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
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