If you want to contribute to an atmosphere of agency among young American men, maybe a good start would be to stop the incessant scapegoating of boomers. Most of it is historically ignorant and intellectually infantile.
Clark, if you feel scapegoated, that's understandable. But I think the generation strife will only get worse until Boomers are willing to take a little fault. The gap between the world of the 70s and the world of today is almost too big to put into words:
In 1985, a middle-class life cost 30 weeks of median male income. Today it costs 53 weeks. There are only 52 weeks in a year. Your generation could earn the standard of living. We literally cannot! Unless you have a working wife, you will struggle to pay the bills.
In 1979, you could finance a year of public university with 182 hours of minimum-wage work. Today it takes 2,000+ hours. That's a full-time job on top of full-time education. You simply can't do it these days.
Homes used to be able to be bought at 3x median income. We face 7x to 10x. I've often heard interest rates raised as some trump card, but the interest rate is actually irrelevant, it's about the monthly repayment amount which is a function of interest rate AND mortgage size. The fact they're now floating 50-year mortgages, shows just how bad things have gotten.
Proverbs 13:22 says a good man leaves wealth to his grandchildren. Americans are staring at $34 trillion in national debt. Talk about robbing your descendants!
So yes feel free to challenge young people. But it just sounds out of touch without an initial acknowledgement of some sort. Some boomer bashing is unfair, but plenty of it is just the truth.
The problem with the public debt isn't due to the Boomers. It's due to the mythology of "tax cuts which pay for themselves", and that remains a tenet of the GOP to this day. Blame the top income people of any age who benefit immensely from those tax cuts-- not an entire generation.
None of what you wrote establishes that boomers are to blame for anything, only that they should understand the plight of younger generations and not be out of touch. That is not scapegoating. Scapegoating involves claiming that boomers CAUSED all the negative changes of recent decades.
You're right that crude boomer-bashing/scapegoating is intellectually lazy. But I think there's a reality around stewardship you're not accepting here.
The Biblical principle of corporate confession (Nehemiah 1, Daniel 9) isn't about assigning personal guilt (BLM Style). Instead it's about a generation acknowledging what happened as a result of their actions, "we have sinned", even unintentionally.
And the democratic reality is stark: Boomers were the largest voting bloc for 40 years, and so they naturally did what most people would do. Voted for things that were good for them at the expense of others.
Boomers voted for tax cuts that favoured them in their peak earning years, financed by debt that rolls over onto their grandchildren. They voted for zoning laws that protected property values at the expense of entry. These policies had majority support.
None of this means that any individual Boomer is personally villainous, but the generation does bear some collective responsibility for the predictable outcomes.
The family data is probably the worst. Boomers inherited strong family structures but presided over the Divorce Revolution creating the very instability that undermines the "agency" you want people to have. I think this is a vastly underestimated cause.
I'm not asking for apology, but as you mentioned "understanding". When young men hear "stop complaining and work harder" without acknowledgement of what it's actually like for them, it makes them rightly angry.
But if you can say "yes, it really is much harder now, BUT you can still do something with your life AND let me help you to do that", you bring people on side.
I see from your profile you are a "Teacher and Elder". I hope that you can share your wisdom with compassion with the young men in your local congregation.
The dates are all wrong for the boomer scapegoating. Relaxation of restrictions on divorce laws began in the 1950's and no-fault divorce laws were passed in the 1960s and onward. Some sources put the first no-fault divorce law in California in 1969, but it used to be said that Oklahoma passed the first true no-fault divorce law in 1962. Even if we accept 1969 (which became popular as a piece of anti-Reagan propaganda), boomers would have ranged in age from 5 to 23 years old, which makes it rather doubtful that the CA legislature was dominated by boomers.
Tax cuts financed by debt hit big time in 1981. Boomers ranged in age from 17 to 35; again, they were not dominant in the US Congress. Every Congress has been dominated by legislators in their 40s, 50s, and older. After 1981, that policy continued as a strategic policy of the GOP, regardless of the passing of generations.
