>“What’s worrying is the effect this situation is clearly having on young adults.”
I wonder if this is a perverse side effect of normalcy bias [0]? For me, a person in middle age, I can look back at my life and see a lifetime of fairly stable history with only a few traumatic events (9/11, 2008 crash). If you're 22, the current circumstances make up a much larger portion of your life.
>The toll has also hit the poor much harder, according to the Census Bureau data — throwing into even sharper relief mental health disparities that have long existed.
This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
This is a stressful stage of life for a lot of people. The quarter life crisis is very real. Young people tend to have young kids, or roommates, or tiny apartments, and working from home is a larger strain, especially at the entry/junior level which is a stressful rat race in many fields. Plus you don't have much wealth built up if you do get laid off, and little experience on your resume to justify being rehired quickly.
When in human history has life for most not been stressful? If anything life for most today (even the young with kids, roommates or tiny apartments) is far less stressful than for most humans in history. There's a complete loss of perspective today.
Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life. That's almost like saying all that matters is if you can eat and sleep. That is not what most people want out of life. They want meaning in their life, respect, and love. Those are all things that are way way way more difficult to get today than at almost any time during human history.
I really don't think so. The people in the past were not getting automatic respect and were not getting automatic love. The marriage was often economic transaction and you often had to live among people who did not respected you. The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
>The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
This makes it sound like you believe love is a bool that gets set at the beginning of the relationship, but from what I understand love is a float that the couple can work to increase.
No, love don't have to die. But, initial passion, is not love. And people are much different in the first period when they are trying to make best impression and later on after months. In extreme case, many abusers (of both genders) show themselves only after months.
For long term love, it matters greatly whether you two are match by personality and values. And short term engagement make it easy to select wrong partner.
We don't really know this with such certainty. Our records have gaps and only extend a few thousand years back, at most. Even then, we often only have bits and pieces for certain populations. It's a large stretch to generalize over human history.
Personal contact is super important to people. Physical closeness is important. Being able to meet people in person is important for personal relationships. This stuff matters, and it's very hard to get right now.
> Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life.
Stress is the response to every day life. We don't have the coping skills we used to have.
Kids, children, were conscripted, given weapons, and sent to a different continent to fight and die. Twice. After the first time, the Spanish Flu hit and killed millions of people. The kids who lived through that time were mentally tough and capable of coping with the tragedy of both events.
They lived full lives, had purpose, had families. By and large, they had a few things that today's kids don't; religion and nuclear families. To some extent, God is a panacea. Having certainty of one's final destination makes the road there a lot more manageable. They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
We are now at the tail end of a "softening". Peace makes for soft people.
> They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
There's a competing line of thought that considers the nuclear family to be one of the worst things that's happened to our society. It's created isolated household units, disconnected truly multigenerational households, and created distance and lack of necessity for extended family. By reducing the amount of direct family connections you can rely on for support, it's caused a massive increase in people depending on the government or charity for their emergency needs and arguably further exacerbated the loneliness epidemic.
I think you're misreading what the OP is saying and you two are actually in alignment. They are not saying the nuclear family is an improvement on the multigenerational household. They are saying that the nuclear family is better than what we have today with divorces and single parent homes becoming increasingly common.
The degeneracy is from multigenerational to nuclear and from nuclear to less than nuclear families. Many people who are marxists typically celebrate the demise of both multigenerational homes and nuclear families because the family unit was seen as an opponent of socialist goals.
The US has had constant military engagements for the last 20-30 years, the largest terrorist attack on US soil, the complete economic erosion of the middle class followed by the largest recession since the great depression and now the largest depression since the great depression with the largest pandemic since 1918 where we're also on track for millions dying. This is one of the roughest times in history to be growing up in compared to those times.
Then there is their idea of "effective coping". It was to drink more and smack their wives. Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
9/11 happened to me in grade school. Iraq war happened thereafter. Then the financial crash. Then the subprime crash. And now covid. My life is shaped MORE by crises than by stability - not just the current one, but ALL of them.
Yea, so turns out being a human in a peaceful stable society is pretty rare. Most of humanity has had much more severe crisis than what you experienced. We’re a remarkably resilient species.
I would argue that resilience came from innovation and creative thinking. When we encountered a problem that threatened the species, we came up with solutions to fix it.
