I spend a good deal of my time pondering what does the good life look like? How is it influenced by things such as family, power, prestige, wealth, material goods, immaterial goods? Everyone says money and things aren’t everything, but then spend their lives chasing those two things. People who say family is everything never spend anytime with their family in pursuit of money and power. They profess one thing, do another, and justify it through yet different means. It is a question that plagues me. What is this good life, and more importantly, am I living it? Today I was sitting on my deck talking to my wife (which I suppose are a combination of multiple of the previously mentioned categories, things, wealth (to maintain those things, damn you deck ownership), and family), when we started to discuss childhood. I had mentioned that in ancient times, a 14-16 year old might occupy a position of power in the government. I love to mention that Walt Whitman was 16 when he got his first job and was living in an apartment in New York City by himself.
This is mind boggling to us moderns. We barely trust 16-year-old’s to drive, let alone have grown up jobs such as Walt Whitman. This is a relatively new development, as for centuries children were seen as economic assets to help with the family business, be it the farm or something else. Only in the 20th and 21st centuries has a nonproductive childhood been in vogue.
All of this is to say, being a child used to be a preparation for adulthood. You were born, you were allowed to be useless when you were useless (no offense to infants and toddlers), and then you were put to work. You were put to work because you were needed. Most of the time period I’m alluding to did not have automation. Be it the farm, or other manual labor. This is demonstrated furthermore a reflection of modern appliances, in which one machine can free you up to do other, usually useless, activities. Furthermore it is also a reflection of how we consume products. Most things are bought manufactured, not home made. Which furthermore saves time. All the innovation of the 20th century has made our lives easier, but with all the time it has saved us, a void has been created, a void that has yet to be filled. And in this void, children have been raised. 100 years ago (or less), a child was seen as a partner. You spent your early childhood working. Sure you had your leisure time, but you had responsibilities and obligations. Chores around the house, helping to raise your siblings, amongst other things. If you did not do these things, your family could not function. Yet in the 21st century, we have rid ourselves of many of those opportunities.
Some will say this is a good thing, we have more time to consider the deep questions. But in this vacuum, children have a less clear role. I can testify that children want to be helpful. My 2-year-old wants to help out with almost everything. Just the other day, my 1-year-old was helping her aunt clear out the dishwasher (one spoon at a time, it still counts.) But where society used to provide a plethora of options to help, there are fewer and fewer. This leads to the rise of an artificial summer. Children essentially exist in a vacation mindset until they are 18, or often older, and then work hits them. Rather than being raised to work, they are raised to be free of work. If anything, work is something to be despised. “Just wait till you’re 18 kid and you have to pay for all your own stuff.” Many parents view work as a bad thing, something to spare their children from. Or that children get in the way of working efficiently and its better they just play than help out. Yet often for many of us, we have to work. Few of us are products of such generational wealth that we do not need to work, so we find ourselves in the awkward position of having no familial training for the workforce, and then having it thrust on to us at some point when we are in young adulthood.
It is then no wonder why so many young adults hate work, yet love to travel and be on vacation. They are attempting to recreate their artificial summer where an environment was constructed for them that was divorced from reality. They spend all their time accruing funds to get back to that point. Travel is our idol, vacations are our pilgrimages, everything we do in our “real” life is to get back to our youth, to get back to that artificial summer. Furthermore, it’s interesting to me the number of child toys that have spun into the adult world. Pokemon, Legos, movies, that were originally for children now have an adult following, and companies cater to that. I understand it’s unfair to condemn companies for giving people what they want, and it could just be this is what I enjoy (in the same way many boomers grew up enjoying activities/things that most millennials do not), but in context of everything else I can’t help but wonder if it’s people chasing a youth that has escaped them. Rather than having grown up with increasing responsibilities where we could not await adulthood when we would have full responsibilities, we have instead grown up in a society that creates a simulation of life with no responsibilities that we spend our adulthoods attempting to return to.
I too struggle with this dichotomy. Why are adults so unhappy with life? It was not until today that it dawned on me that so much of our societal expectations have made it difficult to thrive as a professional. We were raised to be unhelpful and encouraged to do nothing. Then suddenly, we’re supposed to love work and have a healthy balance of our professions and leisure? An obvious critique to this might be, well, you crossed this threshold, your behavior should change. One day the trainee has to come off orientation, the resident physician becomes the attending physician, the graduate student becomes a post-doc/PI, the clerk becomes the cabinet specialist. Is childhood to adulthood that different? I would assert that it is. Because in the aforementioned examples, they are clearly working towards something, which is lost in the vast sea of possibility in reality. Additionally, I prescribe to Aristotle’s view that we are habituated to virtue. If we spend our lives, especially our formative years, hating work and loving entertainment, it will be challenging to suddenly flip a switch and love work and responsibility. Not to say that it is impossible, but challenging to go from one to the other.
Is it truly fair to blame the previous generations for wanting to spare us from work + responsibility? They too at some level wanted that existence and for the first time technology permitted them to grant us that existence? Of course it is unfair to blame everything on someone else and not change, but it is still useful to understand what the root of our current problems may be. I can’t help but wonder if the root of many young adults problems is the artificial summer in which they were raised. They had no proper training to embrace responsibility, to cultivate a craft. Instead, we were trained to be useless, and one day told to wake up and embrace the grind. What is to be done about all this? It’s difficult to say, and I think various people will have different responses. I think it’s important to realize that the past is unobtainable for most of us, and that not only are work and responsibility necessary for most of us, but are places where we spend most of our time and we should be grateful for that. Happiness is in the present moment, if it is somewhere in the past or future, we will never obtain it. Only by embracing the obstacles of today are we able to be happy. Work is a necessary part of my life, by embracing it I feel a little more fulfilled. By rejecting it, I chase unobtainable abstractions.