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Human trends: The Crisis of the Lonely Atoms

#1
C C Offline
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/08/th...#more-6038

EXCERPT: We are facing a generation of unskilled 20-something men, largely unemployed, largely unconnected, largely irresponsible for a want of anything to be responsible for. They are living no one’s fantasy, but they fantasize constantly inside alternative worlds that provide pleasure and escape from a reality largely ignored. Call them the Lonely Atoms.

A significant percentage of white males in their 20s fail to show up for their own lives. They are unable to find a job. They are unwilling or uninterested in doing work, leaving home, or getting married. They play a lot of video games. Economist Erik Hurst of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago summarizes their situation aptly: “The life of these nonworking, lower-skilled young men looks like what my [12-year-old] son wishes his life was like now: not in school, not at work, and lots of video games.”

The Lonely Atoms are intractable: They cannot be compelled, chastened, cajoled, shamed to grow up. Observers, parents, and columnists take this for a crisis. But it is a crisis in the genitive case, belonging to the observer and not the observed. The Lonely Atoms are not present for the account. They are a large-scale retraction, walking off the stage of private and public life.

There is little novelty in side-stepping adulthood or conventional ideas of responsibility. Young adults chafe at the linear progression of college, career, marriage, family, home ownership—what Zorba the Greek called the “full catastrophe.” Dropouts, hippies, beatniks, hipsters, all the way back to the prodigal son. Dissipated youth have always been with us. But rebels rebel against an orthodox grain, from some place outside the mainstream. The Lonely Atoms have not sought out any such perch from which to wage their campaign, because they have no campaign, no agenda, and no particular viewpoint. What they have is a negative retreat, a self-exile that simultaneously takes the reading on the vital signs of the American Dream.

The American Dreamer has worn multiple guises and responded to multiple names, most of them gendered male: The self-made man, Ben Franklin’s industrious hustler, the immigrant dreamer, the Protestant work-ethicist, the organization man, and, of late, the disrupter and the Promethean entrepreneur. All these identities orbited a simple idea: they conferred structure through the ethos of getting ahead, whether by working harder or smarter —the Dream itself. The Dream was within reach, but not by faith alone. The Lonely Atoms index how much and how fast the power of the Dream has fallen.

There is little novelty in dropping out of the world. Nor is there much to be said for worrying about the dropouts as omens of a future already spoiled.

But the Lonely Atoms have elevated dropping out into a kind of pre-emptive strike against a tired dichotomy: either pursue the American Dream or seek an alternative defined in opposition to it. Rather than re-stitching the Dream into a palatable alternative —back to the land, a simple life, listening to your heart, the equipoise of work-life balance, the autonomy of DIY free agentism –- the Lonely Atoms discard the apparatus entirely. This rejection makes us anxious. A lost generation can be reclaimed, reconstituted. But what of a stillborn generation, one that never emerged in the first place...

MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/08/th...#more-6038
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
"I Am A Rock"

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow
I am a rock
I am an island

I've built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock
I am an island

Don't talk of love
Well, I've heard the words before
It's sleeping in my memory
And I won't disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried
I am a rock
I am an island

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
I gave alot of thought to that article today, oscillating between blaming the parents for this growing demographic of basement video gamers, and just accepting it as what it is. I guess I concluded that there are alot ways of being in the world. Some authentic and some not so authentic. Who am I to judge video games as invalid forms of being when I myself watch hours of TV everyday and go to movies? Could not these forms of leisure be condemned as just as escapist and deferential of more socially based forms of living? Sure. As could joining the peacecorp or moving to Alaska to live off the land or joining a cult. So I say let these 20 something males have their lifestyle choice, with all the consequences that come with it. I don't agree it rises to the level of a national crises. At least not yet.
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#4
RainbowUnicorn Offline
(Oct 3, 2017 04:33 AM)C C Wrote: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/08/th...#more-6038

EXCERPT: We are facing a generation of unskilled 20-something men, largely unemployed, largely unconnected, largely irresponsible for a want of anything to be responsible for. They are living no one’s fantasy, but they fantasize constantly inside alternative worlds that provide pleasure and escape from a reality largely ignored. Call them the Lonely Atoms.

A significant percentage of white males in their 20s fail to show up for their own lives. They are unable to find a job. They are unwilling or uninterested in doing work, leaving home, or getting married. They play a lot of video games. Economist Erik Hurst of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago summarizes their situation aptly: “The life of these nonworking, lower-skilled young men looks like what my [12-year-old] son wishes his life was like now: not in school, not at work, and lots of video games.”