In 1982, a big tax hike to support Social Security was enacted. I recall a Senator telling an AARP lobbyist something along the lines of "Congratulations, your members just won at the expense of younger working people." I don't think any boomers were retirees in 1982, ages 18-36, nor did they dominate the US Congress.
Other major changes for the worse in our society were brought about on the wrong time scale for boomer scapegoating. Mass immigration, which affects a lot of things in the USA including the cost of housing, came about due to the immigration act of 1965, when boomers were ages 1 to 19 years old. I actually saw a prominent vlogger recently blame immigration on boomers!
As for your closing remarks, I already said the same things myself. Being sympathetic and not out of touch to the plight of younger generations is important.
My concern with scapegoating is not that I will be personally offended by online remarks. The problem is that the oversimplification inherent in scapegoating precludes a real understanding of historical and cultural developments, and hence obstructs reform efforts. Instead of realizing the hard work required to enact necessary changes, scapegoaters become passive bystanders who are just waiting for the boomers to pass from the scene. When that passing doesn't even begin to solve all of the above problems, everyone will realize that decades were wasted.
Clark, I’ll concede the timeline. You are technically right - Boomers didn’t write the bills in '65 or '69.
But the "We Didn't Start the Fire" defense isn't enough. The Silent Generation may have lit the match, but Boomers held the fire hose for 40 years and never turned it on. That 1982 Senator admitting "your members just won at the expense of the young" is the stewardship failure I’m talking about. 1982 was ~45 years ago.
You mentioned earlier that you "already said" sympathy is important. But you can't treat empathy as a footnote while calling legitimate grievances "intellectually infantile" in your first point.
Ephesians 6:4 warns fathers not to provoke their children to anger. Dismissing the current economic reality that young men face does exactly that, it provokes resentment rather than agency.
That is the kind of the "Spiritual Boomerism" Renn was talking about.
I suspect this conversation has run its course. Praying now that you and your congregation know God's blessing.
Everyone held the fire hose for decades without doing anything significant about the nation's troubles. Is it clear that any generation can solve our nation's troubles by voting a certain way? What is any generation doing about any of it?
Good article. As the article earlier this year addressed the downsides of a mindset largely from Boomers, this one addresses the downsides of a mindset from far too many young people. Spiritual Boomerism and Spiritual Doomerism ends up with people tuning out. People don’t like being finger wagged and people don’t like hanging around an Eeyore.
It would be good to hear stories of people who succeeded through the midst of the challenges of life. This makes me think of Richard Nixon’s Purpose of Life comments, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc3IfB23W4c .
I think the problem is that extraordinary people need this type of advice (to take risks and seize opportunities). When people of average capabilities try to follow advice intended for the excellent, they will often fail. The usual "bootstraps" advice actually worked during the 1980s because of special circumstances in the same way that the best advice for people leaving the military in 1945 only applied to that group of people. Back then the B-curve really could bootstrap itself into stupendous opportunity with handshakes and eye contact.
The great masses of on the B-curve want to be shepherded into a government-issue job in the city that they want to live that also pays very well, does not require much of them, that they can't be fired from, to work with the people they want to work with, without the people they don't want to work with, that will also take care of them in old age. That's rather like the New Deal and the Great Society. The money needed to create that artificial middle class is still tied up paying for those cohorts.
So I think conservatives need to accept that a mass middle class is something that has to be artificially engineered by tax and social policy. It is not a natural result of free market competition. The natural long-term result of free market competition without intervening forces looks a lot like Mr. Rockefeller owning everything and everyone else renting. This is the other reason why we lose so many of the richest in society. If all they care about is freedom from interference from the state, it is easier to buy or to import vote banks of drones than it is to engineer and protect a mass middle class. The mass middle class is a whacky Rube Goldberg machine that still amounts to a vote bank, but many advanced political minds in American history figured that it was a good trade-off for various reasons. Machiavelli would say that such a middle class with some amount of property and capable of advocating its own interests is more reliable in war and more energetic in civic matters.
In higher ed classes that curve exam grades along a normal distribution it’s common but not ubiquitous to make the most common grade a B. In such classes only a small number of students either excel into the A range or fail. So the B-curve students “ride the curve” and do not put in more work than necessary.
