Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

What's Happened to Youthful Freedom?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    What's Happened to Youthful Freedom?

    Well, I'm not really sure this "Technically" belongs in P&R, but I'm very sure it will inevitably brew into a two sided shit-fest, so I figure this is the best place to put it.

    What happened to the days when kids couldn't wait to turn 18, and get out in the world, jump in the deep end head first, with the plan of doing it on their own, and being willing to figure out how to swim, even if they might swallow a little water?

    There is a breakdown, a change in our society where youth went from that to this present type, "European-esque" concept of living in their parents McMansion, much like the castles and manors of yore, multiple generations under one roof, never going out to make something on their own, instead, pushing for changes, laws placing them on their parents insurance policy until they are 26.

    Now we have a new generation coming online, not wanting the freedom nor interest to drive and own their own car, being satisfied with living on Mommy & Daddies WiFi, eating Doritos and Mountain Dew, playing XBOX until three AM, joining the push to make even more changes to a once strong and independent society, wanting more provision, protection, and production of the ability to do nothing.

    /rant

    #2
    Probably because they know they can't make it. It's simply not possible to afford an apartment, a car, and food working for $10.50/hr 35 hours a week (because company xyz doesn't want to give you full time so they can skirt benefits). Let alone the fact that there isn't much point in doing a menial job merely to continue your existence performing said menial job.

    I guess that means I'm pointing at lack of good jobs, although the problem doesn't affect me personally as I went to college and am currently gainfully employed. It did take me 5 months to find a job out of college though, and I was actively seeking employment months before I graduated.
    '87 325is - Schwarz/Schwarz

    Comment


      #3
      I see what you're talking about too.

      My best example: I can't think of a generation of kids that didn't think their parents' music sucked, but this time kids are living off their folks' culture and music collections. It is weird.

      No sense of rejection of the status quo.

      Instead, flatty baseball caps etc.
      STX e30
      No. 10/110 STX: 1989 325i
      DD: 1991 318is slicktop

      SHAZAM, GOMER, LOOK AHEAD.

      Comment


        #4
        I dont get it either, but I'm not sticking around with the kids my age pulling that kinda stuff. I'll be better off than them later on.

        Comment


          #5
          ^Yep.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by Komzorz View Post
            Probably because they know they can't make it. It's simply not possible to afford an apartment, a car, and food working for $10.50/hr 35 hours a week (because company xyz doesn't want to give you full time so they can skirt benefits). Let alone the fact that there isn't much point in doing a menial job merely to continue your existence performing said menial job.

            I guess that means I'm pointing at lack of good jobs, although the problem doesn't affect me personally as I went to college and am currently gainfully employed. It did take me 5 months to find a job out of college though, and I was actively seeking employment months before I graduated.
            Because you need all the creature comforts, right? No point in sacrifice, and working your ass off to get what you want later in life, assuming you need all the bonus items RIGHT NOW, right? That exact mindset is exactly what I'm talking about.

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by Farbin Kaiber View Post
              Because you need all the creature comforts, right? No point in sacrifice, and working your ass off to get what you want later in life, assuming you need all the bonus items RIGHT NOW, right? That exact mindset is exactly what I'm talking about.
              I agree, that mindset is bullshit for sure. I don't subscribe to it, and I got ahead. But if I were 18 right now, I can tell you I'm not sure what I would do.

              College costs are getting outrageous (assuming you're paying for it 100% yourself with no parental/otherwise support), and most jobs you can get out of highschool are dead ends that don't provide enough money to be financially independent in the first place.

              Honestly I think the best bet for young people are tradeschools/apprenticeships where they can get into skilled labor quickly without entering the debt nightmare. If they're too lazy for that, fuck 'em and let them be trampled under the steamroller of life by people willing to give a shit.
              '87 325is - Schwarz/Schwarz

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Farbin Kaiber View Post
                Now we have a new generation coming online, not wanting the freedom nor interest to drive and own their own car...
                This part baffles me. At 15 I couldnt wait to drive, to have the freedom to go absolutely anywhere I wanted. I probably wanted that more than sex.

                Comment


                  #9
                  the stories of sacrifice and working your ass off to get what you want later in life all come from people who've had it pay off. Everyone who worked their ass off but *didn't* have it pay off is on the streets, on welfare, in the military, scraping by at minimum wage jobs, and is generally in shit situations. (note, i'm not saying everyone that is homeless and/or on welfare worked their ass off in the past, that's obviously false.)