The Lonely Atoms are intractable: They cannot be compelled, chastened, cajoled, shamed to grow up. Observers, parents, and columnists take this for a crisis. But it is a crisis in the genitive case, belonging to the observer and not the observed. The Lonely Atoms are not present for the account. They are a large-scale retraction, walking off the stage of private and public life.

There is little novelty in side-stepping adulthood or conventional ideas of responsibility. Young adults chafe at the linear progression of college, career, marriage, family, home ownership—what Zorba the Greek called the “full catastrophe.” Dropouts, hippies, beatniks, hipsters, all the way back to the prodigal son. Dissipated youth have always been with us. But rebels rebel against an orthodox grain, from some place outside the mainstream. The Lonely Atoms have not sought out any such perch from which to wage their campaign, because they have no campaign, no agenda, and no particular viewpoint. What they have is a negative retreat, a self-exile that simultaneously takes the reading on the vital signs of the American Dream.

The American Dreamer has worn multiple guises and responded to multiple names, most of them gendered male: The self-made man, Ben Franklin’s industrious hustler, the immigrant dreamer, the Protestant work-ethicist, the organization man, and, of late, the disrupter and the Promethean entrepreneur. All these identities orbited a simple idea: they conferred structure through the ethos of getting ahead, whether by working harder or smarter —the Dream itself. The Dream was within reach, but not by faith alone. The Lonely Atoms index how much and how fast the power of the Dream has fallen.

There is little novelty in dropping out of the world. Nor is there much to be said for worrying about the dropouts as omens of a future already spoiled.

But the Lonely Atoms have elevated dropping out into a kind of pre-emptive strike against a tired dichotomy: either pursue the American Dream or seek an alternative defined in opposition to it. Rather than re-stitching the Dream into a palatable alternative —back to the land, a simple life, listening to your heart, the equipoise of work-life balance, the autonomy of DIY free agentism –- the Lonely Atoms discard the apparatus entirely. This rejection makes us anxious.  A lost generation can be reclaimed, reconstituted. But what of a stillborn generation, one that never emerged in the first place...

MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/08/th...#more-6038

Quote:EXCERPT: We are facing a generation of unskilled 20-something men, largely unemployed, largely unconnected, largely irresponsible for a want of anything to be responsible for. They are living no one’s fantasy, but they fantasize constantly inside alternative worlds that provide pleasure and escape from a reality largely ignored. Call them the Lonely Atoms.

males
unemployed
unskilled
between the ages of 20 & 30 years old
with disposable cash
engaging in pre-defined activaties that are deemed by the observer to be "non real"

wow !

sounds like a cry for help by the writer of this article.
maybe more soo transferance self actualisation as a mid life crissis.
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#5
C C Offline
(Oct 4, 2017 04:24 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: I gave alot of thought to that article today, oscillating between blaming the parents for this growing demographic of basement video gamers, and just accepting it as what it is. I guess I concluded that there are alot ways of being in the world. Some authentic and some not so authentic. Who am I to judge video games as invalid forms of being when I myself watch hours of TV everyday and go to movies? Could not these forms of leisure be condemned as just as escapist and deferrent of more socially based forms of living? Sure. As could joining the peacecorp or moving to Alaska to live off the land or joining a cult. So I say let these 20 something males have their lifestyle choice, with all the consequences that come with it. I don't agree it rises to the level of a national crises. At least not yet.


Every era seems to have doomsayings about its lazy, degenerate, or weak younger generation. Whether the Lost generation, the GI generation, the Silent generation, the Boomers, the slackers of X, the Millennials (Y), the I-gen (Z). From the perspective of the reigning oldies which were formerly one of those themselves, each newbie group looks like the one that's finally going to let civilization slide into the sinkhole. A line-up of failed predictions which does not negate, however, the possibility of an ultimate, nihilistic plague of apathy or anarchism eventually making its debut.

Adulthood itself is initially an outward deception or pretentious disguise. A formal template of behavior and social responsibility that the snot-nosed teens and collegiate bullocks / heifers tentatively assume as a requirement for just getting employed and accepted by the seasoned establishment. Gradually it does become the key identity of the individual (especially when / if parenting becomes applicable). But the buried, immature roles of the early years are still lurking beneath the surface, awaiting an occasional opportunity to either come out and play jackass again or inject some subconscious influence in decision-making. (Even should it require insulated "I can get away with it" opportunistic surroundings, inebriation or other disoriented states of mind, escalating exchanges between angry parties, permission by authorities of a barbaric or fascist state to engage in lord of the flies for grown-ups, etc.)

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