The experience of most people from the last few generations is that only the right side of the curve succeeds and the fat middle flails in debt and disappointment.
"The usual "bootstraps" advice actually worked during the 1980s because of special circumstances."
I actually disagree. (And I'm someone who thinks the whole traditional "bootstrap" narrative was often overdone.) But America has a real, genuine history of middle-class success. (And lower-class failure.)
How much of that middle-class success was due to an open frontier, and then American soft imperial hegemony? Hard to say. Maybe the closing of that world is the real story.
But I don't think four centuries of a middle-class society was artificially engineered by tax and social policy.
I think reading the tax code itself (I know, I know) really hammers home the artificiality of so much of what companies do around hiring and managing employees in particular. Tax law casebooks also do a pretty good job of explaining the policy motivations which tend to be much more inflected with pre-boomer societal harmony, fairness, and a cut-down-the-tall-poppies ethic. Raising revenue is really only a small part of what the tax code is supposed to achieve, with the social engineering aspect being much more important.
This creates kind of a funny dynamic in which economists and policy prognosticators put forth entirely different theories of the purpose and function of taxes than the legislators who draft the statutes and the lawyers that enforce them.
Good piece. I feel myself torn between these two impulses as well when relating to the young and discouraged. You didn't even bring up women directly (EDIT: looked again and saw the points at the very end of this essay), but I've been trying to help a discouraged Zoomer at my church with women, and I sympathize with some of his complaints, but also he has an agency problem. I have to ask: "Bro, do you want a wife or don't you?"
On this point:
>How often does this happen with conservatives? How often does some conservative see an opportunity, go seize it, and then have others of similar disposition follow? If even a handful of families followed a pioneer like Hickman to some small town, the could turn it into a place like Garberville, CA - a functioning, cool, desirable town.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is Doug Wilson's church. There's also Ave Maria, FL. Indeed, you're probably not going to see this on the part of conservatives without religion being the driver.
I would think that for young men, religion is also a source of agency, even if there's still an agency problem inside the church. But it's a source of mission, at least. I personally know two fellow Millennials that descended into a lifestyle of marijuana, video games, and permanent unemployment, and then sort of fell off the map. Neither of them, of course, had religion.
Re: I personally know two fellow Millennials that descended into a lifestyle of marijuana, video games, and permanent unemployment, and then sort of fell off the map.
There were people like that in my generation (Gen X), and probably among the Boomers too. In fact, a certain fraction of every generation dooms itself to failure.
Solid take. Another tangential point, is that it is essential to change your presentation as you age. The exact same behavior can be applauded at 20, politely overlooked at 30, and get you socially cancelled at 40. Shapiro is no longer the exciting 20 yr old conservative on college campuses. To maintain influence, his approach will have to change. But this lesson applies to the rest of us as well.
Acknowledge the very real problems facing younger generations (especially young men), talk about potential government policies/cultural changes to address them....
....and then remind people that most of your destiny ultimately depends on YOU. Not on forces outside you.
Well, we do need to keep in mind that things can happen that are so overwhelming that they cannot be overcome. A person who ends up paralyzed in an accident will not become a skiier or dancer. A blind man will not become an artist. That doesn't mean someone who suffers something awful and unappealable should sit around and cry in his beer for the rest of the life, but it does require recognizing the outside forces can and sometimes are more powerful than any amount of willpower and optimism can set at naught.
But this is why the belief in redemption is so important. (Even Oprah could recognize the resilience and fortitude of post-paralysis Christopher Reeve.)
The Christian understanding of redemptive suffering is pretty central here. As Isak Dinesen put it, "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story." Even Hannah Arendt could use that as the epigraph for her book The Human Condition.
This is also why Community is important. The radical individualism of the libertarians and neo-Scroogists (as I call them) is not a recipe for a successful civilization.
As an Elder Gen-Z here (or youngest millennial, depending on who you ask). The bit about people not wanting to hear success stories is definitely true.
I left uni very ill, with serious mental health issues, then suffered through a year of chronic fatigue syndrome. Just as I was starting to get my head above water, COVID and lockdowns arrived.
