Weekly Digest: Millennials vs. Boomers

Illegible churches, psychedelic re-enchantment, Boomer grandparenting and more in this week's roundup

Welcome to my weekly digest for December 8, 2023, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.

Once again, I encourage all of you to pre-order a copy of my forthcoming book Life in the Negative World, coming out on January 30th. Pre-ordering will really help the book succeed in having an impact, and you will also get free bonus material to boot. Thanks so much.

Some of what I’ve been reading: A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth, Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgaard, and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars by James Davison Hunter.

Illegible Churches

In response to this week’s post about becoming illegible, a reader shared this observation:

I find this all so interest and quite germane to my experience in visiting a new church in my city--[redacted] The church is evangelical and has traditional/biblical stances on social issues and morals. This is anathema is my hyper progressive town. If words gets out the picketers and "cancel culture" vultures would circle. Alternative views are not to be allowed in my oh, so tolerant and inclusive town. So what I have noticed while visiting the church and seeking to get further involved, is that there is a seemingly deliberate illegibility about the church in anything public facing. No contact information is given about the staff. There is a vetting application process to get access to the "full" church webpage and even its mid-week "community group" leaders and locations are hidden and only accessible via a pre-vetting process and a "they contact you gate-keeping". Instead of "seeker friendly" it feels "seeker wary". As if these supposed "seekers" could be "sheep in wolves' clothing." I see this as what will be increasingly the mode of Christ-following churches in the Negative World we are entering into. Churches in [redacted] and other leftist locales are at the front of this coming wave of needing to be illegible. The church is going underground.

Re-Enchantment and America’s Psychedelic Moment

Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Phil Cotnoir writes on the coming psychedelic moment.

My contention in this article is that these two trends—the rise in mental health issues and the rise in psychedelic use—are even now starting to collide. In fact, one study claims that 65% of Americans with mental health conditions “want access to psychedelics.” The question is: what happens when they get that access?

A raging foment of metaphysical and spiritual questions are set to burst forth as these two clear cultural trends collide. Why? Because of the inescapable questions that psychedelic experiences raise. One set of such questions concerns the very nature of reality itself. In this regard, the rising wave of psychedelic use is perfectly timed to take advantage of the receding tide of atheism. The link between psychedelic use and major worldview shifts is very strong, with one study associated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine finding that “more than two-thirds of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards.” The findings were pithily summed up by this VICE headline: “It’s Official: DMT Makes You Believe in God.” As much as I enjoy a catchy headline, this one isn’t quite true. DMT seems rather to disrupt materialism and to awaken users to the spiritual realm.

...

Therefore we might say that the proliferation of psychedelics is a symptom and an accelerant of the metaphysical shift taking place in the West. As the hard-edged materialism fades along with the boomer generation that enshrined it, a porous openness is taking its place. To borrow from the insights of Charles Taylor, if modernity produced isolated, buffered selves that were in some way insulated from the supernatural, then the re-paganizing and re-enchanting era we are entering now is producing newly porous ones. For every materialist atheist content with a cosmos of just stuff there seem to be a half dozen others intuiting that there is more than matter.

This goes right in line with what I observed a few weeks ago about re-enchantment being one of the themes of the future. Rod Dreher observes:

I can’t say it often enough: it was the Anglican ordinand Daniel Kim, then aged 27, who first put me onto the idea that his generation was done, done, done with New Atheism, but was not really interested in Christianity. Instead, they were more inclined to seek transcendence in the occult and in psychedelics. Daniel told me that he expects to be dealing with this phenomenon for the entirety of his ministry.

Boomers and the Millennial Children

Business Insider ran an interesting article about Millennials who complain that their Boomer parents are too selfish to help out with the grandkids.

Looking back on her childhood, Kristjana Hillberg said that it was "never a question" whether her grandmother would watch her and her brother when their parents went on a trip. "If Mom and Dad ran out of town, we were at Grandma's," the 33-year-old told Business Insider. "Grandma wasn't going anywhere, and we always knew that." But Hillberg, a mom of three, said there's no guarantee that her parents or in-laws would do the same for their grandkids — certainly not at the snap of a finger. "We have to make sure that we are asking months in advance," she said, adding that their "own travel plans" often have to be factored in.

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A May analysis from Bank of America on consumer-spending habits found boomers were outspending other generations on travel and dining out. And why shouldn't they? According to the Federal Reserve, baby boomers own more than $78 trillion in assets — that's around half of all wealth in the country.

But while they're busy spending their money, their millennial children feel left behind. Leslie Dobson, a psychologist in Los Angeles, said many of her millennial clients were dealing with feelings of abandonment and resentment toward their boomer parents.

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The elder Dobson said that even if he's off boating and playing pickleball in Mexico, he'd still done plenty to help his children out, including supporting them financially through much of their lives. At this point, he said, he deserves to spend some of his money on himself.

