too hard and too expensive

The modern world is facing a real problem in regard to the increasing anomie of each successive generation. What’s going on is very fundamental and very problematic.

Fundamental: What we’ve built up technologically and institutionally has become overly complex and overly extensive-intimidating. Consequently, life has just become too hard and too expensive. The young can see the burdensomeness of it and the expense of it … such that a significant percentage are disinclined to “grow up” as per what has heretofore been the cultural standards of adulthood, i.e., committed enduring partnerships, household creation, home ownership, family-with-children. The percentage who now thrive in that formerly standard way (including lifelong marriage, one or two careers enabling a middle-class lifestyle, prospering children, grandchildren) is surely no more than twenty percent.

The majority don’t thrive in that traditional way. Even though the latter circumstance in now more the rule than the exception, many still may harbor feelings of inadequacy or abnormality. It might be more meaningful than is generally acknowledged to hear young people refer to themselves as “freaks” or “queers” … “cursed” or resentful “incels,” etc.

Modernity is a strange brew of affluenza, alienation, and sociopathology. This is not a healthy condition.