be led to believe anything, which is one reason the dems are pushing for age sixteen to vote.
Maybe they really believe they’re unhappy, are required to be be unhappy, because they’re told they’re unhappy.
And, in conjunction with another issue, if you’re happy, you’re not paying attention. As if you’re one of the lower orders who knows how to, you know, do stuff.
So, perhaps this unhappiness is self-inflicted as a matter of absorbing social messages.
I once was…very slightly…mentoring some kids of late el ed. I gave them jobs to help other people. You’d have thought it was Christmas. For example, with Easter coming, we had a chair at the end of each pew. Overflow, of course. So I told one kid we needed to carefully line up the chairs with the end of the pews so the older people wouldn’t trip and hurt themselves. So he should check them all and take care of those which needed to be fixed. He set off like he was a Commando. By golly, he was going to take care of the old folks. He was probably eight.
Knowing you’re useless is a terrible thing. But it doesn’t take much to fix that.
As you know there is a difference
What does that have to do with his friend’s flippant remark and my objection?
I’d like to hear your friend’s brilliant plan for running schools without administrators and implementing public policy without civil servants.
A reduction of 75% of them would be a good start, like a bus full of lawyers going over a cliff.
A reduction of 75% of them would be a good start,
Why 75%?
Neo, does this suicide statistics include deaths from drugs overdose? These numbers are huge and, IMHO, should be added to the overall statistics, since use of illegal opiods is just another method of suicide.
“…if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.”
Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism” (1945)
This will all be sorted out after CW2.
“…if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, o
I find there are four sorts of pacifists:
1. Otherworldly sorts who withdraw from society and are ready to die. (Amish, Mennonite, Bruderhof).
2. A pacifism that is like what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the religion of the household gods’. It’s an heirloom for people in anabaptist confessions which have gone suburban (as have Quakers and Dunkers, for the most part). To the extent these people have any political engagement it takes two varieties: (1) pleasant but unserious, inasmuch as no one is thinking too hard about the relationship between ends and means or acts and consequences and (2) slides toward being cruel to the kind and kind to the cruel, because that’s easier. AFAICS, the former is modal among Dunkers, the latter among Quakers.
3. The pacifism of political recrimination. See Chris Hedges for an example. These people are insufferable and merit no respect. The entire red-haze left is like this. People of this variety have a particular hatred of Israel.
4. Libertarian goofballs. See Ron Paul, conceited fool.
dont worry, women fixed the family… its ALL GOOD now and dont you forget it!!!
dont say a word about what happened to kids when the ladies reworked it all..
just compare leave it to beaver or denis the menace to todays mentally screwed up fair…
but at least its not the problem for us guys anymore
we are evil, oppressors, and so on….
excuse me… MGTOW calls…
wait till the pop drop hits them…
want to see a really confused face?
you know,
like everyone found out being used by politics was better than loving family
parker at 3:20am
The problem here is the same one we saw with the claim that Trump and then his Admin bear comparison with personalities, political parties and events that arose in Central Europe during the 1930s. What was going on in Europe throughout the first half of the 20th C drove developments there … and the United States today is not subject to anything resembling the factors & forces that were at work in Europe, then.
Similarly, the American Civil War took place in its own time, for its own reasons. Several people over the last 150 years have taken an interest in how that came about, what factors & forces were at work. It was even more-different from today, than Europe leading up to WWII.
Donald Trump shows no signs of sprouting a goofy mustache, and his supporters are not crafting special armbands. Hats maybe, but no goose-stepping.
Likewise, there is no read of the contemporary context that tells us Americans are about to fall upon one another, except on social media & in blog-comments. Among our 100s of millions, yes, there are a few who fall off the rails, and that’s unfortunate. But there isn’t a pattern of evidence to suggest any large-scale domestic armed conflict in the USA.
We may as well entertain the discussion of rule-of-thumb rods, with which to discipline our wives.
A reduction of 75% of them would be a good start,
Why 75%?
OK. 90% Look at the numbers.
OK, Maybe it will be localized.
Huxley (4/7/19 5:10pm) has it right. We’re in C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” but the surplus population is not the lower class, but the middle class. Instead of building stuff in factories which is then sent to factories to be scrapped, Congresspeople, State legislatures, and bureaucrats create laws, regulations, and rulings, which are sent out to lawyers, accountants, and compliance officers who fill out the required forms to be sent back to the bureaucrats who review and adjust the filings, giving rise to appeals and court cases which require more bureaucrats and judges to adjudicate, which of course requires more lawyers and accountants and corporate staff to oppose them, some of whom move up to become Congressmen (or women), bureaucrats, and judges. All on the Great Paper Wheel (soon to be the Great Paperless Wheel, but nothing significant will change), ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Thus has it been so since the Sumerians noticed that they didn’t need everyone farm to feed them all, they had a few people left over with nothing useful to do, and thus it shall be forever.
