If I had to generalize, the main reasons why the Millennial generation is dysfunctional is because of insulation from competition, organizational chaos around them, and a resultant lack of healthy friendship. This is what people tend to mean when they use terms like ‘atomization.’ It’s not just that people are isolated, it’s that they’re isolated in a chaotic social environment.
People in the business press will often try to explain why millennials need to be treated differently to manage their unusual psychologies.
In the US, we’ve gone from what was once a highly competitive culture into a cut-down-the-tall-poppy culture that’s more common in Asian countries, Europe, and South America. Part of the reason for this is that this is the first generation to grow up with enormous numbers of new people from Asia and South America. The positive spin that’s often put on this is that it’s a less materialistic culture. Well, that may be, but primitive tribes without plumbing are also less materialistic. A certain amount of materialism is what keeps humans out of the trees.
This generation is also the first to really bear the full brunt of feminism and women in the work force.
All of this leads to caginess, social fracture, romantic nihilism, and corporate dysfunction.
This is a generation that, as children, tended to be used as chemistry sets for new psychiatric theories that tend to be developed and discarded in five year cycles. The results of using children’s brains as chemistry sets seem to be, at least from self-reports, widespread psychosis.
People whose formative experiences were having quack doctors tell them all the ways in which they were disabled and deficient (while simultaneously telling them that they were talented and special) lead to people with a strange sense of identity.
We’re what happens when you have classes for middle schoolers that explain why promiscuity is healthy and masturbation is a great idea. This was a bold social experiment, and now we know what the results look like. It’s not just the chemicals, but the pioneering psychological theories pushed onto people without much thought about the potential damage that might be done. Libraries have been filled with books of untested notions, and then those ideas have been promoted at scale at schools, universities, clinics, and hospitals.
The baby boomers get a lot of credit for being the vanguard of the ‘sexual revolution,’ but even those that have divorced tend to have an idea of what romance and monogamy means. It’s difficult for people in the older set to understand how, among young people, even in the upper classes, monogamy has become strange, and even a perverse behavior, before increasingly fewer feel the pressure to go into a sham marriage to satisfy someone’s baby rabies.
While millennials are highly educated, they’re educated in a system that has watered down standards to the point of uselessness. Meanwhile, many of those people with watered-down credentials believe that they are entitled to high positions in the workforce. This leads to frenetically chaotic competition in which employers with limited legal means to discriminate among employees based upon ability have to sort through huge numbers of people who are all desperate for work, without being permitted to efficiently test the capacities of the people looking for that work.
Additionally, many of those people are saddled with debts that push them to compete much harder for work than they probably should be. Demand for labor to repay debts (created ex nihilo, with a ‘native advertising’ campaign called K-12 paid for by the government) displaces demand for labor based on capability and interest to do the job.
That all happens in the larger context of economic chaos caused by Federal Reserve policy, egregious acts like Obamacare, and foreign competition taking advantage of the civil conflict within the US.
Faced with this pile of problems that single people can’t solve, the typical response is to pray for the apocalypse. That’s understandable. It’s also the morally wrong response.
A lot of the common life problems that millennials experience are due to people no longer really looking after one another. Families, which are supposed to fulfill this purpose, have been greatly damaged or obliterated in enormous numbers. It’s sort of like what happens when formerly owned dogs become strays. Their hair gets patchy, they don’t eat good food, they develop weird habits, they have trouble socializing, and they become incapable of doing ordinary dog-like things.
People aren’t much different. Without close friends, family, and spouses, people tend to become unhealthy, erratic, and unproductive. They begin worshiping strange idols, obsessing over useless paths of knowledge, making bad art, and abusing drugs. The people that are supposed to help other people to resolve their problems will tend to instead just do what they can to triage the dysfunction, tell the person who has made themselves worthless that they still possess essential worth, and go on to the next dysfunctional person.
The reason why we hold each other to standards of behavior, health, and appearance is because a breakdown of this process causes the breakdown of civilization: city by city, town by town, village by village, family by family, person by person.
Apocalyptic violence only makes those problems far worse and usually has multi-generational negative consequences. Chaotic civil war doesn’t select for civilized traits. The people who thrive during chaotic civil wars are killers, pimps, smugglers, and whores in that order. The higher arts disintegrate almost immediately, because delicate spirits must either coarsen or escape to survive the conflict. Keeping the electricity running and the plumbing working is a big enough challenge: producing literature and advancing technology becomes impossible.
[Citation required]
I find that implausible. IT was only a few years back the Americans shitcanned their surgeon general for mentioning briefly that perhaps it’d be better if teens masturbated instead of engaging in risky sexual conduct.
Meh
I graduated high school in 2007 (Canada, small-ish town), and encouraging girls to be promiscuous was implicitly taught in the health classes.
I know this is personal anecdote, but it was of course the same for the dozens of other kids in my grade.
>and encouraging girls to be promiscuous was implicitly taught in the health classes.
Wait, really? If that happened here it would probably make national news. Were the boys told to be promiscuous?
