If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again)…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to understanding. /1 https://t.co/KG0ZBEBHtL

The essay begins with the recognition now that our self-image is nearly always generated in adolescence. And if that period of your life is traumatic, that trauma stays with you. “Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.” /2

“Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school…teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.” Let that sink in. /3

This is where it gets really interesting for me, and I’ve Tweeted about this a lot. “Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities.” Listen to James Coleman: /4

“Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies, which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.” This is a social-cultural mechanism for generating societies. It’s how ours is formed and reproduced daily. /5

Forget politics and -isms and Left and Right. All adult life is adolescent, high school behaviour. That’s where our culture is created, we just give different names for it when we leave school. But it’s the same social mechanisms. Senior has much more to say. /6

“In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages.” Robert Faris: “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status.” /7

Societies are always social, and nothing else. They’re battles for status, through imitative rivalry. Faris: “Absent established hierarchies and power structures…kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-­denominator…/8

…stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—­rather than the subtleties of personality.” There it is, absent established hierarchies and power structures. The structures of adult life, which are absent in schools. So kids invent their own, and take them into adult life. /9

So not only do they re-make adult society as a high school, the brutal anxiety of that experience is also fuelling the adult worlds they go on to create. Any of this seem like the world we’re seeing around us right now? And then onto another favourite - popularity. /10

Popularity is what drives high school status hierarchies. And thus now adult life too. It’s why elections are so popular, and team sports, and music stars, and celebrity, and social media with its likes. They all tap into our deepest formative experiences, in school. /11

Faris also makes the interesting point that if you put adults in similar group situations (reality TV for example), separated from the rest of life, the same behaviours happen. A ‘giant box of strangers’. Seniors goes on to say: “one also has to wonder whether high school…” /12

…is to blame; whether the worst of adult America looks like high school because it’s populated by people who went to high school in America. We’re recapitulating the ugly folkways of this institution, and reacting with the same reflexes, because that’s where we were…/13

…trapped, and shaped, and misshaped, during some of our most vulnerable years.” Long brilliant section then tracing the popularity status hierarchies of adolescents in school in their adult lives, and how the same hierarchies tend to reproduce there. And then, social media. /14

“Before Facebook, there was a real discontinuity between our high-school selves and the rest of our lives.” Then Mark Zuckerberg came along. “Social ties that would have gone dormant now remain accessible over time, and all the time.” Says it all. These platforms are key. /15

They provide a seamless transition from adolescent high school life, to adult life. They’re the infrastructure that makes that transformation of high school life into all adult life seamless. I highly recommend this entire essay, to everybody. /16

Every day I hear the frustration here that adult life is dysfunctional, that we’re not doing the most basic grown-up things to manage things like pandemics and climate change. This is why. Until we diagnose why correctly, it won’t shift. /17

Coming here to argue in your team(s) against other teams is the same high school culture. The imitative rivalry takes high school culture (already decoupled from reality), and amplifies the separation even more. Coming here to ‘network’ too - obvious high school behaviour. /18

Forging alliances, status groups. Aren’t we sick of high school yet? /end