Earth life is hard. The spirits that chose to incarnate here in pre mortal existence may not have been ready for Earth the Roguelike dungeon crawler rpg.
Humans are surprisingly resilient, but they do take psychological damage from dying in games. They sometimes log off and never come back, after a particularly crushing defeat. Rage Quit!
Well, given that they are contracted to life until death on Earth, some people can’t take it any more and decide to void their contract before it is finished. They will not be rewarded with heaven nor punished with hell, as in the various religious dogmas.
Rather, their actions will plague them until the end of eternity and they create their own hell or reward as a result of this. The experience in the game is transferred to the player. The experience of whatever life you had on life is transferred to the eternal spirit after death of avatar. This upload is unavoidable.
That’s why suicide is almost pointless. You cannot escape the pain, not entirely.
Similarly, the American Civil War took place in its own time, for its own reasons. Several people over the last 150 years have taken an interest in how that came about, what factors & forces were at work. It was even more-different from today, than Europe leading up to WWII.
Donald Trump shows no signs of sprouting a goofy mustache, and his supporters are not crafting special armbands. Hats maybe, but no goose-stepping.
Likewise, there is no read of the contemporary context that tells us Americans are about to fall upon one another, except on social media & in blog-comments. Among our 100s of millions, yes, there are a few who fall off the rails, and that’s unfortunate. But there isn’t a pattern of evidence to suggest any large-scale domestic armed conflict in the USA.
There is a severe ignorance and mistaken impression about CW1 in the US. For example, the idea that it started with “large scale domestic armed conflict” is wrong. The CW1 activated in 1861, but was preceded by Lincoln’s election, but even that was preceded by the Utah War of 1857, Kansas Missouri border war between slavers and non slaver communities full of ethnic cleansing and Rwanda style mass rape, Missouri Extermination Order, and mob contracted lynchings of abolitionist speakers by Northern and Southern Demoncrats.
Once a person realizes the preceding signals of civil war 1, they can see the ambushes of whites and blacks and internal philosophical dissent preceding civil war 2. But that’s why yall were educated in American history by the indoctrination centers. To keep you from realizing what actually happened before 1860.
The earliest lynchings of abolitionist speakers in the NORTH, were circa 1830 via my primary sources. That’s a pretty long generation before the actual shots were fired. Because it takes that long to condition a new generation to Hate the Enemy.
They should be grateful that they were even born, as Omni. Instead, they could have been aborted by Planned Profit and chopped up to be sold on the biogenetics black and gray markets.
In FPS gamer terms, Earth is full of Fking Kid pfking PVP SPAWN CAMPERS.
Of course young people are depressed, and I see a lot of the reasons why even in my own kids (ages 19-25). Everything that influences their lives is nihilistic in nature: entertainment, politics, education. Everything is being turned into indoctrination: indoctrination into envy, dissatisfaction, intolerance, even hatred.
They are are being told that the fact their lives are miserable is not their fault. They are being taught that the only escapes are to fall into the mindless hedonism of drugs and sex, and that the only ways their lives can be made better is to cede all their agency to the government so that it can cocoon them in entitlements that they do not deserve and are told they cannot earn. They are led to believe that fairness doesn’t mean equalizing the playing field, but equalizing the score, which is impossible, so they succumb to despair.
It is relentlessly pounded into their heads that success is a zero-sum game, and that all the successful people got that way by taking it away from them. They are not offered the solace of religion, which teaches us that suffering is not the worst thing that happen to a person… in the twisted worldview they are being force-fed, suffering is the worst thing that can happen, and that in comparison, death is preferable.
They are subjected to “social justice” which is completely arbitrary, capricious and vindictive. You can’t avoid its sins (which change from week to week) and cannot avoid its punishments, unless you join the mob and do unto others before they can do unto you, and that still won’t stop the mob from devouring you when they stop to catch a breath from immolating others.
So it’s no surprise that young people are depressed. Everything that makes life worth living, they believe, has been taken from them, or impossible to achieve. They are raised on a steady diet of grievances and resentfulness. They are being held to a moral code that constantly shifts and is entirely unpredictable. They are told to believe certain people must have complete power to be their only hope as saviors and yet those people will turn on them at the drop of a hat. The Cultural Marxism that has spread so thoroughly into our culture is creating the perfect dystopia (it has even deeply infected the Catholic Church, which has always been a bulwark against the evils of modernism), where everyone is miserable and hopeless despite living in the richest, most successful society in the world.
This what young people are facing as they try to grow up in a society which offers many opportunities for people smart enough to recognize them, but is also infected with excessive complexity and bureaucracy, and anyone who buys into these lies, even a little, will undoubtedly be miserable.
Rick Gutleber:
Good points. There are still plenty of young people who manage to be happy, but they do seem to be swimming against a rather strong cultural stream.