Not being able to own a home. Working multiple unfulfilling jobs. Being socially isolated. Having no prospects for retirement. Having no health insurance. Etc.
Together these can become oppression or existential life difficulty.
This sounds like textbook "first world problem". Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades so that the items you listed are not the status quo, and there is a chance that some of the items might become better. My grandparents lived under almost all of the items in your list, my parents lived under some of them, and even I was not able to evade all the items growing up.
Sure, but all of those things are considerably better now than at every point in history, the fact you'd write this even ...
Do you realize that up until about 2 generations ago that nobody had fulfilling work? That work was just labour? 3 Generations ago you worked on the farm, or in the factory, or keeping the shop for meagre wages. In 1960 only about 8% went to university. In 1900 it was probably only 1%.
Literally we live in a world where people can be or do anything they want. This is the first time in history this was even thinkable.
'Having no prospects for retirement' ?? Retirement is a modern concept. 1.5 Generations ago you worked, retired and very quickly died! You lived a few years maybe and that was that. And there wasn't much in the way of support, expectations, or even things to do. Government workers expected 'full comp' in retirement because they only lived a few years. The notion has changed dramatically and it's why our finances are so out of order. You do realize that 'social security' is a very modern concept, right?
People are living literally '3rd lives' now, decades into retirement, and generally much more fulfilling.
'Healthcare'? We are only 2 generations into socialized medicine! Again, the fact most Westerners have access to great healthcare, most of their lives, means they are living at vastly higher standards of living than in any era.
My grandparents were born on farms, with no plumbing or running water, and not electricity. Taxes were extremely low, and most people didn't go to high school (my grandmother did). There was no social security/insurance/retirement. There was no socialized medicine whatsoever. We were barely into having antibiotics. People worked hard and died at 65 from the large variety of ailments which we can now treat, push off, work around etc..
And finally - home ownership - again - a very new concept, only a couple of generations in. 'Retail Banking' is a very modern convention to the point wherein 'owning your own home' is really a '1st generation' concept even in parts of the Latin world. 'Home ownership' was largely driven by 'new world' ideals (US/Canada) where the land was not spoken for - which was a major political idea.
'Social Isolation'? Try living on a farm, where there are
almost no cars, and it takes 1/2 day by train to get to the nearest 10 000 person population centre. We are materially less isolated than ever before.
I don't doubt the notion of feeling isolated, but it's almost as though we need to chose our words better, because whatever we mean when we say 'isolation' it's literally not that, but I agree it's a growing problem. I suggest it's a growing problem of people not participating in their own cultures.
Unconditionally, life is materially better. Whether life is better overall, that's a hard thing to say, but we are undeniably 'rich' as a class of people (anyone reading this). We have the gift of massive surplus and bounty, it's now a matter of being able to socially make do with that.
If you live in a city with a large homeless population, I think it would be interesting for you to go and talk with them.
I live in San Diego, and I've talked to hundreds of homeless people while doing volunteer work and photography. You would not believe how many people, though they may be mentally ill, are smart, honest, good people, who just got fucked by the system. They're out here scrounging for food and getting Hepatitis A and dying in the canyons and not getting any medical or dental care, and their lives are incredibly hopeless.
To take the Steven Pinker-ish approach, and talk about about how great everything is, comes off as ignorant/dismissive of these real problems. I'm not saying what you're saying isn't true, but the average person is (relatively) not better off than 50 years ago. See https://wtfhappenedin1971.com.
Yes, again, I'm not disagreeing with any of what you're saying.
But for those barely clinging on to society, and those who haven't had the chance to accumulate real wealth, life is still pretty hard. Or, at least, a millennial may find life seems hard in comparison with the Baby Boomer generation. Many Baby Boomers lived stable, tracked lives in the postwar economy, and have now accumulated vast generational wealth.
If there's a generation that grew up in a bubble, it's the Baby Boomers, and you'll see this typified by the "in my day, I worked my way through college and bought a house while working my job at the coffee shop" sentiment. Millennial and younger generations just don't have this chance at stability and building wealth at a young age.
Also, drug addiction, lack of any care for mental illness (even sanatoriums), and homelessness of the kind we see now are unique problems that started around the same time as the "war on drugs."
West coast cities homelessness problems are indicative of nothing more than the specific economic and political realities in those cities. It is folly to extrapolate that to larger macroeconomic conditions.
