Being Gen-Z feels like showing up to the party 4 hours after everyone left.
The American dream is dead. Trump said that at the RNC when I was like 10 years old and it's gotten worse every year since. It's frustrating because everyone knows it's bad but there's still so little sympathy. It seems like all that's left of America is this vague idea that you have to work yourself to death so you can buy things. That's literally all we have left that unites us. Working and trying to buy groceries.
What is this country without prosperity?
My generation is trying to figure this out and we're not coming up with much inspiring stuff. With the benefit of hindsight, no one likes the direction our ancestors chose to take. The suburbs that gave our great grandparents the dream of homeownership left us isolated and friendless as kids, sealed up behind a TV screen so our parents could feel like we're safe. The constant economic stimulus that kept our economy growing throughout the 20th century is now like a noose around the neck of anyone who has to buy things regularly in order to survive (aka everyone). The cost of living is brutal and probably not going down unless the economy actually shrinks for a while. We've transitioned from a labor economy to an ownership economy as boomers retired and invested their savings in real estate and the stock market. It no longer pays to work. College is useless. Our society is overly bureaucratized and discrimination against white people and men is openly celebrated. Anyone who doesn't fit into DEI HR culture is effectively banned from participating in the mainstream economy.
No one is happy. Liberals aren't happy. Conservatives aren't happy. Men and women are at each other's throats but equally miserable for different reasons. We have no culture, no third spaces to meet people and forge lasting relationships. Most people are single, lonely and completely disgusted by one another. Everyone I know is mentally ill to some degree. It's really bad. I don't think older people fully understand the caliber of people who will inherit this world.
I think the negativity will only stop when the direction of our civilization completely changes. There's no making our current trajectory work, under any circumstances.
CONSTANT GROWTH IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. Constant change, constant agitation is not normal. It's not normal for every generation to die in a world that's completely unrecognizable from the one they were born into. It's not normal that our pattern of life is constantly being messed with for the sake of theoretical progress. It's not normal to feel like you're on the clock 24/7, constantly surveilled, constantly accounted for. The feeling that time is speeding up, that every moment needs to be filled with some meaningless distraction. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This is not healthy. Our birthrates are falling off because this world is not appropriate for human beings to live in.
Consumerism has to die. Liberalism (in the classical and modern sense) needs to be retired. Even rationality in the sense we know of today has to go. Inefficiency is what makes life home for human beings.
I don't want to hear people call this idealistic nonsense when our culture is visibly dying before our eyes. The status quo and the 20th century frame of reference has been discredited, as hard as that is for some people to accept. Change is our only option and it's inevitable at this point.
Conservatives will have to articulate a vision of our future that goes beyond capitalist consumerism or else we're going to become a third world communist shithole. New ideas are needed. We have to drastically expand our minds beyond what we've been conditioned to believe, or humanity is truly doomed.
Rant over.
You're so close. You've for a few assumptions wrong, though, and they make all the difference. We don't have capitalism, we have oligarchy and monopoly. Since the central bank and cutting off from precious metal backing of currency, money has been meaningless but still effective at keeping everyone down. If they can print money, why tax us to death?
Education has been captured, as have media in all forms; if you went to any institutional school, you've been programmed deeply with certain ideas, they've been reinforced by all media, and so it will take time to break free of them. You say, for example, that growth is unsustainable. However, I bet you've got a vision of humanity as a bunch of cities. Have you any idea how big this planet is? Consider that one volcanic eruption puts out more carbon, more sulfur, more 'pollution' than the whole of industrialized nations from all history? And the earth absorbed it each time. (Not to say that we shouldn't be focusing on pollution, because we should, which is why the oligarchs steered the whole thing to carbon dioxide instead.)
Youth are being taught lies, separated from God, misguided away from all sense of civic duty-honor-reason, pumped full of toxins and drugs so they're neurologically challenged and mentally unstable. Of course they can't see the meaning or purpose of life, they can't even comprehend the afterlife. Go check out Socrates, who trained that there has to be an objective Good, and one single Creator, and that our purpose in life is to reach for that Good and that God. Since he was teaching this to the rich youth of Athens, and since they accepted his wisdom and stopped patronizing the temple brothels, bacchanalia, etc, TPTB decided he was corrupting the youth and had to die! Are we not there again now? Relativism was not new back then, perversion, corruption, hedonism, paganism, human sacrifice... Any voice against what we instinctively know is evil is targeted for silencing by the shameful evildoers. True then, true now.
What is one person to do? Save his soul, first. Then go save others. Resist, observe, preserve, learn, prepare, persevere.
It's not the world that has no meaning. It doesn't owe you meaning. Even the drudgery that you describe ain't nothing compared to what our predecessors dealt with, what hundreds of millions of poor people around the world are dealing with now. What's stupid is that you're accepting that the Disney is all there is. Evil programming, mental box prison.
You want meaning? Pick a mission, man up and hit it. There's tons of people to join with, tons also to save all around you. Develop a real skill for homesteading, survival, trades, or even just to prep for when manufacturing returns. Start a small company providing what is needed now, prepare it for the future. Or research, collect and archive real truth before it's lost, to teach the next generation, because we will have to rebuild education practically from scratch. There's so much to do it's impossible to run out of useful tasks. You have talents, you have vision (you're awake!), hopefully you have faith, reach out to Jesus. Never forget that God put you here on purpose, with a purpose, for a purpose.
Start with yourself and work outward. Get healthy, look around and move to where the people and the climate are best for you and your future. Or if you want a challenge, where they seem worst for you, but that you could change. Pick a mission, advance.
After the Great War and then in the depression and then after the second world war, do you not think there were waves of people who felt that the world was ended, life itself has no meaning? How did they not all kill themselves? How did they persevere, survive, thrive? They had fewer resources than the average Joe today! The American spirit is defined by the generations of self-selected individualists that came here for- not gimmes- opportunity. The CHANCE to earn and keep what you earn. That's the American Dream. It's reclaimable, step by step
Very well said, thank you! Young people have information (and misinformation) overload from tv, internet, 24/7. They’ve been sold a packet of lies. No wonder they have despair. Your advice is gold.
Everyone probably would also do well to remember that if they'd already won, they wouldn't need to keep pushing all the propaganda.