5 ms·

The idea that "today's youth" are more fragile than the youth of yore seems to be a growing meme. I do believe that there is a rise in mental health issues amon

by m_fayer 11y ago

The idea that "today's youth" are more fragile than the youth of yore seems to be a growing meme. I do believe that there is a rise in mental health issues among young adults, but there are many potentially interacting causes. I haven't read the book in question, but I hope that anyone who tackles this subject addresses all the possibly relevant social phenomena before pinning it all on one root cause. Some things I hope would be factored in are: - The tightening economic climate and increasing difficulty of staying in the middle class. Especially when it relates to the panoply of difficulties young people face: student debt, high cost of housing, the gateway of unpaid internships, the declining number of professions that can support a middle class existence, the clustering of opportunity in a few high-cost urban areas to the detriment of the rest. - All the new systemic and political sources of anxiety - climate change, destabilizing politics in North America and Europe, mass migration, ambiguous wars, extremism, etc. - Increasing diagnosis of mental health issues and occasional pathologization of everyday troubles. - Decreasing stigma of mental health issues resulting in more young people seeking help. - Weakening of existing family structures and modes of monogamous relationships, along with the appearance of a multitude of new family and relationship structures. - "Helicopter parenting". - The decline of the "traditional job" and all the security that came with it. - All the various information overloads, distractions, and paradoxes of choice that come with the internet. I'm sure there are plenty of things that could be added to this list. But generally, I think we are exiting a period of relative postwar stability and returning to a more chaotic status quo. But now a majority of people of all socioeconomic brackets yearn for a middle-class existence, and without the support of old rigid-but-secure (for some) social structures. The millennials-and-forward generations are going to manifest the stress of all these things in many, frequently-unexpected ways. Pinning it all on "helicopter parenting," IMO, is cruel and facile. EDIT: Formatting.

veryes 11y ago
> The tightening economic climate and increasing difficulty of staying in the middle class... > But now a majority of people of all socioeconomic brackets yearn for a middle-class existence... There is no middle class. This framing is itself toxic. There are only people who have to work for a living (i.e. the working class), and people for whom paid labor is optional due to accumulated capital of various forms (for simplicity, let's call them the rich.) Focusing on distinctions between substrata of the working class mainly benefits the rich.
- m_fayer 11y ago
  Although it's certainly subjective, I don't think what we call the middle class is such a fine-grained entity, and I do think the distinction between "working class" and "middle class" is useful. I would define "working class" as people who are resigned to whatever paid labor they can find on pain of hunger and homelessness. Anyone in this class wants to get out of it. The middle class, on the other hand, expect to get to pick the labor they perform, and in return expect a comfortable and secure existence as well as a good amount of leisure time and luxury to be attainable through their labor. Many in the middle class hold no ambition to climb still further, but are desperate to not fall out of it. The distinction is useful for shaping policy - we want to help as many people as possible into the middle class and out of the working class (as defined above), and then do everything possible to keep them there.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  This is a great comment, and succinctly states a point I've been trying to make for a long time. You either have to work for a living or you don't. The term "middle class" simply means you're N+M paychecks away from ruin rather than N paychecks away from ruin. When we say the middle class is disappearing, what we really mean is the percentage of working class people with a savings cushion is disappearing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vacri 11y ago
Economics isn't responsible for lack of resilience. There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. Having all your money go on shelter and food, and having to share housing... these things are not new. They're also seen all over the world right now. It's really not harsh economics - more likely it is the lack of resilience from things like helicopter parenting that makes life stressors like economics have more effect. And even though there are problems like climate change, every generation has it's problems. Billy Joel got so sick of his generation being blamed for everything by the next generation, he wrote a song about it - way back in 1989! "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a song listing scandal afteer scandal, issue after issue, showing that this stuff has always been happening. Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".
- m_fayer 11y ago
  >There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. And there was a lot more poverty then than we have now. There also wasn't the widespread expectation of having a "good life," and probably a much smaller pre-existing middle class all attempting to hang onto their position. Furthermore, the whole notion of "middle class" and all the expectations that come with it probably weren't as firmly rooted as they are now, so people just... expected less. >Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X". Just saying "there are bad things now and there were bad things then" does not mean that circumstances are always equally good or bad. The economic/social/political climate CAN be better or worse at different times. Life was certainly very hard for the generations living through the great depression or WW2, and the burdens those people carried should not be diminished by people living in more fortuitous times.

by m_fayer 11y ago

veryes 11y ago

> The tightening economic climate and increasing difficulty of staying in the middle class... > But now a majority of people of all socioeconomic brackets yearn for a middle-class existence... There is no middle class. This framing is itself toxic. There are only people who have to work for a living (i.e. the working class), and people for whom paid labor is optional due to accumulated capital of various forms (for simplicity, let's call them the rich.) Focusing on distinctions between substrata of the working class mainly benefits the rich.

m_fayer 11y ago
Although it's certainly subjective, I don't think what we call the middle class is such a fine-grained entity, and I do think the distinction between "working class" and "middle class" is useful. I would define "working class" as people who are resigned to whatever paid labor they can find on pain of hunger and homelessness. Anyone in this class wants to get out of it. The middle class, on the other hand, expect to get to pick the labor they perform, and in return expect a comfortable and secure existence as well as a good amount of leisure time and luxury to be attainable through their labor. Many in the middle class hold no ambition to climb still further, but are desperate to not fall out of it. The distinction is useful for shaping policy - we want to help as many people as possible into the middle class and out of the working class (as defined above), and then do everything possible to keep them there.
ryandrake 11y ago
This is a great comment, and succinctly states a point I've been trying to make for a long time. You either have to work for a living or you don't. The term "middle class" simply means you're N+M paychecks away from ruin rather than N paychecks away from ruin. When we say the middle class is disappearing, what we really mean is the percentage of working class people with a savings cushion is disappearing.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vacri 11y ago

Economics isn't responsible for lack of resilience. There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. Having all your money go on shelter and food, and having to share housing... these things are not new. They're also seen all over the world right now. It's really not harsh economics - more likely it is the lack of resilience from things like helicopter parenting that makes life stressors like economics have more effect. And even though there are problems like climate change, every generation has it's problems. Billy Joel got so sick of his generation being blamed for everything by the next generation, he wrote a song about it - way back in 1989! "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a song listing scandal afteer scandal, issue after issue, showing that this stuff has always been happening. Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".

m_fayer 11y ago
>There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. And there was a lot more poverty then than we have now. There also wasn't the widespread expectation of having a "good life," and probably a much smaller pre-existing middle class all attempting to hang onto their position. Furthermore, the whole notion of "middle class" and all the expectations that come with it probably weren't as firmly rooted as they are now, so people just... expected less. >Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X". Just saying "there are bad things now and there were bad things then" does not mean that circumstances are always equally good or bad. The economic/social/political climate CAN be better or worse at different times. Life was certainly very hard for the generations living through the great depression or WW2, and the burdens those people carried should not be diminished by people living in more fortuitous times.