I spent months doing courses and upskilling in my own time. Sent hundreds of applications, tracked in a depressing spreadsheet. Eventually landed one absolutely miserable job where everyone was as checked out as each other (they'd worked together for years and didn't even talk to each other at lunch times - the office had no windows).
But I kept going. Each evening I spent either doing more training or trying to get some more sleep as I was still recovering from the CFS. I managed to find a role at a start-up eventually, then "job hopped" my way up through a series of year-long stints until I finally landed somewhere decent. Somehow I leaf-frogged a few of my more successful university peers in the end.
My best friend has got four kids, helps run his small church denomination, serves as a deacon, works a full time managerial role, and is somehow doing a theology course on top of all that. I'll be starting a degree myself in the new year whilst also working full-time.
There's this stark division amongst people our age between what I'd call "high agency" and "low agency" types. You've got people who stay in dead-end jobs they openly admit are terrible for them, but become quite angry when you try to suggest something better. Then you've got those of us riding the edge of burnout trying to make something work.
To be fair, I did have family support and other structures that helped me recover, and more than ever it's true that not everyone has that. But it's not like it was some perfect world, both my friend and I come from stereotypical "modern" broken homes.
Was any of this fair? No. Should the system be better? Yes. But Hickman's point about "entering the arena" regardless just rings true. You've only got one life.
Anyone my age knows you aren't going to stumble into prosperity like the boomers did. There's a Big Four partner at our church whose father-in-law gets nearly the same disposable income from his final salary pension - he was an engineer for a local council.
That world's gone (indeed, younger people are paying for it's close). But you still have to play the hand you're dealt.
What gets me is the resentment towards anyone who makes something work despite it all. As if their success invalidates everyone else's struggle. You can acknowledge things are genuinely difficult and still expect people to have a go. Those aren't contradictory.
If you want to contribute to an atmosphere of agency among young American men, maybe a good start would be to stop the incessant scapegoating of boomers. Most of it is historically ignorant and intellectually infantile.
Clark, if you feel scapegoated, that's understandable. But I think the generation strife will only get worse until Boomers are willing to take a little fault. The gap between the world of the 70s and the world of today is almost too big to put into words:
In 1985, a middle-class life cost 30 weeks of median male income. Today it costs 53 weeks. There are only 52 weeks in a year. Your generation could earn the standard of living. We literally cannot! Unless you have a working wife, you will struggle to pay the bills.
In 1979, you could finance a year of public university with 182 hours of minimum-wage work. Today it takes 2,000+ hours. That's a full-time job on top of full-time education. You simply can't do it these days.
Homes used to be able to be bought at 3x median income. We face 7x to 10x. I've often heard interest rates raised as some trump card, but the interest rate is actually irrelevant, it's about the monthly repayment amount which is a function of interest rate AND mortgage size. The fact they're now floating 50-year mortgages, shows just how bad things have gotten.
Proverbs 13:22 says a good man leaves wealth to his grandchildren. Americans are staring at $34 trillion in national debt. Talk about robbing your descendants!
So yes feel free to challenge young people. But it just sounds out of touch without an initial acknowledgement of some sort. Some boomer bashing is unfair, but plenty of it is just the truth.
The problem with the public debt isn't due to the Boomers. It's due to the mythology of "tax cuts which pay for themselves", and that remains a tenet of the GOP to this day. Blame the top income people of any age who benefit immensely from those tax cuts-- not an entire generation.
None of what you wrote establishes that boomers are to blame for anything, only that they should understand the plight of younger generations and not be out of touch. That is not scapegoating. Scapegoating involves claiming that boomers CAUSED all the negative changes of recent decades.
I do want to try and find an agreement here.
You're right that crude boomer-bashing/scapegoating is intellectually lazy. But I think there's a reality around stewardship you're not accepting here.
The Biblical principle of corporate confession (Nehemiah 1, Daniel 9) isn't about assigning personal guilt (BLM Style). Instead it's about a generation acknowledging what happened as a result of their actions, "we have sinned", even unintentionally.
And the democratic reality is stark: Boomers were the largest voting bloc for 40 years, and so they naturally did what most people would do. Voted for things that were good for them at the expense of others.
