The Cost of Stagnation: We’re Living In Limbo

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

This erosion of opportunities to complete life’s stages and core dramas is rarely recognized, much less addressed.

The idea that human life subdivides rather naturally into stages is based on our natural progression from childhood into adulthood and eventual (if we’re lucky) old age.

Confucian thought views life as a developmental process with seven stages, each roughly corresponding to a decade: childhood, young adulthood (16-30), age of independence (30-39), age of mental independence (40-49), age of spiritual maturity (50-59), age of acceptance (60-69), and age of unification (70 – end of life).

Each stage has various tasks, goals and duties, which establish the foundation for the next stage.

Each stage is centered on a core human challenge: for the teenager, establishing an identity and life that is independent of parents; for the young adult, finding a mate and establishing a career; for the middle-aged, navigating the challenges of raising children and establishing some measure of financial security; for those in late middle-age, helping offspring reach independent adulthood and caring for aging parents; early old age, seeking fulfillment now that life’s primary duties have been accomplished and managing one’s health; and old age, the passage of accepting mortality and the loss of vitality.

The End of Secure Work and the diminishing returns of financialization are disrupting these core human challenges and frustrating those who are unable to proceed to the next stage of life:

1. Teenagers are being pressured to focus their lives on achieving a conventional financial success (see “Training for Discontent” in From Left Field) that is becoming harder to achieve.

 

2. Young adults without secure full-time careers cannot afford marriage or children, so they extend the self-absorption of late adolescence into middle age.

 

3. The middle-aged are finding financial security elusive or out of reach as they struggle to fund their young adult children, aging parents and their own retirement.

 

4. Increasing longevity is pressuring the late-middle-aged’s stage of fulfillment, as elderly parents may require care even as their children reach their own retirement (65-70).

The financial pressures generated by the demise of financialization and the End of Secure Work are not just disrupting each stage; they are upending essential financial balances between the young, the middle-aged and the old.

The elderly, protected by generous social welfare benefits paid by current taxpayers, also benefit from the soaring value of assets such as real estate and stocks. Meanwhile, financialization’s asset bubbles have pushed housing beyond the reach of most young people.

Downsizing, lay-offs, low-paying replacement work and poor decisions to buy houses near the peak of the prior bubble have left many of the middle-aged with high fixed costs and a stagnant or increasingly insecure income.

The stresses of trying to make enough money to afford what was once assumed to be a birthright–a “middle class” lifestyle–is taking a heavy toll on the mental and physical health of the middle-aged, leaving many of them too tired for any fulfilling activities and easy prey for destructive self-medication.

This erosion of opportunities to complete life’s stages and core dramas is rarely recognized, much less addressed. We are constantly bombarded with messages to innovate, keep up, be fulfilled, etc.–essentially impossible demands for those with multiple generational and/or business duties.

The most workable and productive response to these financial disruptions is to focus not on what’s scarce and fraught with intense competition (the top 5% slots of conventional financial security) but on what’s still abundant, which is opportunities outside conventional hierarchies, ways of reducing fixed costs and life-skills that happen to be entrepreneurial, adaptive and fulfilling.

When I talk about the Mobile Creative class in Get a Job & Build a Real Career, I’m not talking about a finance-centric definition of success or a path to join the top 5% in Corporate America and the government. The herd is chasing those dwindling slots, too, guaranteeing frustration and failure for the 95% who won’t secure one of those slots.

What we’re really discussing is a way of living that places a premium on independent thinking, maintaining very low fixed costs, establishing a healthy honesty with oneself and one’s associates and customers, the ability to make realistic assessments of oneself, one’s successes, failures and errors, and a focus on challenges, opportunities, risks, adaptability, flexibility and experimentation, all with a goal of building one’s own human, social and material capital–the foundations not just of well-being but of any meaningful measure of wealth.

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ragman
ragman

I really believe that IF we stop immigration, all of it, this can be reversed. This dude says 70 is the end of life? I sure as shit hope not, almost there!