I know that we had modules explaining the double standard on promiscuity and why we had to oppose it… in private schools.
Actually, this is a great point. For all the talking that goes on about how public schools are garbage and how big government corruptes everything and blah blah, the state had pretty much nothing to do with the pornification and sluttification of the US. Corporatons and technology did. My public school, in a highly liberal area mind you, pretty much said “promiscuity is unhealthy,” “abstinence is the best bet,” and it did nothing to encourage masturbation.
Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented:
Fair. Harsh, but fair.
Social engineer is a polite term for child abuser.
I think the turning point for my lot will be when they realize who is footing the bill for their demands. The bad art is inexcusable.
It’s a lot easier to break than to build. And the Millenials are broke. See SJW, which is a mass movement of badly damaged people (no father in the home, drugged, government-schooled, helicoptered by neurotic Boomers, etc.). Can such a broken generation rebuild? No, they will pass on their brokenness and it will transmogrify into even more freakish forms. Unless God makes a miracle, which I pray for every day.
I’m hoping that many SJWs will self-destruct before reproducing. It seems that they fall into two camps: the rage-driven extroverts–e.g., Big Red–and the mood disordered, chronically suicidal tumblrites. Neither group is terribly attractive to men.
That’s nothing – just think of how attractive a male feminist or SJW typically is to women.
I think that a eunuch locked inside of a gay bathhouse typically has a better chance of reproducing.
Unfortunately, they’ve already started spawning as fornication is rampant within this generation. It is exasperated because their parents still support them either morally and/or financially. So, they probably spawn even more.
We are simply (although I am a technical generation X in a Millennial age group) the dilapidated result of bureaucratic social engineers efforts. Uber-broken people in need of paradigm shifts to rebuild in a manner in step with being made in the image of God.
The whole ‘competition ethic,’ overdone, leads to a lot of these problems. The previous competition-oriented generations have not prevented the country from coming to this point. Competitive people care only for themselves and not for their country, I’ve never known it to be otherwise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/pamela-druckerman-talking-to-kids-about-sex.html?referrer=
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Pamela Druckerman, huh?
I largely would agree with this assessment of my generation, and I’m not much of an exception to this mindset. I think generations like mine are the result of the world the boomers pushed for with their cultural and sexual revolutions. We’re exactly the kind of generation that pops up and delivers to civilization its final blow. Some certainly look forward to apocalypse, others are just trying to give it a silver lining because it’s coming and there is no stopping it. Personally, I want to turn back the clock–even just ten years–because the future is going to suck, and if things get truly horrid, I probably won’t survive it.
“Chaotic civil war doesn’t select for civilized traits. The people who thrive during chaotic civil wars are killers, pimps, smugglers, and whores in that order.”
I take a slight issue with this however. If chaos really did select for these types, then how did civilization ever arise? From what I’ve witnessed of the chaos in Mexico, killers and smugglers tend to die young. People who keep their heads down get pretty unlucky sometimes, and they have to deal with horrid economic conditions, but they do survive in large–even if it is in squalor. I would argue that civilization is born out of chaos. That chaos does select for what leads to civilized traits. It’s not the killer who thrives in such an environment, it’s the clever killer. The one who knows how to survive and profit both in the short term and in the long term. These sorts of people, and yes they are killers I have no illusions, create the stability which leads to civilization down the line.
So, no the apocalypse will definitely suck. It won’t be liberating at all. For most, myself included, it will be boring poverty and helplessness. It means losing loved ones regularly.
Lazy millennials will by and large die (or at least undergo massive suffering and changes to their entire mentality), but those who do make it to the other end will see (or their children will see) the beginnings of a better world.
Alexander the Great wasn’t a thug.
Right, but his forefathers were warlord-kings who arose during a time of chaos in Greece.
That’s a slow process that doesn’t necessarily result in what it did in Greece. In most of the world, it leads to crap…
It was crap in Greece too.
The dark age might last centuries, and it is crap, but crappy chaos always gives birth to something new. Comfort leads to crap, crap to glory, glory to comfort, and so on.
Millennials aren’t going to man up and save civilization. The handful of millenials who manage to prosper in the upcoming hell will sow the seeds of the next civilized era though.
My point in all of this is to say: my generation isn’t unique.
The essay was wonderful to read. Thank you.
Nil desperandum. Even in the days of the fall of Rome, there were green shoots. On that occasion, it was The rise of Christianity.
For my own part, I will never work with women or Miilennials again. Their conduct in the workplace destroyed my health and I’ve been out of work for the past year repairing the damage (adrenal fatigue, Cushing’s and diabetes).
I am now fit for work again but my doctors assure me that the odds of 2:1 of dying in three to five years will return if I work with those people again. I’m fifty and I’ve taken less than fifteen sick days in my life but assicuating with narcissistic women and Millennials has robbed me of three decades of my life.
My point is I’m highly motivated to see a way out of this mess and it lies in creating that bogeyman patriarchy those neurotics dreamt up – intelligent men doing business with intelligent men.