While some specific cities may have their heads up their butts with regard to public policy resulting in more visible homeless the living conditions of the "almost homeless" and working poor have very much improved since the early 1970s (as far back as my knowledge goes).
You can say what you want about the blue collar middle class (off-shoring and student debt have hit them hard over the past decades) but things have very much been improving up for the poor as a whole even though some poor people are unlucky enough to live in backwards places where things have gotten worse locally.
That's just not true. Please don't spread this kind of misinformation. Many cities and states bus their homeless into California. Drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness are all huge problems throughout the US (though also in Europe, et al.).
The downfall of the middle class is the downfall of everyone except the super-rich. Some kind of Portugal drug model / New Deal-type infrastructure plan would be necessary to fix this problem, which is present all across the US. Why do you think Donald Trump got elected? It wasn't bigots in the Midwest — it was impoverishment.
There definitely was a downfall of the middle class! Why do you think we had Occupy Wall Street, and why are populists on the left and right, like Sanders and Trump, gaining in popularity? Why did Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders poll highest among Trump voters? It's because the real middle class of blue- and white-collar work at a stable career has been vanishing. Much of this is due to bad trade and jobs policy, some is due to automation.
The number skills that are useful today are also less than they used to be. The need for actually skilled manual labor has been outsourced to China, Taiwan, and increasingly India.
And don't forget the swindle of universities — 18 year olds signing themselves away to lifelong debt to party, drink, and learn at an institution that couldn't care less about their future prospects. People who leave college with degrees in anything but highly desirable fields are learning they've been lied to about the importance of a degree.
No. First of all, most of them aren't mentally ill. But most who are would probably have been fine doing a normal job if they hadn't gotten hooked on drugs or become homeless, which exacerbated their condition.
Nah. I'm Gen X and we definitely had it easier. Education is way, way more expensive now. Between working part time and some money from family, I left college with no debt.
"Literally nothing existentially difficult" flies in the face of the unprecedented increase in suicide among people coming of age which started precisely around 2008.
Your comment 'flies in the face' of the fact that suicide has not materially changed that much in 50 years [1] (it's up a couple of points since 1980) - and the fact that rates of suicide are currently, literally almost 1/2 what they were before WW2. [2]
Once again proving my point: flippant assertions that 'the world is hard' when actual data suggests just the opposite.
Taking your example, suicide, we're very materially, measurably, scientifically, much better off.
During actually tough times such as world wars, suicides rates go down [0]. Suicide rates are up because people lack purpose and meaning, not because their lives have suddenly gotten tougher.
By the beginning of January, the termination of pandemic-related economic supports is expected to put 19 million Americans at risk of homelessness, and make 11% of the US population unable to afford to put food on the table.
The longer-term picture is that the millennials (born 1980 or later) will be the first generation in a very long time to have a lower standard of living than their parents did.
These are the kinds of problems civil unrest is made of.
It's not minimizing someone pain, it's correcting the impression that now is somehow uniquely worse than in the past. I see it all the time "oh, people in the 50's had it so great", "oh, people in the the 70's had it so great".
Go and ask people who grew up then. It wasn't that great.
You're literally extending the plight of someone 'graduating in 2008' to 'Jews dying in the holocaust' as though they are on some similar scale which I think helps prove my point.
That's because of the way you personally perceive it, while I'm looking at the holistic scenario under which they're living.
The economy is fucked. Its working because its artificially propped up by the Fed and the European Central Bank, to a lesser degree. People know this because the stock market continues to perform well, but individuals are mostly static. Social mobility in the United States is at all-time low and this is well-reported.
Student loan debt has ballooned 2000% over the past 50 years.
Housing prices, be it to buy or rent, have ballooned by 200% in the past 50 years.
Climate change is a serious concern, and absolutely no one can say with any degree of scientific certainty what the long-term (100-300 year range) effects will be.
Now I told you all that... to tell you this.
They're being robbed of hope. People can endure through hardships unimaginable... as long as they have hope. When you take away someone's hope, you take away their life.
You say 2008 wasn't bad because being lynched for being having to drink from the colored fountain is worse. So I tell you that's not so bad because the holocaust was even worse. And maybe the holocaust wasn't even such a big deal because <insert some other tragedy>. See where that leads us?