Boomers voted for tax cuts that favoured them in their peak earning years, financed by debt that rolls over onto their grandchildren. They voted for zoning laws that protected property values at the expense of entry. These policies had majority support.
None of this means that any individual Boomer is personally villainous, but the generation does bear some collective responsibility for the predictable outcomes.
The family data is probably the worst. Boomers inherited strong family structures but presided over the Divorce Revolution creating the very instability that undermines the "agency" you want people to have. I think this is a vastly underestimated cause.
I'm not asking for apology, but as you mentioned "understanding". When young men hear "stop complaining and work harder" without acknowledgement of what it's actually like for them, it makes them rightly angry.
But if you can say "yes, it really is much harder now, BUT you can still do something with your life AND let me help you to do that", you bring people on side.
I see from your profile you are a "Teacher and Elder". I hope that you can share your wisdom with compassion with the young men in your local congregation.
Every blessing.
The dates are all wrong for the boomer scapegoating. Relaxation of restrictions on divorce laws began in the 1950's and no-fault divorce laws were passed in the 1960s and onward. Some sources put the first no-fault divorce law in California in 1969, but it used to be said that Oklahoma passed the first true no-fault divorce law in 1962. Even if we accept 1969 (which became popular as a piece of anti-Reagan propaganda), boomers would have ranged in age from 5 to 23 years old, which makes it rather doubtful that the CA legislature was dominated by boomers.
Tax cuts financed by debt hit big time in 1981. Boomers ranged in age from 17 to 35; again, they were not dominant in the US Congress. Every Congress has been dominated by legislators in their 40s, 50s, and older. After 1981, that policy continued as a strategic policy of the GOP, regardless of the passing of generations.
In 1982, a big tax hike to support Social Security was enacted. I recall a Senator telling an AARP lobbyist something along the lines of "Congratulations, your members just won at the expense of younger working people." I don't think any boomers were retirees in 1982, ages 18-36, nor did they dominate the US Congress.
Other major changes for the worse in our society were brought about on the wrong time scale for boomer scapegoating. Mass immigration, which affects a lot of things in the USA including the cost of housing, came about due to the immigration act of 1965, when boomers were ages 1 to 19 years old. I actually saw a prominent vlogger recently blame immigration on boomers!
As for your closing remarks, I already said the same things myself. Being sympathetic and not out of touch to the plight of younger generations is important.
My concern with scapegoating is not that I will be personally offended by online remarks. The problem is that the oversimplification inherent in scapegoating precludes a real understanding of historical and cultural developments, and hence obstructs reform efforts. Instead of realizing the hard work required to enact necessary changes, scapegoaters become passive bystanders who are just waiting for the boomers to pass from the scene. When that passing doesn't even begin to solve all of the above problems, everyone will realize that decades were wasted.
Clark, I’ll concede the timeline. You are technically right - Boomers didn’t write the bills in '65 or '69.
But the "We Didn't Start the Fire" defense isn't enough. The Silent Generation may have lit the match, but Boomers held the fire hose for 40 years and never turned it on. That 1982 Senator admitting "your members just won at the expense of the young" is the stewardship failure I’m talking about. 1982 was ~45 years ago.
You mentioned earlier that you "already said" sympathy is important. But you can't treat empathy as a footnote while calling legitimate grievances "intellectually infantile" in your first point.
Ephesians 6:4 warns fathers not to provoke their children to anger. Dismissing the current economic reality that young men face does exactly that, it provokes resentment rather than agency.
That is the kind of the "Spiritual Boomerism" Renn was talking about.
I suspect this conversation has run its course. Praying now that you and your congregation know God's blessing.
Everyone held the fire hose for decades without doing anything significant about the nation's troubles. Is it clear that any generation can solve our nation's troubles by voting a certain way? What is any generation doing about any of it?
Good article. As the article earlier this year addressed the downsides of a mindset largely from Boomers, this one addresses the downsides of a mindset from far too many young people. Spiritual Boomerism and Spiritual Doomerism ends up with people tuning out. People don’t like being finger wagged and people don’t like hanging around an Eeyore.