"They've all got nannies," he said. "We didn't have a damn nanny. They drive expensive SUVs. I drove a fricking minivan." Moving to Mexico and buying a boat hasn't taken away from his children, he said: "I haven't spent a nickel less on my kids. I just spent some on me." Still, many millennial children, including Dobson's own, would prefer time spent — and not necessarily money.

We’ve been very fortunate that our Boomer parents are willing, even eager to come see and help out with our son. There are plenty of Boomers who are actively engaged grandparents. We’ve met many Boomers around here who moved to this area specifically to be close to and help out with their grandchildren.

But there still seems to be plenty of narcissistic Boomers who are still living their best life now, and plan to spent as much of their money as they can on themselves before they die.

At the same time, my observation is that Millennials are very willing to cut off their own parents over various imagined slights or ideological differences. Some parents seem to live in fear of their own children doing just that.

The Catholic Church Is Too Masculine?

Here’s a new one on me. Pope Francis thinks the Catholic Church is too masculine:

This Thursday, November 30, Pope Francis received members of the International Theological Commission at the Vatican, where he reminded them that the Church is "female" and a "bride." The organism was established by Paul VI within the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1969 (it was a proposal of the first assembly of the Synod of Bishops) to assist it in examining the most important doctrinal issues.

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"The Church is female," Francis reiterated, "and if we do not understand what a woman is, what the theology of a woman is, we will never understand what the Church is. One of our great sins has been masculinizing the Church. And this is not resolved through ministerial means, that's another thing. It is resolved through the mystical, the real way." 

"This," the Pope concluded, "is a task I ask of you, please. Demasculinize the Church." 

Rod Dreher noted:

I sent that link out on Twitter, snarking that Francis is doing more to recruit for Orthodoxy than us Orthodox. I promise you, almost every Catholic I’ve repeated that Francis story to has responded by saying some version of, “Hasn’t it been de-masculinized already?”

The Soft Girl Revolution

Back in October, Glamour magazine’s UK edition published an article called “Welcome to the soft-girl revolution: How young women are rejecting girlboss culture for a life of leisure.”

“I don’t want to be a girlboss, I don’t want to hustle, I simply want to live my life slowly and lay in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence, reading books and creating art and loving the people in my life,” she said.

Jones isn’t alone. For many Gen Z women who have entered the workforce during the past few years, their greatest dream increasingly is to have the chance to achieve nothing. At least, by traditional capitalist standards.

Welcome to the world of the “soft girl,” the lifestyle choice that many young women are now holding up as an ideal. The soft girl doesn’t value the grind or getting ahead. She prioritises slow living. Her days are filled with a nearly obsessive focus on self-care, from making the perfect morning smoothie to tending to her skin and trading in hardcore HIIT workouts for leisurely “cozy cardio.” Long-term, the soft girl dreams of making dinner for her husband and, if she’s got them, staying at home with her kids. She’s not interested in being promoted or founding her own company. She’s in touch with her feminine energy, her menstrual cycle, and her moods.

Much like the tradwife craze on Instagram and Tik Tok, it’s not clear to what extent this is real vs. a social media trend people are glomming onto for clicks. But it’s interesting to see this article appear. Sometimes the medium is the message.

Best of the Web

Jonathan Haidt: I’m Worried About the Boys Too

Dusty Deevers: End ‘No Fault’ Divorce

Speaking of divorce, Michael Clary posted an interesting X thread with a lot of statistics on divorce.

It’s long been known that when women have kids, their earnings take a hit. It’s typically been assumed that having kids caused a change in the mother’s income trajectory, but an interesting study out of Norway suggests that in fact many women choose to have kids when their income starts to flatten out.

Institute for Family Studies: Stuck in a Situationship

Institute for Family Studies: Raising Resilient Children

Ross Douthat/NYT: Is South Korea Disappearing?

Ben Dunson: Rejecting Due Process - “The presumption of innocence, however, is in peril in the evangelical world. In fact, there are many who believe that a presumption of innocence is the very opposite of justice.”

New Content and Media Mentions

I had previously recommended the book Dressing the Man as a good Christmas gift. A friend sent me a link to this post that summarizes a lot of the guidelines from that book. The post doesn’t actually mention me but is a great resource.

Joel Carini had an interesting post arguing that secular society is not hostile towards Christianity, only towards people who reject cultural leftism. I think there’s a certain sense in which that’s true, and in fact make a similar observation in a different way in my book. But there’s also a sense in which that’s like saying Rome wasn’t hostile to Christianity, only to people who wouldn’t burn incense to Caesar.

I also got a mention from Niccolo Soldo.

This week’s podcast is with Dr. Ben Merkle, President of New St. Andrews College, on the business model of higher education, and why it’s broken.

Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

New this week:

• My post about why I need you to pre-order my book.

• Become Illegible - In the negative world, people should look at ways to become less visible to governments and other entities

• The Future of Media - Macroculture and microculture go to war