                  There are still people that will work hard and have it pay off. That's not going to stop happening. Nobody remembers the ones who didn't work hard 50 years ago, though, because they didn't do anything of note. You're aware of them now because you exist at the same time they do and can't help but be aware of them.
                  cars beep boop

                  Comment


                    #10
                    It all boils down to laziness. Personally, I blame the parents. People coddle there kids nowadays.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      A good read this issue:

                      The recession didn't gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.


                      The recession didn't gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.



                      Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

                      In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

                      This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

                      Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.



                      Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you're a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

                      The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn't mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here's Rubio: "Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home." He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

                      David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party's combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: "This isn't conservatism: It's a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation." The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

                      Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

                      His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.

                      The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."

                      The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers' deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there's just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.



                      Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government's future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.

                      This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers' spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the "compassion" in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.

                      Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

                      And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.

                      Let's say you just graduated from high school.
                      College, right? You have to go to college. That's not just what your career counselor told you. That's in the numbers. If you go to college, you're significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else's pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?

                      And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing" after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That's no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts.

                      Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.



                      Once you're out of college, you'll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we've forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.

                      Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren't internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an "important recruiting tool." Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students "credit" for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.

                      But maybe you're an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master's or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it's not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily.

                      Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That's not just an expression.



                      And if you didn't take your high school advisor's advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what's left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a "globally competitive wage."

                      Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders "won't be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing."

                      Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

                      Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children's birthright for a mess of their own pottage.



                      Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They're entitled, they have too many choices. They don't know what they want. They're getting themselves into debt. They don't know how good they have it.

                      These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.


                      The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought "being able to give their children better opportunities" was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.

                      Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it's exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.

                      Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.

                      A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it's the irresponsible, feckless children who don't have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.



                      People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It's the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody's parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don't have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.

                      The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?



                      Get ready for the summer. It's going to be hot.

                      Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.

                      The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don't want to be there, who would rather be working?

                      Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what's happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.

                      By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we'll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

                      We'll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        ^^^ I'm pretty sure this was the basis for at least one entire LP by the Clash in the late '70s.

                        Point being, you're correct. But you're not pointing out anything that's as new as you claim. It goes back further.

                        And the targeting is broader than you suggest.

                        ANY easily subjugated group is going to be taken advantage of ... The young, minorities, small business, gay-lesbian, women, THE ELDERLY, etc.

                        Pick your subcult ...

                        "Old vs. Young" doesn't really get at the heart of it. It's power vs. nonpower.

                        Ultimately, the world lately reminds me more of a game of musical chairs -- nobody wants to be the last one standing.
                        STX e30
                        No. 10/110 STX: 1989 325i
                        DD: 1991 318is slicktop

                        SHAZAM, GOMER, LOOK AHEAD.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          What multiple generations have experienced is that the majority of young people can't do shit about their state of affairs until they're old people.


                          By that time, sensibilities change and they are only looking to preserve the status quo because of prideful and misguided selfish anecdotes like 'well, i worked hard to get to where i am sonny hurr durr'.


                          No one gives a fuck about the kids and the world is not everyone's oyster.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by evandael View Post
                            the world is not everyone's oyster.

                            Nope. The game has been rigged for a long, long time.

                            The question here, from my point of view, is why is the current generation's response so tepid and lame?

                            What happened to snuff out the impulse to shake that shit up?
                            STX e30
                            No. 10/110 STX: 1989 325i
                            DD: 1991 318is slicktop

                            SHAZAM, GOMER, LOOK AHEAD.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Originally posted by Komzorz View Post
                              Probably because they know they can't make it. It's simply not possible to afford an apartment, a car, and food working for $10.50/hr 35 hours a week (because company xyz doesn't want to give you full time so they can skirt benefits). Let alone the fact that there isn't much point in doing a menial job merely to continue your existence performing said menial job.

                              I guess that means I'm pointing at lack of good jobs, although the problem doesn't affect me personally as I went to college and am currently gainfully employed. It did take me 5 months to find a job out of college though, and I was actively seeking employment months before I graduated.
                              how about be willing to relocate? to say, North Dakota, where oil and jobs exist.
                              “There is nothing government can give you that it hasn’t taken from you in the first place”
                              Sir Winston Churchill

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X