Aug 17, 2022 04:12 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 17, 2022 04:33 PM by C C.)
To understand why so many adults are acting just like children, don’t blame Millennials – look to Japan in the 1990s
https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-kidu...y-weddings
INTRO: These are trying times. People are working harder and earning less. They’re buffeted by terrifying headlines and grim predictions. They’re having less sex and living with parents longer. And they’re burrowing under weighted blankets and escaping into the childish comforts of colouring books (or the fairytale fantasies of corporate theme parks and video games). If life in the 1930s was marked by a Great Depression, and the 2010s by a Great Recession, one might say our current decade is marked by a Great Regression. This return to childhood manifests in the things we consume, in how we spend our time, even in the ways our societies are governed.
Is this a crisis? Or just more of the usual intergenerational grumbling, as when Joan Didion scathingly critiqued the foibles of young Boomers in the 1960s? ‘We were the last generation to identify with adults,’ she declared of her own Silent Generation. In time, the Boomers set upon Generation X, portraying them as slackers. Then, adults of all ages dumped on Millennials for being entitled, oversensitive ‘baby-people’. Inevitably, Gen Z now finds itself in the same crosshairs. But this time, at this moment in history, things feel different. The Great Regression cuts across generational lines and national borders.
Critics claim that ‘Britain Is A Nation Of Kidults’ (Female First website, 2012), and that the United States is experiencing a ‘Peter Pandemic’ (The Baltimore Sun, 2004), even going so far as to lament ‘The Death Of Adulthood In American Culture’ (The New York Times, 2014). And they’re right. Grownups around the globe really do seem to be eschewing the trappings of adulthood in favour of constructing second childhoods for themselves. But where the critics are wrong is in their assumptions that the Great Regression is a crisis – or worse.
[...] It’s tempting to frame the Great Regression as a reaction to the unique confluence of crises that have affected Western nations in the 21st century – a byproduct of the profoundly unnerving decade we are living in. But our global second childhood has roots that extend far back ... In the 1990s, a precursor to our contemporary Great Regression emerged in a certain nation decades before it did in the rest of the planet. That nation is Japan, and its experiences suggest that when the youth and young adults of a hyper-connected post-industrial society lose faith in the future, a Great Regression is inevitable.
To critics who see the adoption of childish sensibilities among adults as a kind of social disease, this might seem a grim conclusion. But Japan’s experience implies a startling corollary. Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play. It can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles. These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life – and, as we adopt them, they transform our definition of what it means to lead healthy ‘adult’ lives.
[...] This was more than niche subculture. Throughout much of the 1990s, Japan’s most popular comic magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, sold 6 million copies a week. In 1995, a quarter-million attendees thronged the biggest fan convention, Comic Market, making it the largest fan gathering of any kind in the world. But at the time, mainstream Japan disparaged these hyper-consumers of pop culture as ‘otaku’, meaning someone who focuses on their hobbies to the detriment of everything else in their lives. The irony was that, amid a desperate push to promote consumer spending in the 1990s, the otaku were among the last ones still seriously consuming. Nevertheless, social critics excoriated them for buying the ‘wrong’ things, which is to say things not befitting adults: games, cartoons, comic books.
Salarymen may have built Japan, Inc but, when it crumbled, young people picked up the pieces. The real trendsetters were young women, ranging from schoolgirls to ‘office ladies’, the female counterparts of the salarymen. They began unabashedly incorporating symbols of feminine childhood into their adult identities, upending entire industries through the power of ‘kawaii’, a Japanese word that overlaps with ‘cuteness’ but which is also a state of mind that refers to being adorable, playful, just begging for cuddles, like a kitten – or a baby. By 1992, one women’s magazine anointed kawaii ‘the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese’.
Over the course of the decade, a new crop of hypercute pop idols eschewed sex appeal for childishly high-pitched voices and juvenile fashions... (MORE - missing details)
https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-kidu...y-weddings
INTRO: These are trying times. People are working harder and earning less. They’re buffeted by terrifying headlines and grim predictions. They’re having less sex and living with parents longer. And they’re burrowing under weighted blankets and escaping into the childish comforts of colouring books (or the fairytale fantasies of corporate theme parks and video games). If life in the 1930s was marked by a Great Depression, and the 2010s by a Great Recession, one might say our current decade is marked by a Great Regression. This return to childhood manifests in the things we consume, in how we spend our time, even in the ways our societies are governed.
Is this a crisis? Or just more of the usual intergenerational grumbling, as when Joan Didion scathingly critiqued the foibles of young Boomers in the 1960s? ‘We were the last generation to identify with adults,’ she declared of her own Silent Generation. In time, the Boomers set upon Generation X, portraying them as slackers. Then, adults of all ages dumped on Millennials for being entitled, oversensitive ‘baby-people’. Inevitably, Gen Z now finds itself in the same crosshairs. But this time, at this moment in history, things feel different. The Great Regression cuts across generational lines and national borders.
Critics claim that ‘Britain Is A Nation Of Kidults’ (Female First website, 2012), and that the United States is experiencing a ‘Peter Pandemic’ (The Baltimore Sun, 2004), even going so far as to lament ‘The Death Of Adulthood In American Culture’ (The New York Times, 2014). And they’re right. Grownups around the globe really do seem to be eschewing the trappings of adulthood in favour of constructing second childhoods for themselves. But where the critics are wrong is in their assumptions that the Great Regression is a crisis – or worse.
[...] It’s tempting to frame the Great Regression as a reaction to the unique confluence of crises that have affected Western nations in the 21st century – a byproduct of the profoundly unnerving decade we are living in. But our global second childhood has roots that extend far back ... In the 1990s, a precursor to our contemporary Great Regression emerged in a certain nation decades before it did in the rest of the planet. That nation is Japan, and its experiences suggest that when the youth and young adults of a hyper-connected post-industrial society lose faith in the future, a Great Regression is inevitable.
To critics who see the adoption of childish sensibilities among adults as a kind of social disease, this might seem a grim conclusion. But Japan’s experience implies a startling corollary. Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play. It can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles. These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life – and, as we adopt them, they transform our definition of what it means to lead healthy ‘adult’ lives.
[...] This was more than niche subculture. Throughout much of the 1990s, Japan’s most popular comic magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, sold 6 million copies a week. In 1995, a quarter-million attendees thronged the biggest fan convention, Comic Market, making it the largest fan gathering of any kind in the world. But at the time, mainstream Japan disparaged these hyper-consumers of pop culture as ‘otaku’, meaning someone who focuses on their hobbies to the detriment of everything else in their lives. The irony was that, amid a desperate push to promote consumer spending in the 1990s, the otaku were among the last ones still seriously consuming. Nevertheless, social critics excoriated them for buying the ‘wrong’ things, which is to say things not befitting adults: games, cartoons, comic books.
Salarymen may have built Japan, Inc but, when it crumbled, young people picked up the pieces. The real trendsetters were young women, ranging from schoolgirls to ‘office ladies’, the female counterparts of the salarymen. They began unabashedly incorporating symbols of feminine childhood into their adult identities, upending entire industries through the power of ‘kawaii’, a Japanese word that overlaps with ‘cuteness’ but which is also a state of mind that refers to being adorable, playful, just begging for cuddles, like a kitten – or a baby. By 1992, one women’s magazine anointed kawaii ‘the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese’.
Over the course of the decade, a new crop of hypercute pop idols eschewed sex appeal for childishly high-pitched voices and juvenile fashions... (MORE - missing details)