To protect your kids, you must know when to stop protecting your kids, and of course, this does not mean going back to toughening up, an easy route to toxic masculinity, like in a Cobra Kai dojo, like in Vincent Haddad’s excellent article Masculinity on the Mat (2019).
All metrics describe how there is less and less partying among teenagers, while on the positive side, there is less and less drinking. The side-effect is that there is an increase in OCD, PTSD, mental health issues, etc. The less you go out, the more you grow anxious about meeting people, even your friends. There is a combination of factors that, at least in the West, produced teenagers who will be less likely to go out and hang out with their peers than, say, in the 1980s (the time I had been socialized growing up in Socialist Romania).
Rave culture and jungle party culture of the 1990s foregrounded a rather collectivist and direct mode of production, on-the-spot organization, and even an important political stance, like in Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place (just think of the enmity of Margaret Thatcher’s government against raves). I guess it is quite impossible to avoid k-punk Mark Fisher’s conclusions about the opening and utopia constituted by rave and jungle in those years, as it is impossible not to see today’s sweeping loneliness and solitude crisis as not just the effect of the lockdown years. Not only are clubs closing down but there is a certain ‘monkish mindset towards health and wellness’ (check the excellent article about SV Grindcore hustle culture). The social fitness is as important if not more important of physical fitness (you depend on). This can easily sound alarmistic but social life is one metric where everyone agrees could be much better. Maybe you a misanthrope, maybe you lost or hope for humanity’s
People stop leaving their bedrooms, stop leaving their houses, not going to parties, not meeting or making friends. The shift from latchkey parenting to intensive parenting had a high cost. Alienation was one of the most important aspects of capitalism since Marx and Engels, now it strikes at the very core of society and socialization. We are not eusocial but truly asocial.
TimeSpace Warps 