The Youth Of Today

There’s an Ancient Greek play, maybe by Aristophanes, where a market trader complains about the young people of his day, that they no longer show the respect he used to in his youth and so forth. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t really go into much detail, but it’s telling how the exact same sentiments could be expressed more than two thousand years later. This strongly suggests that the youth of today are in no way more “snowflaky”, feckless, disrespectful or lazy than any other youth of any other day.

Were I to be asked, I would probably say that youth is the period from about eighteen to twenty-five, although the duodecimal system also provides quite a nice division from twelve to twenty-four which conveniently ends at the age when the brain stops growing. Anyway, for me, the first version of that would’ve been from 1985 to 1993, which spans the period between just before I left home to just after I got married. At that point, the norm for English middle-class youth would be that after they did their A-levels at an FE college or a sixth form from sixteen to eighteen, they would leave home and either get a job straight out of school or go to university, polytechnic or an HE college in a distant town or city, study a degree for three years living in a Hall of Residence or private rented accommodation from a small-scale landlord while receiving a grant, then hopefully get a well-paid professional job before settling down and getting married in their mid-twenties and probably paying a mortgage and becoming a homeowner. This situation was the norm from probably soon after the War until 1989, after which various processes changed things, notably the Tory introduction of student loans, followed by various other happenings, which in fact didn’t do a lot of natural Conservative voters much good, such as the replacement of small private landlords by massive private firms building new student accommodation, which incidentally is how this blog started. Yet for some reason, it doesn’t seem to put them off voting for them, and because the older generation is more likely to vote Conservative, this also leads to them complaining about the Youth of Today when in fact it’s the policies of the party they voted for that led to them being put in their current position. I presume that their response would be that it results from their own laziness and might attribute the cause to the policies of New Labour and their effect on schooling and parenting, although this is now beginning to recede into the past and put the Government in a similar position to that of the Tories in the late ’90s after what proved to be eighteen years of the same party in power.

What we have now, in any case, is the “Boomerang” phenomenon of young people either leaving home for university and returning to live with their parents, not uncommonly into their thirties, which of course means they no longer count as youth. Since more students go to university locally now, this means in turn that they may not leave home at all. Those of us of a certain vintage may be tempted to see this as a backwards step, but in fact it bears some resemblance to life before the Great Transformation, when life stages consisted not so much of childhood, youth and adulthood as the stages before and after marriage, and before it they would probably have lived with their parents. The causes of this are multiple, but include low wages and internships, high rent, fragile romantic relationships and a precarious job market. Three and a half million single young people in the UK are now thought to live with their parents, up one third over the last decade. Research at Loughborough University has led to the claim that this situation is now permanent. The statistics break down as follows:

• 71% of single adults in their early twenties live at home.
• 54% are still with their parents in their late twenties.
• 33% are still there in their early thirties.

I should probably point out at this point that Covid-19 has exacerbated this trend due to such factors as job losses, the restriction on higher education and banning people from moving home, and the takeaway from this is that although the pandemic probably means the data and research are obsolete, it would have accelerated the trend. Stagnating wages and insecure employment would do the same. In 1996, 55% of twenty-five to thirty-four year olds were “home owners” (actually meaning they were paying mortgages and therefore effectively renting their houses off banks or building societies). By 2016, this had fallen to 34% and there’s no reason to suppose it won’t fall further. To spell out the causes, they amount to rising property prices and low incomes for young people as well as their perception that they’re in debt (see the other blog post for an explanation of that description of the situation).

At the same time as all of this, and probably in connection with some aspects of the boomerang situation or its causes, mental illness has famously reached epidemic proportions among young adults. Between 2007 and 2018, universities reported a fivefold increase in disclosure of mental health conditions from 9 675 to 57 305 despite a fairly small rise in student numbers. This may be partly caused by an increased willingness of young people to talk about their feelings, but there are ways of disentangling the underlying reality from that possibility. For a rather younger age group of thirteen to sixteen year olds, A&E admissions for self-harm rose 68%. One in ten children and young people are estimated to have mental health problems and 70% do not receive sufficiently early intervention. Typical problems in that cohort are depression, generalised anxiety disorder and conduct disorder.

As a break for the unrelenting gloom I suspect this post is emanating, possible ways of helping this situation include good physical health, being part of a well-functioning family, taking part in local activities having the chance to enjoy themselves, hope, optimism, the opportunity to learn, feeling loved, trusted, valued and safe, accepting who they are, a sense of agency and belonging, knowing what they’re good at and resilience.

Risk factors for mental health issues in young people would include the opposite of all of those, and also such things as bullying, being a carer for an infirm adult such as a parent who is also physically or mentally ill, long term educational problems, poverty, homelessness, being in a group subject to prejudice, bereavement, a family history of mental illness (note that this is multiplicative because of the aspect of being a carer along with environmental factors of other kinds and genetics) and parental separation. I would contend that many of these risks are greater due to government policy, and before you go thinking I’m blaming the Tories I would also include Blair’s and Brown’s terms and the policies made under them in that, for example in education. But clearly the crisis in the NHS, rise in homelessness and the creation of a world fit for no-one in the past decade don’t help.