There are very few times in human history where we took any steps backwards on that progress. The collapse of the Roman Empire was one of those moments, and it took hundreds of years for civilization to recover from that.
I'm not saying we're getting close to a catastrophic event like that any time soon... but we should definitely not shrug off unnecessary world hardships with a glib "we've survived worse". Because if the worst should happen and Western Civilization takes a step backwards... the consequences aren't going to be pretty. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.
I'm a similar age as you, but personally wouldn't count 9/11 (although maybe the year difference is why). For me 9/11 happened when I was in pre-k. I don't remember learning about it back then and had no clue what 9/11 was until middle school. I'd guess for most kinder/pre-k age kids even if they did learn about it, it's not something they meaningfully processed and then the life post 9/11 is pretty much all they remember. My memories of elementary school as a whole are already really weak and become nearly 0 for memories <=5.
The financial crash did impact my family some, but not much personally (prevented us from selling our house). I feel like covid is the first situation that's had a very direct impact on me. I was laid off due to finance issues back in march, have had a 'fun' time searching for a new job, and being stuck mostly at home. Still a lot better than others due to having a good financial safety net (my family).
In fairness, the Soviet Union fell when I was in grade school, which means I got laid off from my first job during the dot com crash, went to grad school, and re-entered the market when the housing crisis finally caught up with Silicon Valley.
Worse, I know someone that was supposed to retire in a few years, and he was laid off once for each Republican president going back to Regan.
Of course, when all that happened, the planet’s ecosystem wasn’t collapsing.
Europe was an even worse place crisis-wise for the majority of the 20th century.
The sad thing about humanity is our living memory only goes back fifty years or so. Everything past that is just "back in the old days" and we forget how extremely recently all those things were even on a human timescale.
The US had its share of bad times in the 20th century too, including the largest depression ever, but at least it invested in economic development. Currently, the goal seams to be reducing all social investment and let the financial industry take control of everything.
> This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
I'm in a very low-income rural community. With most the folks living off food stamps already, their lives were relatively unaffected by COVID-19, it's not like they were working much anyways.
If you wanted to maximally screw over the poor, you'd first get them all sitting pretty long enough to start making families while riding on a social system like food stamps, then yank it out from under them. This is something the current administration has been both working on and threatening, and that creates significantly more anxiety from what I've observed.
As someone also from a low-income rural community, I'd say that entire scenario you presented has problems deeper than removal of social systems. If you were to rank worlds from best to worst, I'd say it looks like this:
1. The poor are net positive on the tax/social system.
2. The poor are neutral on the tax/social system.
3. The poor are negative but not dependent on the tax/social system.
4. The poor are negative and dependent on the tax/social system.
5. The poor are negative and have no social system.
In your scenario, the poor start at 4. In your view, the current admin trying to move towards 5. In your view, how does one get to 3? I imagine the move to 3 would require scaling back the social system as to prevent abuse and dependency on it.
We probably agree that the poor shouldn't remain a negative impact on the tax payer and dependent on the social system (I'm a conservative, you seem to lean more left of center on this). Where we likely disagree is how to get to 3, and I think scaling back social systems is some cold water in the face to help catalyze that change.
I would also add that the main stream media and social media don't help. Everywhere you turn, you're being conditioned to be in fear and social media amplifies that negative message.
A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that. For example a person looking to build a family will miss out on a few months they could find a partner, and the fertility clock is ticking
> A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that.
I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant?
I find your comment to be even more mind boggling - I'm not exaggerating. The shutdown has been short but it has completely wrecked with education and entry-level jobs, which define a young person's development.
1) Anyone in school has had their education upended. Schools will be closed March through June. That is 3 months of a child or teen's educational/social/psychological development. I'm not even talking about college (which you can argue can muddle along with distance education), or summer activities (which you can argue are optional), but those have been impacted too.
2) For those in college, I would guess the majority have lost internships. Many new grads have lost their jobs. Most new grads probably didn't even get a job by March, and now they likely won't get a job until the end of the year or next year. For the majority of people who don't go to college, many work in service jobs and have been wiped out.
You're not wrong, but I suspect that there's a widespread Whig view of history that's been present in the Western world since the end of WWII.