It would be good to hear stories of people who succeeded through the midst of the challenges of life. This makes me think of Richard Nixon’s Purpose of Life comments, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc3IfB23W4c .
I think the problem is that extraordinary people need this type of advice (to take risks and seize opportunities). When people of average capabilities try to follow advice intended for the excellent, they will often fail. The usual "bootstraps" advice actually worked during the 1980s because of special circumstances in the same way that the best advice for people leaving the military in 1945 only applied to that group of people. Back then the B-curve really could bootstrap itself into stupendous opportunity with handshakes and eye contact.
The great masses of on the B-curve want to be shepherded into a government-issue job in the city that they want to live that also pays very well, does not require much of them, that they can't be fired from, to work with the people they want to work with, without the people they don't want to work with, that will also take care of them in old age. That's rather like the New Deal and the Great Society. The money needed to create that artificial middle class is still tied up paying for those cohorts.
So I think conservatives need to accept that a mass middle class is something that has to be artificially engineered by tax and social policy. It is not a natural result of free market competition. The natural long-term result of free market competition without intervening forces looks a lot like Mr. Rockefeller owning everything and everyone else renting. This is the other reason why we lose so many of the richest in society. If all they care about is freedom from interference from the state, it is easier to buy or to import vote banks of drones than it is to engineer and protect a mass middle class. The mass middle class is a whacky Rube Goldberg machine that still amounts to a vote bank, but many advanced political minds in American history figured that it was a good trade-off for various reasons. Machiavelli would say that such a middle class with some amount of property and capable of advocating its own interests is more reliable in war and more energetic in civic matters.
A search engine only tells me about circuit breakers when I ask about "B-curve." Maybe you could clue us in.
In higher ed classes that curve exam grades along a normal distribution it’s common but not ubiquitous to make the most common grade a B. In such classes only a small number of students either excel into the A range or fail. So the B-curve students “ride the curve” and do not put in more work than necessary.
The experience of most people from the last few generations is that only the right side of the curve succeeds and the fat middle flails in debt and disappointment.
"The usual "bootstraps" advice actually worked during the 1980s because of special circumstances."
I actually disagree. (And I'm someone who thinks the whole traditional "bootstrap" narrative was often overdone.) But America has a real, genuine history of middle-class success. (And lower-class failure.)
How much of that middle-class success was due to an open frontier, and then American soft imperial hegemony? Hard to say. Maybe the closing of that world is the real story.
But I don't think four centuries of a middle-class society was artificially engineered by tax and social policy.
I think reading the tax code itself (I know, I know) really hammers home the artificiality of so much of what companies do around hiring and managing employees in particular. Tax law casebooks also do a pretty good job of explaining the policy motivations which tend to be much more inflected with pre-boomer societal harmony, fairness, and a cut-down-the-tall-poppies ethic. Raising revenue is really only a small part of what the tax code is supposed to achieve, with the social engineering aspect being much more important.
This creates kind of a funny dynamic in which economists and policy prognosticators put forth entirely different theories of the purpose and function of taxes than the legislators who draft the statutes and the lawyers that enforce them.
Good piece. I feel myself torn between these two impulses as well when relating to the young and discouraged. You didn't even bring up women directly (EDIT: looked again and saw the points at the very end of this essay), but I've been trying to help a discouraged Zoomer at my church with women, and I sympathize with some of his complaints, but also he has an agency problem. I have to ask: "Bro, do you want a wife or don't you?"
On this point:
>How often does this happen with conservatives? How often does some conservative see an opportunity, go seize it, and then have others of similar disposition follow? If even a handful of families followed a pioneer like Hickman to some small town, the could turn it into a place like Garberville, CA - a functioning, cool, desirable town.
The closest thing to this that I can think of is Doug Wilson's church. There's also Ave Maria, FL. Indeed, you're probably not going to see this on the part of conservatives without religion being the driver.
I would think that for young men, religion is also a source of agency, even if there's still an agency problem inside the church. But it's a source of mission, at least. I personally know two fellow Millennials that descended into a lifestyle of marijuana, video games, and permanent unemployment, and then sort of fell off the map. Neither of them, of course, had religion.