The results include PTSD, generalised anxiety disorders, eating disorders, self-harm and depression, and an environment in which ADHD is seen as a problem, or maybe I should say a disabling environment which fails to make the most of or accommodate people with ADHD. This brings me to the first organisation I want to link to: PAPYRUS. This is a charity aiming to prevent young people ending their lives, and it gives the following advice regarding helping people avoid doing this: listen non-judgementally, don’t be afraid to mention the S-word, be direct, try to stay calm. One young person in four has had suicidal ideation, so it’s common and this may help break down the taboo, and mentioning it won’t provoke them into doing it by giving them the idea because they’ve already had it. It can happen to anyone and you aren’t expected to solve the problem. You might want to pass them on to a professional who can help.

CALM is another group aiming to help men with depression. 75% of people who kill themselves are male. I don’t have much to say about it than that.

Then there’s the issue of Pathological Social Withdrawal or ひきこもり- hikikomori, and at this point I need to make a bit of a digression because before I go into this I need to point out the issue of 日本人論 – Nihonjiron, or Japanese exceptionalism. Nihonjiron translates as “Japanese Theory” and is something which both certain Japanese and Westerners are keen on to an extent which could be seen as nationalist from within and racist from without. There is a cluster of hypotheses intended to support the idea that Japan is unique, to the extent that in extreme cases it’s even been claimed that the Japanese people are descended from different primates than the rest of the human race. It is true that East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA than other people but this probably isn’t what they mean and doesn’t amount to them specifically having a radically different genetic makeup. The Japanese are seen as an isolated island race, ethnically homogenous (they aren’t, because of the Ainu for example), having a unique language (it’s a linguistic isolate but has a lot in common with other SOV languages and drops pronouns in a similar way to the Chinese dialects, and also has some features in common with Korean, to which it was thought to be related) which leads to a fusion of the ego with others, and social structures which are filial rather than “horizontal” (e.g. tiger parenting and not wanting to disappoint one’s parents and grandparents). Of course Japan has various features which are unusual, although I tend to think many of them are shared with Britain, but there’s an element of caricature and looking at the Japanese people as if they’re laboratory specimens to me in some of this, and it can be very unhelpful not to recognise the commonalities which also exist, one of which is hikikomori, also known, perhaps more helpfully, as Pathological Social Withdrawal. This is not to ignore the particular pressures Japanese youth find themselves under, but please remember that the following description tends to apply more broadly than just in Japan.

Hikikomori literally means “pulling inward”. The textbook case is of someone who has for a long time stayed in their room all day and doesn’t socialise. The situation began in the 1990s with the Japanese recession, and affects 1.2% of the Japanese population. It’s often precipitated by perceived academic failure or inability to get a particular job. However, it isn’t confined to young people and is also found throughout the adult life span and has another peak late in life. There may be connections with depression, autism, agoraphobia and social anxiety. Parents often need to devote a fair bit of time and energy to ensure the long term security of their children. Help is often unavailable because by its very nature the problem is hidden, and there’s also the usual problem of it not being dramatic or visible, like many situations of poor mental health. I imagine that attempts to model the English education, or rather schooling, system on those of the Far East really don’t help with the situation here. But we need to recognise that this is not a uniquely Japanese problem and that it exists here in Northwestern Europe.

To finish, I want to address one more issue which is sometimes mentioned in connection with depression: the question of exercise. A few years ago, an academic investigation into the relationship between exercise and addressing depression was undertaken which appeared to demonstrate that it didn’t help. Two groups were surveyed over a one year period, one of which had pharmaceutical and counselling and the other of which had both plus information on exercise opportunities. The problem with this study is that it ignores the issue of psychomotor retardation. The problem is motivation and the sheer physical ability to exercise at all. One feature of depression and several other illnesses, including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, generalised anxiety disorder and disordered eating (and I feel the need to add here that thinking of illnesses as entities in themselves may not be particularly respectful of people diagnosed as mentally ill but I have a lot of plates spinning here), is reduced physical movement and slowed thinking. This can lead to empathy breaking down because someone who is not suffering this, and perhaps never has, apparently easy, everyday tasks are not done, and it may also appear to them that this is an easily overcome problem. This is of course part of the famous “snap out of it” idea of depression, that it’s an easily solved problem and almost sinful in nature. You can’t expect someone who literally cannot even get out of bed to spend any time on a gym treadmill or going for a run.

To use a cliché, the current situation is a perfect storm for young adults. The political situation has led to difficulty in holding down or even getting paid work, affording accommodation or, at the moment, even getting out of the house. There’s also an epidemic in mental illness within that age group for a number of reasons, and it should also be borne in mind that they are, as far as they’re concerned, facing a potentially grim prospect regarding the state of the planet which their predecessors don’t seem interested in doing anything about at all. Many of them would therefore also withdraw. So I suppose what I’m saying is, don’t blame them. Much of this is the doing of the previous generations and we are not used to living in their world.