You think of the '90s and the prosperity there, the end of major international rivalries, the birth of the Information Age, and imagine that time will just go on forever. Each generation is supposed to live better lives than the previous generation, right? We have the technology!
And yet the past couple of decades showed that no, income inequality and rising costs of living and the impossibility of buying housing in many markets have basically depressed American (and many other Western) youth, sort of like what's been happening in Japan all this time.
The hardscrabble Ellis Island immigrants were fleeing from clearly traumatic problems. Famine, war, disease. What afflicts modern day youth? High prices, bad numbers. It's an abstract foe with no clear solutions. It's not as if they can just move to Australia or New Zealand, another frontier of economic opportunity to start anew.
You only have to be aware of the recent financial crisis, whose impact went through arguably between 4 to 6 years, to realize that enduring a simple lockdown that takes 4 to 6 weeks is a mere inconvenience, and whining about the devastating impact of staying at home for a few weeks is a kin of whining about not getting a haircut on schedule.
It doesn't just put family building on ice, it puts almost everything on ice. Everyone who hasn't already built a life they are reasonable happy with will be feeling horrible right now, and most young people are in that stage. I'm already above that age so Corona doesn't affect me much, but I know that if I were younger I'd hate it.
All of that plus the unknown end of it. Sure its been 2 or 3 months but its not like its ending tomorrow. Any one who wanted to make a major life change in the next two years is probably rethinking it.
This is an issue I've had. I've been reconsidering and exploring career options over the last year. Atm I can't act on anything but I've all the time in the world to dwell on it. It's incredible frustrating and causing me a lot of anxiety. And I'm one of the lucky ones with a secure job that's not terrible. I can't imagine how rough it is for others.
> I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant?
No, but millions have lost their jobs due to the shutdown, and it's very conceivable that many would put off children/marriage/partnership because of that.
I know that the whole "have kids" thing, which we were thinking about, has basically been totally shut down. Nope, this is craziness, time to just survive for the next few years.
On the plus side, if you catch a bad case of Covid then a birth this year will probably work out as free because you'll be hitting your out-of-pocket max anyway. Just make sure you time it so the birth doesn't hit on the next year or they'll get you for double.
(yes, for international folks, people in the US who've thought it through really do base their family planning in large part on when their annual insurance limits reset, because the difference in costs can be thousands of dollars even with pretty good insurance, if you accidentally land most of the prenatal care on one year and the birth itself on the next)
We had a baby in May, it was a bit uncomfortable being in the hospital but it everyone is healthy. I'm in Illinois and I am grateful our governor ordered stay at home. We were worried about over crowding at hospitals.
But yeah....I don't think anyone would willingly have a baby right now.
It's not that it's been two months, it's that it's been two months and no plan for the future. If I knew, ahead of time, that I'd be able to meet people again in another month? Sure, that's 3 months, that's no problem. It's the indefinite suspension of all activities! It's the suspected lockdown! It's not even the laws - people are scared, if you don't already have a long-term partner you're probably not going to go meet someone new! You can't even make plans for "after", because it's unclear when exactly "after" is. This is a huge roadblock to any sort of planning, much less a romantic relationship.
My SO was supposed to start med school this fall, and now that's all up in the air. Try to empathize -- yes, the lockdown has only been in effect for a few months, but this pandemic is going to continue for at least a year or two. I'm planning on taking the GMAT in prep for business school next year, and even that is questionable at this point.
When you're in your mid 20s, delaying 6 months to 1 year of your career trajectory can have massive effects. If you already have your life established, you probably don't have the same concerns.
Yeah this is going to impact things for a while most likely.
When I finished college, the 2008 recession had not happened yet, however there were definitely warning signs in the job market even after I graduated. Many of my friends from college were laid off before or during the downturn, I was stuck in a very dead end job just trying to make ends meet. I wound up not getting a job fully utilizing my degree until I had almost reached 30.
Lots of folks in this area were in similar boats; they aren't starting families until their mid or even later 30s because they had stumbling blocks due to the 2008 crisis.
> Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month
They've already basically cancelled college in Canada for September through December. All large classes (so all freshman core classes) will be online and it's doubtful dorms will be open. So that's at least 9 months ruined for high school seniors and college students.