Southern Sage
Southern Sage

Excellent. This is why I crapped all over Bill Bonner for his idiotic remarks praising part-time work and pseudo-work (like Uber) and suggesting that this was all just hunky dory. We were all “free” to do what we want, when we want and supposedly peruse our favorite novelists with all the leisure time we will have. Horseshit. A man needs a steady, stable job to raise a family, one that pays a living wage. Fucks like Bonner would be happy to see American workers making $3.00 an hour as long as their own “investments” keep them in tall cotton. Fuck him and all like him.

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

In summary, things are fucked up and shit.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

Don’t have kids.

starfcker
starfcker

Southern sage, great post

BEA LEVER
BEA LEVER

Sage- The elites don’t want people raising families, population control is top of their list. They want it all, money , natural resources, uncluttered real estate etc. etc. Bonner is a asspuppet for the PTB to convince you that you are doomed and therefore will not reproduce.

Too bad PJ’s parents weren’t on board with the program of not having kids. heh

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

Keep ’em coming, Bea! No childless or childfree person EVER heard that line before. Fill up my bingo card, I want to win the hibachi grill.

You’d have to talk to my parents yourself to know what they think, but I have a pretty good idea.

They are both in their 70s now and say they are glad to be that age and not my age, let alone younger, because they think their generation was the last one to enjoy the good life. They don’t sit around waving their canes in the air and complaining about young people. They know young people do not have the opportunities they had.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

ragman says:
I really believe that IF we stop immigration, all of it, this can be reversed. This dude says 70 is the end of life? I sure as shit hope not, almost there!

When people have sharpened their focus so tightly that they have acquired laser vision, they run the risk of a mindset like that of the hammer to which every problem looks like a nail. This is a sad situation, Raggy, at your age I would expect to hear words of wisdom and comfort, of resignation and patience, hope and guidance. Instead, I hear the same old MSM line that all of our problems would dissappear if only illegal immigrants would go back to Europe, Iran, India, China, Mexico, Russia, and everywhere else.
It is easy to buy into his idea that kids grow, leave home and start a career which will allow them to buy a house raise a family and retire. He mentions seven stages of life roughly 10 years long but he lumps the teen years and young adulthood into a 15 year stretch. This may be due to his theory that young adults choose to remain children for as long as possible, some kids in Europe managing to extend this dependent stage well into their 40’s. The pain Americans feel is due to the unattainable reality of this dream. If only we could hear a helpful oldster whispering ‘plastics’ into our ear, we could be secure in our future. Like lemmings, Americans keep moving and swimming into the waters attempting to reach an ever more distant shore, drowning in the effort.
I’m not denying illegal immigration is a problem but i don’t agree that illegals got us into the economic basket case we are in. We are easily manipulated by the media when they convince us that the 50’s was the perfect state of the Union. There was no racial strife, Hispanics did not exist, teevee was entertaining. Every deviation from this state of perfection, like a new wrinkle that reminds us we are not 15 anymore, causes Americans an unconscious anxiety and stress. Today, illegal immigration is the bogeyman. No one concerns himself with inflation, deflation or globalization because the media has convinced us that economic refugees from the third world are the cause of our malaise. No one considers that this development is a deliberate attempt to misinform the public, to create a diversion from the real causes of America’s downfall.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

El Coyote, this is completely unrelated, but I believe in another thread you were the one who quoted the Kenny Rogers song as, “Four hundred children, not a crop in the field” instead of “Four hungry children.”

When I was a wee sprog myself, I was riding in the car with my parents and that song was on the radio. I announced, “Well I’d leave him, too!” My mom and dad asked why, and I replied, “Four hundred children is just too many!” You were not the only kid who heard it that way. My parents still tell that story over and over.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

Old Sarge said his daughter like Olivia Newton John’s song so much, she told him, ‘Dad, I want to have a heart attack.”

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