These are trying times. People are working harder and earning less. They’re buffeted by terrifying headlines and grim predictions. They’re having less sex and living with parents longer. And they’re burrowing under weighted blankets and escaping into the childish comforts of colouring books (or the fairytale fantasies of corporate theme parks and video games). If life in the 1930s was marked by a Great Depression, and the 2010s by a Great Recession, one might say our current decade is marked by a Great Regression. This return to childhood manifests in the things we consume, in how we spend our time, even in the ways our societies are governed.
Is this a crisis? Or just more of the usual intergenerational grumbling, as when Joan Didion scathingly critiqued the foibles of young Boomers in the 1960s? ‘We were the last generation to identify with adults,’ she declared of her own Silent Generation. In time, the Boomers set upon Generation X, portraying them as slackers. Then, adults of all ages dumped on Millennials for being entitled, oversensitive ‘baby-people’. Inevitably, Gen Z now finds itself in the same crosshairs. But this time, at this moment in history, things feel different. The Great Regression cuts across generational lines and national borders…
It’s tempting to frame the Great Regression as a reaction to the unique confluence of crises that have affected Western nations in the 21st century – a byproduct of the profoundly unnerving decade we are living in. But our global second childhood has roots that extend far back before the appearance of COVID-19, the divisive populism of the 2010s, or even the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy of 2008. In the 1990s, a precursor to our contemporary Great Regression emerged in a certain nation decades before it did in the rest of the planet. That nation is Japan, and its experiences suggest that when the youth and young adults of a hyper-connected post-industrial society lose faith in the future, a Great Regression is inevitable. Read more…