Dating is close contact with people from outside your household. Sometimes several in quick succession. I don't see that becoming safe or legal before full vaccination. The science-fiction timeline for full vaccination is two years. And I hope we in this industry know better than to take the "not physically impossible" timeline on an ambitious technical project as a commitment.
It's possible there will be some kind of compromise involving a longer phone/video-only period, earlier exclusivity, and public policy acceptance of having contact with a small number of people from outside the household. At least I can hope. But nevertheless, this is a uniquely awful time in history to be single.
Arguably the fertility clock is ticking harder for those who in their late thirties just realized perhaps it's ok to stop waiting for full employment stability before starting to consider a family.
I'm just entering my late 30's, and this made my decision for me - I didn't feel good about my resources the last few years and now this? It just got A LOT harder to see myself having kids - at this rate the clock is going to run out before I feel good.
Wow. I just checked the average age of motherhood in the USA and it's 26yo. That's 6 years less than in the country I'm living; perhaps my intuitions about what it's normal in a modern society are heavily skewed (and in my social circles it's even worse, with age if motherhood around 35yo, largely due to effects caused precarious work)
The grand parent comment probably made the same mistake because there isn't any country where the mean mother age at first birth is 32 or 33, that is, 6 years more than US 26.3 or 26.9 (depending on sources).
fertility clock was made up by fertility clinics, they say it's declining sharply, doubeling the rate at which bad things can happen to the child if u get it in ur 50ies, but it's going from 0,1 to 0,3 or so, it's really low if someone's healthy in her fifties and still has eggs left
I'm gonna speak purely anecdotally, and this is personal opinion.
I was born in 82 in France, was 19 on 9/11/2001.
It definitely shaped my psyche and world view. You just don't grow up as naively when you know 9/11 is an option (the end result, however we got there).
I realized last Sept (19) as I visited the Memorial in NYC for the first time that this had had a long, lasting effect on me. I sobbed in the room where you listen to a flight attendant's last call to her husband. Upon exit I saluted the security guard with deep gratitude. We exchanged a timid smile from the eyes. It felt right.
The shitshow that occurred in the US in the years following 9/11 (Patriot Act, Iraq conspiracy to bring in my country to war, Obama spying on Merkel and Hollande and condoning PRISM, etc) made me realize, with profound disappointment, how idealistic and naive I had been about the USA, as if their recent suffering made them somehow impervious to be becoming hostile. I now realize how ridiculous my optimism had been, and the truth is I have countless examples right here at home in history and reality.
The fact is we get over something like 9/11, we move on, but sometimes we're reminded that this shaped us deeply.
I believe COVID will have bigger and more lasting effects on youth, it's just so much bigger and longer. I hope it will help produce the bigger kind of changes that make history move forward.
> You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
This is very true in the US and most countries around the world. If I were poor and I could choose where, I'd certainly prefer to be poor in Western Europe where at least it's not a death sentence thanks to free healthcare and a minimum socio-economic net (it's not perfect, far from it, but if I had to choose... better than the USA certainly under COVID, and that would probably remain true whoever the president is given the lasting social security structure).
I feel grateful, in a way, that we're taking care of poor people. I know many rich entrepreneurs today in Europe who, at some point in their life, were poor AF and may have died if it weren't for all the social nets, they might have never become who they are today. Some of them employ 100+ people, others have contributed massively to funding education (lifelong notably, for adults too).
This tangent to say: it's worse for the poor and probably always will be, but that's also how some eventually create value beyond mere wealth. The "trick" is to avoid death, whether social or clinical, when people are drowning. In that regard, most rich countries do worse today than 50 years ago (chances for children to do a better job than their parents), and that's deeply, deeply worrying because it's the very fuel of our current wealth and domination over existence (how modern civilizations are so much better at surviving, at thriving, thanks to science, tech, political stability, etc.)
Food for thought, and room for improvement, which I'm sure those most shocked by COVID will have no choice but to care about. They will have seen the fall, so they are uniquely qualified to build the next new rise.
I wonder if this is a perverse side effect of normalcy bias [0]? For me, a person in middle age, I can look back at my life and see a lifetime of fairly stable history with only a few traumatic events (9/11, 2008 crash). If you're 22, the current circumstances make up a much larger portion of your life.
>The toll has also hit the poor much harder, according to the Census Bureau data — throwing into even sharper relief mental health disparities that have long existed.
This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias