The Land of the Frazzled, the Home of the Frayed

 The last time I attempted to write something for publication about a younger generation was in the early 1990s, when I wrote a piece for the Pittsburgh City Paper on the supposed youth phenomenon of the time, the Slacker.  I suggested that basically, the so-called Slacker wasn't all that different from the supposed phenomenon of my youth, the hippie.  Both faced a world in which they were expected to fight for jobs they didn't want, doing things they didn't believe in, and therefore forced into a stunted life of quiet desperation.  So, essentially, fuck that.

I mentioned also that the disenchanted youth was a phenomenon beyond those cliches (you wouldn't call Benjamin in The Graduate a hippie), that there were manifestations in the 1950s, 70s and 80s as well.  I could have quoted Paul Goodman's 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd (which I did quote in similar essays I wrote at the end of high school and beginning of college), about a future some young people of the 1950s felt they faced: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good."

The de-humanization of the workplace itself is somewhat perennial, but definitely became a widespread oppression in the industrial age.  The delights of working on the factory production line are typically inflated in today's culture.

The Slacker, I wrote in 1993, was responding to a somewhat different but similar set of circumstances as those earlier decades in what I called "the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed."

In fact I'll never forget the dazed look of a beautiful young woman I knew in college who'd just experienced her first forays into the working world, in the early 1970s..  When faced with a smug employer who demanded to know why he should hire her, she said that the first response that came into her head was: "Because I'm smarter than you."

Even since the 1990s however, the country and the context and circumstances of a young person's daily life have changed a great deal.  In many respects, it's a different world.  But last month when I read an opinion piece in the NYT by Jessica Grose titled (by the editors no doubt) "For Gen Z-ers, Work is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment," I did not feel the sense of displacement I usually do in articles about the social media-obsessed, nose buried in phone, AI dependent young, but a sense of kinship.

Of course I already felt a deep compassion for the generation whose lives will eventually be dominated by the effects of the climate distortion caused by and ignored by a determinative proportion (in power more than numbers) of previous generations. But this piece describes ways in which a familiarly disenchanting present context for those "starting out" in the "real world" is both the same as it was and mostly worse.

I couldn't even conceive of the debt burden of overpriced college education. Although I had seen up close the craziness of top-heavy administrations and futile business models applied to education, just why it all costs so much is beyond my understanding, and I do wonder if my own ability to go to college was an historical anomaly for someone from my background.

Within today's "grim" job market, Grose writes, "the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal."  She describes a process in which the "first levels" of job application scrutiny is often done now by AI, including interviews on line. (The Guardian goes into more detail about today's Orwellian hiring process.)

Jobs themselves are often micromanaged and otherwise abusive, as well as poorly paid and with negligible benefits. Electronic surveillance has become the slave-driving boss, as has the speed with which computers perform tasks--instead of being "time-saving" they function as employer expectation-raising for the amount of work and the speed with which it is done: a more intense workplace.  

These and other factors result in poorer mental health so that this essay's title is literally true (very unusual for a NYT opinion piece): An annual study of nearly half a million American workers finds that workers under 25 are as unhappy as the unemployed.  When job satisfaction rose for other age groups, it fell for the young.

Some of this, the surveyors suggested, was because the young had higher expectations.  According to me, you can blame social media, media in general and so on, but really, the young always have higher expectations, and they should.  But the experts also agreed that "the workplace is markedly worse."

Grose begins and ends by referring to prejudices of older generations. "The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation," she begins. "Gen Z-ers don't even deserve this perfunctory slander."

Well, I'm already on record objecting to the over-generalizing and slander of the Baby Boom generation by some younger writers, and the New York Times.  So when Grose ends "Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain," I join in that hope.  For I have no disdain for them, and a lot of compassion, but more than that, I have what I had for my own generation of young and the ones that followed: anger and disdain for the society that persists in exploitation, that does not affirm their hopes and ideals but that grinds them down for their own selfish ends.