Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that…
Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way.
This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political categories we’re using instead. /1 https://t.co/iLKZlQepFG
As LIFE describes (https://t.co/PxbCMkksEn), it was that mid-century period where teenagers were suddenly invented as a distinct social group.
People who follow me know why I think that mid-century period is critical. /2
The first half of the 20th century was dominated by 4 major social catastrophes: WW1, Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2.
Those catastrophes decimated existing adult social status hierarchies (the things that drive all human life). /3
At the same time, mass schooling was bedding down in most Western countries. The confluence of these two things led to our world today.
Adult life was destroyed, leading to a fundamental re-build post-WW2 around the notion of a ‘public’. /4
A concept created to capture collective life, rather than status-driven life, to guide the re-build.
At the same time children, now effectively decoupled from adult life in schools, were developing their own culture. Teenage culture. /5
The collision of these two movements led to our world today. Teenagers emerged from school, the only culture they knew, and remade the adult world, now a near blank sheet because of the 4 catastrophes.
They remade it as a giant high school. /6
The currency of high school is popularity. And that became the currency of adult life in the second half of the 20th century, and still is today. Populism.
Voting went from being a mundane way of selecting leaders - a means - to becoming the actual ends of political life. /7
Winning elections was no longer a means to an end. It became THE end in itself. That’s adolescent culture as adult culture.
The economic and political framings we use to try to understand the world today describe nothing. /8
Our world of free markets and small government is just a teen world of ‘freedom’. Teenagers will of course rail against authority, that’s all 60 years now of libertarian politics has been about.
That’s our society-as-a-high-school. A social, cultural shift. /9
Similarly we’re now ‘living with’ a pandemic because everybody got too bored with dealing with it. (Recognising teen behaviour here?) It was no longer ‘trending’. We’d moved on.
Climate change the same. To deal with that, we’d have to interrupt our ‘lifestyles’. /10
Whole societies now are on permanent adolescent ‘gap years’ from reality. Again, this is all perfectly understandable as the extension of adolescent/teen culture, to all adult life.
Because that is literally what happened.
/end