Re: I personally know two fellow Millennials that descended into a lifestyle of marijuana, video games, and permanent unemployment, and then sort of fell off the map.
There were people like that in my generation (Gen X), and probably among the Boomers too. In fact, a certain fraction of every generation dooms itself to failure.
Sure. We do have charts like this though:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRAC25MAUSM156S
Solid take. Another tangential point, is that it is essential to change your presentation as you age. The exact same behavior can be applauded at 20, politely overlooked at 30, and get you socially cancelled at 40. Shapiro is no longer the exciting 20 yr old conservative on college campuses. To maintain influence, his approach will have to change. But this lesson applies to the rest of us as well.
This kind of piece is exactly why I subscribed. Everything here needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
Acknowledge the very real problems facing younger generations (especially young men), talk about potential government policies/cultural changes to address them....
....and then remind people that most of your destiny ultimately depends on YOU. Not on forces outside you.
Well, we do need to keep in mind that things can happen that are so overwhelming that they cannot be overcome. A person who ends up paralyzed in an accident will not become a skiier or dancer. A blind man will not become an artist. That doesn't mean someone who suffers something awful and unappealable should sit around and cry in his beer for the rest of the life, but it does require recognizing the outside forces can and sometimes are more powerful than any amount of willpower and optimism can set at naught.
Oh for sure. Sometimes shit really happens.
But this is why the belief in redemption is so important. (Even Oprah could recognize the resilience and fortitude of post-paralysis Christopher Reeve.)
The Christian understanding of redemptive suffering is pretty central here. As Isak Dinesen put it, "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story." Even Hannah Arendt could use that as the epigraph for her book The Human Condition.
This is also why Community is important. The radical individualism of the libertarians and neo-Scroogists (as I call them) is not a recipe for a successful civilization.
Agreed. America has traditionally accomplished the unlikely combination of community and economic individualism.
Is that combination sustainable? History says yes; reason says no.
As an Elder Gen-Z here (or youngest millennial, depending on who you ask). The bit about people not wanting to hear success stories is definitely true.
I left uni very ill, with serious mental health issues, then suffered through a year of chronic fatigue syndrome. Just as I was starting to get my head above water, COVID and lockdowns arrived.
I spent months doing courses and upskilling in my own time. Sent hundreds of applications, tracked in a depressing spreadsheet. Eventually landed one absolutely miserable job where everyone was as checked out as each other (they'd worked together for years and didn't even talk to each other at lunch times - the office had no windows).
But I kept going. Each evening I spent either doing more training or trying to get some more sleep as I was still recovering from the CFS. I managed to find a role at a start-up eventually, then "job hopped" my way up through a series of year-long stints until I finally landed somewhere decent. Somehow I leaf-frogged a few of my more successful university peers in the end.
My best friend has got four kids, helps run his small church denomination, serves as a deacon, works a full time managerial role, and is somehow doing a theology course on top of all that. I'll be starting a degree myself in the new year whilst also working full-time.
There's this stark division amongst people our age between what I'd call "high agency" and "low agency" types. You've got people who stay in dead-end jobs they openly admit are terrible for them, but become quite angry when you try to suggest something better. Then you've got those of us riding the edge of burnout trying to make something work.
To be fair, I did have family support and other structures that helped me recover, and more than ever it's true that not everyone has that. But it's not like it was some perfect world, both my friend and I come from stereotypical "modern" broken homes.
Was any of this fair? No. Should the system be better? Yes. But Hickman's point about "entering the arena" regardless just rings true. You've only got one life.
Anyone my age knows you aren't going to stumble into prosperity like the boomers did. There's a Big Four partner at our church whose father-in-law gets nearly the same disposable income from his final salary pension - he was an engineer for a local council.
That world's gone (indeed, younger people are paying for it's close). But you still have to play the hand you're dealt.
What gets me is the resentment towards anyone who makes something work despite it all. As if their success invalidates everyone else's struggle. You can acknowledge things are genuinely difficult and still expect people to have a go. Those aren't contradictory.
Thanks for sharing.