Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is also a caricature. I think the middle ground between what you have said and I what I have said is more likely to be true.
> Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
Noted. In retrospect, I agree.
If anything the "softening" is that we can now speak of these things, rather than force them down under stoic veneers and alcoholism.
* Operation Desert Storm
* The early 1990s post-war recession, and its jobless recovery
* The Asian and Russian recessions (and the LTCM collapse) and knock-on effects
Go back 10 years from that and you have:
* Early 1980s recession
* Black Monday
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Humans have recovered and prospered from far more dire circumstances, including many immigrants to the US and Europe.
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.
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.
(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)
> yes, for international folks, people in the US
That's not the end of it. There's an "in network" deductible and "out of network" (OON) deductible.
Depending on the health plan you have and the state you live in, the hospitals can also "balance bill" if they are OON.
When giving birth, parents in the U.S. is very much expected to ask everyone involved, I repeat, everyone involved that they are not OON.
It's insane.
But yeah....I don't think anyone would willingly have a baby right now.
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.
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.
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.
My state issued the stay-at-home advisory around March 15, and lifted it with precautions May 19. That's two months.
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.
Its also bimodal https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...
Edit: I actually think i confused my self with the age of first birth and age of parents, ignore that first line
Official Italian ISTAT report for claims 31.1 for mother age at first birth. Still significantly higher than US fwiw.
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.
Edit: math...
Do they count years differently in France?
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