Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality.
Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War ethics and regulation collectively reworked its incentives. The education system has always been in a position of scrutiny since universal education become the norm. Presidents have been the stuff of tabloid gossip since the founding fathers with the media mercilessly opting to promote scandal and controversy over respectability. Our conception of President as moral arbiter is a function of the reworking of journalism mentioned above.
The difference in peoples attitudes reflects an increased diet of emotion inducing media that accelerates fears and expectations, rather than some great pivot in volatility. Yes there are things to worry about but there always are (let's remember the twentieth century had two world wars, the Great Depression, and an even worse pandemic).
I think there is a real danger in just arguing basically "things have always been a shit show, empires collapse, pandemics rage, etc. etc." for a couple reasons:
1. While true, lets not ignore the fact that things get really, really, really bad during those periods where empires do collapse, or environmental damage causes ecosystem collapse, etc. etc. I mean, yes, you could argue "Hey, the Black Death killed a 3rd of Europe" and be correct, but I'm not sure what comfort that's supposed to give. Even if you want to argue that the post-war era up until, say, the 80s was an extremely unique period of progress and broad-based social advancement, that still doesn't make me feel any better if we're now in a "reversion to the mean."
2. Advanced technology does make "things collapsing" potentially much more catastrophic than in generations past. I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war, but things like the speed with which modern social media (and regular media) can pit people against each other is very different than, say, the yellow journalism periods of decades past.
Contextualizing the present with the past is less dangerous than feverishly articulating the uniqueness of circumstances. It's more helpful to be aware of current events as a continuation of past events since it allows a better understanding of the present.
As an individual, it doesn't serve you well to exist in a fog of worry among perceived threats. Volatility should be understood as a common facet of life so you can shape your competence to deal with it, rather than assume a static environment that demands alarm with every variation.
Furthermore, collapse doesn't happen everywhere the same, nor all at once. It's more like things break down slowly, and never get fixed rather than explosions on the street, until one day you are a third world country.
And third world countries still have very nice neighborhoods, and very rich people. But everything around gets much worse.
> collapse doesn't happen everywhere the same, nor all at once.
Frankly, I have a “living experience” of a practically instantaneous collapse. January 1, 1992. Prices were “freed”, (hyper)inflation started, people life savings were burned to dust, monthly pensions - at once - begin to cover just about a week of food (and were not paid until 3 months later). Policemen’ salaries became meaningless and the police - in the whole country - started to look for additional ways to feed their families… It all happened pretty fast.
So “inflation” is a trigger word for me since. And you can imagine unease I am watching the US government printing shiploads of money with.
Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?
Which is interesting to note since a majority of the other weapons the former Soviet Union had made their way into several revolutions happening in the Middle East and Africa via several well known international arms dealers.
Not sure if it was just operationally unfeasible to move something like a ballistic nuclear weapon, but from what I can gather, it was one of the few things that wasn't sold off en masse after the collapse.
The Soviet Union (and America) made hundreds if not thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. These were very small; you could put many of them into a single standard shipping container.
During the 90s there were persistent rumors that some of these had been "lost", but as far as I know these rumors were never substantiated. If in fact these weapons didn't get stolen/sold, we probably have numerous intelligence agencies to thank.
My sentence was "I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war". Point being that, yes, the unique dangers of nuclear war seem so blatantly obvious that they're not likely to be ignored. Contrast that with one of the other "elephants in the room" that has the potential to be nearly as dangerous, but as these other risks don't involve, on the surface, metro-area obliterating fireballs, they are easier to downplay.
> Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century
And it wasn't just journalism. After WWII many veterans took advantage of the free education offered by the GI Bill. That gave us a lot of highly educated people (with no student loan debt to worry about!) who then went on to use that education to improve things. Couple this with the recent memory of fascism in Europe and The Civil Rights movement and we had sort of a golden era. We were able to live off the fumes of that era until right around the end of the 20th century. You could say that in a sense things are just returning back to a more normal state of affairs and this seems painful because many of us lived through an era that was unusually good.
I added the clause: "With no student loan debt to worry about!" above. That's an important aspect, I think. They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example) where as now people have to consider how they're going to pay back that debt and choose degrees in fields that will enable them to do so.
> They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example)
I also wonder how much of that growth is from high school students being told to go to college above all else, and how this graduation increase corresponds to enrollment and graduation from vocational schools.
I do think your point is the big one: people could go into college and come out with knowledge in the so-called soft skills, like philosophy or literature (areas that don't pay well but are vital for a society to understand itself, if nothing else). Why society doesn't value teaching and similar jobs as much as it does other industries is left as a debate for another time.
It isn’t obvious from your link… what % of current grads are “business majors” who don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy and justify it with fancy PowerPoint slide decks?
The number of grads may have gone way up, but I think the education itself had slid down the slippery slope to create too many administrators and bureaucrats.
"don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy" - this is a pretty bad faith take, and also simply not true. In the US at least, business grads typically take accounting courses, marketing courses, even statistics courses. All of those skills lead to jobs that can provide both societal and economic value.
My personal experience says otherwise, but I’ll concede that accounting does have value.
Marketing? Well, we can disagree there — to me marketing is making a science out of “parting fools with their money”, so to speak. It’s always felt fundamentally dishonest and a little dirty. But again, thats me and I am definitely biased.
Maybe the problem now is we have too many college educated people and not enough high paying jobs to offset the cost of those people's education costs. Leading to #1 people working terrible jobs they were not educated for, #2 leaving these same people with a huge boulder of student loan debt that is hard to be paid off due to #1. Its a classic problem of supply and demand. In addition people's degree choices do not reflect the markets needs, way too many people went into communication/sociology/LA stuff than what the market wants which are STEM.
IMHO I think part of the problem is that there's been a shift in how degrees are interpreted. It used to be someone wasn't equated with their degree so closely, like a branding. The idea of a liberal arts degree was not to be unknowledgeable about STEM, but diversified.
Now you have automated HR depts and someone is equated with their degree one way or another. It's not really that different from ads for knowledge of particular programming library, when the potential hire clearly could pick it up in a week based on their other experiences.
This isn't all of it of course but I do think people tend to be treated as objects, no more or less than their degrees or certifications to a greater extent than the past. It's the dark side of meritocracy in my opinion, which is a horrendous mislabel.
Sometimes I feel as if we live in a world of formalized stereotyping, where the stereotypes have shifted from race and sex to some extent, to political, employment, and degree stereotypes.
To the extent that our present time is at all unique, I subscribe to Robert Putnam's thesis that much of what we see today can be explained by the drop in social capital in American life over the past several decades. Less socialization means less trust in other Americans or in the government, fewer norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, and increased polarization. There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example. Surprisingly, it seems as though these trends were firmly in place well before the internet or 24 hour news came along.
> There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example.
I tend to agree with the Putnam thesis, but I don't think you can lay this all on television. Until the 80s there were really only 3 viable TV/radio networks (CBS, NBC and later, ABC). If you watched the nightly news on any of those networks you got pretty much the same vision of reality. There was more variation in newspapers, but people watched a lot of TV in that era and for the most part they shared a cohesive vision.
Putnam ascribes ~25% of the drop in social capital over the past 70ish years to television's rise, but not because of fragmentation of visions of reality as you suggest. Rather, it is due to TV soaking up time that might be used to build community and social cohesion. See below for an example quote and corresponding link that goes into more detail.
"Even though there are only 24 hours in everyone's day, most forms of social and media participation are positively correlated. People who listen to lots of classical music are more likely, not less likely, than others to attend Cubs games. Television is the principal exception to this generalization--the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home. TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations. TV viewers are homebodies."
All fair points. The change, as I see it, is the speed at which information flows. The old saying about how a lie can circle the world before the truth gets its trousers on applies. Only now, the lie can travel at the speed of light.
Narratives have a very strong early-mover bias.
The OPs point about things starting to crack in the Obama years rings true. For all of his positive points, there is nothing in Obama's resume that suggests he was qualified to be President. He was the first President to be memed into office. The press loved to talk about how adept the campaign was in utilizing the Internet to mobilize and motivate supporters.
Everybody took notice, and now the narrative battle happens online, at Internet speeds. This is a terrible, terrible idea. Unless you're some kind of otherworldly genius, taking in all of the input and coming to a rational opinion weighing all the pros and cons is impossible. So, like a black-box AI algorithm, people come up with opinions based on odd things like who has a more insulting neologism for their opponent, or whatever.
The "collective amnesia" you mention also occurs at Internet speeds. What was major news on Tuesday is fishwrap by Thursday, replaced with something else. There's no value in revisiting it, so whatever narrative gets entrenched is it.
I don't think there's a solution for any of this, short of a CME wiping out everything more technological than a shovel.
With all due respect, this is not some in-the-moment emotionally-colored thing. Months after America has almost lost its democracy for good, we are just now finding out that we were extremely lucky that it all worked out this time.
So, no, it's not just an old man opening a paper in the morning and claiming that "this country is going to hell". That's not new. THIS is.
I am genuinely surprised by this take on HN, which is very common. Any serious historian will tell you that this is not normal.
The idea of mass disillusionment is pretty academic. If we just think about it for a moment, it's very hard to argue that there was some cohesive, clearly articulated illusion that was shared by everyone regardless of demographic, and it was somehow lost.
The narrative of mass disillusionment is more based on the limits of a historical narrative that must broadly categorize a mass of people as having a unified reaction for the sake of a simplified historical account.
Disillusionment is a persistent experience for people as they grow up. The idea that one period was "more" disillusioned than another isn't a real phenomenon.
Humanity is largely self-grouped by culture. Cultures fundamentally share mythologies, both about themselves and about other cultures, be they rival or friendly.
What we experienced in the '60s and are experiencing right now is a dissolution of the predominant self-mythology in American culture, which was temporarily boosted to a high degree of uniformity first by the advent of mass media, then again by 9/11. That's what's causing the culture war we're all entrenched in, willing or not. American self-mythology is in a period of redefining itself.
As cultural collapses go, mass media (the internet included) has caused these unprecedented waves of disillusionment happening at lightning speed compared to how they happened in the past. Historically it took massive famines to cause the degree of social unrest that modern war photos and videos can incite (as in the Vietnam era).
The speed of communication is unprecedented; as a result, so is the severity of this age-old issue.
80s checking in. It was way more disillusioned too.
They created a whole genre of punk music where the lyrics were basically fuck Thatcher/Reagan for a reason.
And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider. They are the institutions and they do not trust themselves, as is clear via the leadership stalemate and both parties destroying their best hopes in favor of the crumbling and ever more distant wealthy status quo.
> And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge
No, "they" are not. The few people in the inner political circles of that generation are in charge, same as every other time in history. The normal hardworking people are never in charge.
I remember when in middle school (Gen X here) I thought when our youth generation grows up and gets to be in charge the world will be better, because everyone I knew in school and out was so reasonable and so nice. Surely none of these people will be the corrupt politicians of tomorrow?
And turns out they(we)'re not the corrupt politicians of today. Because none of those regular kids of then are in charge. Who is? The children and grandchildren of the corrupt politicians of back then, groomed from childhood to be the corrupt politicians of today. They weren't in our middle class school of course, so never met any of them.
How to break that cycle? Ideally by voting for people not affiliated with the dominant two parties, but the system is rigged against that succeeding, so I don't know.
As a gen-x-er I agree. I realized this year that in the last 30 years politically, NOT ONE STEP OF PROGRESS HAS HAPPENED. 30 years ago the big political issues were culture wars (Gingrich vs Clinton), row v wade, unaffordable healthcare. Guess what we have today? Culture wars, row v wade, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable housing. Fuck, well, that's progress.
If you try to support a third party things it splits the vote so much things are too divided so nothing gets done. Support a mainstream party, surprisingly, also nothing gets done. For 30 years. Before my generation they stymied the hippies. Before that the Lost Generation was just made invisible by the Greatest Generation. And the Greatest Generation was made too exhausted by fighting WW2. It is not a generational issue. I promise, no generation says 'I don't want things to be better for my kids'. It's our political class. They are garbage.
>And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider.
Why do people think of an entire generation of people as a single minded entity? Might as well say, "women," or "men," or "humans." Did you know the majority of baby boomers weren't hippies? Looking at documentaries of the era, you'd think they were. Many boomers hated hippies. So which boomers are creating these divisions? The hippies or the non-hippies?
>their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider.
This would be much more targeted (and accurate) if you said the current generation of politicians. Last time I checked, I've mostly only had two bad choices for president since I've been voting. The third choice was, "throwing away my vote." Guess who came up with that one? The politicians. When you blame a generation of people, you don't blame the people who actually have the power to make the decisions affecting our lives.
Is this sarcasm? It's truly laughable if you don't think boomers had a clear advantage in comparison to Millennials, Gen X, etc;
I'm sorry you didn't reap the benefits of the most benevolent time in America's history but plenty of your Boomer counter-parts sure as hell did. I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally gave up and resort to 'UNFAIR MEH WON'T TRY NOW'. Am in that camp? No. I don't get upset when people generalize because it doesn't pertain to me as an individual. There is some truth to prejudice
Boomers had an era of prosperity that we will never see again. My in-laws purchased their first home in 1971 for 60,000. That same home is worth 800,000+
The only reason I can even own a home or compete in my late 20's is because I wasn't naïve enough to think that any degree would pay the bills.
You might not like it, but Boomers took their hoard and pulled the ladder up behind them. It is what it is.
>You might not like it, but Boomers took their hoard and pulled the ladder up behind them. It is what it is.
And what mechanism did they use to do this exactly?
>I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally gave up and resort to 'UNFAIR MEH WON'T TRY NOW'. Am in that camp? No. I don't get upset when people generalize because it doesn't pertain to me as an individual. There is some truth to prejudice
Its an unwillingness to understand the predicament or situation and just blaming it on a group of people. It's pretty common throughout history; a weapon wielded by the powerful.
>I'm sorry you didn't reap the benefits of the most benevolent time in America's history but plenty of your Boomer counter-parts sure as hell did.
Housing in almost all the west is a huge rent extraction scheme made possible by politicians catering to boomers and run by boomer savings allocated in real state + NIMBYism from boomers that prevent the market to adjust.
'I've met enough __________ that there is nothing wrong with generalizing about ________ as a whole. Every last __________ are __________.
You have no perspective, self awareness, nor understanding of economics and history so you blame it on boomers.
The prosperity you talk of included smaller homes, built to different code, with a population of 205 million not 330, at a time with huge unemployment and high interest rates. There are so many factors, but yeah distill it down to BOOMER hate because it works for your simplistic thinking and you have met a representative portion to be able to judge them all.
I grew up in the 80s. EVERYTHING is nicer today, everything. But let's look at your example. Housing. Job stress was super bad in the recession of the 80s. You don't understand what it is like to live in the gloom that was the 80s. Let's talk about the economic part of that gloom. Continuing on the inflation/high interest of the 70s. Every night on the news they talked about how no one would ever have the American dream of owning a home again, what with the combination of high interest rates and no one having jobs because of the recession (unemployment 1980 7.2%, 1981 8.5%, 1982 10.8% 1983 8.3%, 1984 7.3%, 1985 7%).
Man if you could only live in those glorious times when house prices were cheap because nobody had jobs, and those that did have jobs were poorly paid (because of competition for jobs) and their money was quickly worthless because of interest rates/inflation (Inflation of 1979 13.3%, 1980 13.50%, 1981 10.3%). You leave out that homes were cheaper because interest was so high people couldn't afford the price they can with lower interest. 1980 15%, 1985 9.93%.
I remember my boomer parents and the stress in their eyes every day. But yeah, when they were young everything was easy not like your generation's struggle. FU dude. How dare you judge my parents? You don't know them. You don't know their struggles to keep food on the table for me. Just straight up F U dude. You are garbage, thinking you can judge them because you 'met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers'and because you are to ignorant to understand the factors that created the spread of home prices in the past and today but want to feel like you do.
Stop being a tool, get some perspective on what you are talking about if you are going to judge people. You don't understand what it is like to live with a horrible economy for basically a decade, but because it depressed housing prices want to act like it was some sort of blessing.
Don't forget the Vietnam draft (that's a big one) and the closing of factories and farms, computerization and automation went from 0-100 in the 80s, and the OPEC oil crisis where you had to wait in line for hours to get enough gas (if you were lucky) to even get to work. Speaking of, you know how soul sucking working in a factory is, day in, day out? I don't but I can only imagine. Big union busting under Reagan, pension stealing by corporate raiders, and social safety nets were cut pretty hard in the 80s as well. Oh yea and the whole looming Cold War, nuclear winter, getting your skin burnt off at any time. People are beginning to get a taste of that again. That's no fun either.
Average income in 1960 (as an example year since it wasn't listed) $6000 or 10% of that house.
Average income in 2021 $65,000, well short of the $80,000 to equal 10% of the house. Also, there has been a large increase in other expenses. Most households had a single earner, leaving another adult to generally raise children. That's much rarer today. Two car households, higher utility bills, etc... The evidence is pretty clear that money doesn't go as far today.
$10K in 1971, so 1/6th of the house. I suspect the people in this example made well more than that because buying a home at 6x income is not very responsible. That kinda skews the results because if you buy a home in an already well off neighborhood, I suspect the chances of it increasing in value are much better because the neighborhood has already proven to be valuable.
The boom in housing prices is also a temporary anomaly. That's only half the reason young people can't afford them. The other half is NAFTA and globalization and trade agreements, etc. Those were all done by politicians for corporations. It's easy to blame Boomers because you read an article that did that very thing (it's common in news to stir cross generational resentment). It also lets the politicians off the hook. Remember that next time they say the presidential candidate of whatever party you prefer will actually help you. Unless you are a corporation, that's unlikely.
>> It's truly laughable if you don't think boomers had a clear advantage in comparison to Millennials, Gen X, etc;
Baby boom generation started in what, 1946?
In 1946 almost half the houses in the US didn't have full indoor plumbing. That's some era of prosperity to be born into.
I'm not of that generation, but my parents were. My mom and her brother were driving tractors and operating other heavy machinery on a farm when they were still in elementary school. That was how a large part of the baby boomers grew up.
Everything that happened to a Baby Boomer was the most extreme ever. All other generations before Baby Boomers and since the Baby Boomers have had an easier time than the Baby Boomers. Their experiences are the Alpha and the Omega of human experience. When they die, the universe probably will cease to exist.
Well, they did have domestic terrorist groups going around setting off bombs on the regular in the 60s and 70s. I was quite surprised to read about it.
I’ve never heard an argument about the “specialness” of that generation?
I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point.
Which always came as a surprise to me… If we’re going to generalize about people based on generation (bad idea, but…)— I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent, in aggregate, than the generation before it. Definitely in the West, but I suspect everywhere. And no, I’m not a Boomer, I’m one of the younger ones.
>I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point.
Counterreaction, a lot of voices claiming to speak for boomers, or boomers themselves, have done plenty to claim "it's just young people messing up". Despite the obvious that they have been the majority voter base for decades, have more wealth as a collective, and because of their age and wealth, tend to have different incentives and opinions than the younger generations having problems to do something as simple as getting a foothold in adult life.
NB: the obvious problem isn't "boomer / old", but the nature of the social game as it is (relatively or perceived zero-sum) and the haves voting against the have nots.
>I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent
Weaker and less competent how? I assure you, for every argument you'll find, you can find another argument which would flip the script.
Dude, if you think that is different than any other generation ever well, hopefully when you get older you'll learn about perspective.
The 'Greatest Generation's version of the boomers sent them to WW2 to die by the millions, but poor you, right? Never has a generation been handed such a shit sandwich by the generations before them as the boomers have handed you. Get over yourselves. You aren't so special in the list of generations.
When the boomers had nothing in their youth they created the hippie culture where it didn't matter. Today's hyper consumerist tiktok generation think they have a right to live like the made up people on TikTok do. They aren't boomers, but you know the characters on the TV show Friends could never have lived like that in New York, right? That it was a fake show that portrayed an unrealistic quality life that young people working those jobs didn't actually live, right?
That may have been the case among the young (coincidentally the boomers). But it would be difficult to make the case that a significant percentage of people over 30 were disillusioned in that era.
Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War ethics and regulation collectively reworked its incentives. The education system has always been in a position of scrutiny since universal education become the norm. Presidents have been the stuff of tabloid gossip since the founding fathers with the media mercilessly opting to promote scandal and controversy over respectability. Our conception of President as moral arbiter is a function of the reworking of journalism mentioned above.
The difference in peoples attitudes reflects an increased diet of emotion inducing media that accelerates fears and expectations, rather than some great pivot in volatility. Yes there are things to worry about but there always are (let's remember the twentieth century had two world wars, the Great Depression, and an even worse pandemic).