Social Withdrawal as Protest, Again

Writing about the issue of social withdrawal--certainly writing about social withdrawal in the sense of individuals' withdrawal from the job market, marriage market, family-raising that they are conventionally expected to treat as the ends of "grown-up" life I have argued again and again over the years that the growth of the tendency has been a response to broader social conditions. Simply put, finishing school, getting a job and devoting the rest of one's life to it as they bear the conventional burdens of being a householder is just not a terribly attractive or pleasant thing for most--and as that has grown less so all the time these past several decades. The neoliberal age, after all, has meant working people giving more and getting less, enough so that college looks less and less the ticket to middle classness that it was supposed to be (I have actually found it appropriate to speak of the pursuit of college degrees as having become comprehensible in the terms we ordinarily apply to economic bubbles), all as those who do get middle-class jobs likely find themselves less and less able to afford the middle-class living standard supposed to go with them in an age of heavier student debts, greater insecurity, and the exploding costs of essentials like housing and health care. (Indeed, it seems worth noting that Emmanuel Todd has gone so far as to correlate a country's being an economic success in neoliberal terms with the plunging of its fertility rate as middle-class people find raising a family in what middle class people traditionally regard as decent conditions, with a minimum of security, increasingly implausible.)

The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, heightened attention to the issue--as the self-isolation many pursued for extended periods to stay safe, the shift of many jobs to a "telecommuting" basis, the "burn-out" workers in many fields suffered, the loss of employment, the way crises and even just the jolting of people out of their routines compels them to reassess their lives, etc. found expressions ranging from resistance to a shift back to the office as telecommuting-hating employers demanded a reversion to the status quo ante, historic levels of resignation by workers, and signs of a new "wave" of Americans "turning hikikomori."

Still, if the issue has got more attention the thinking about it did not change. The tendency remains just as it was before to see those withdrawing as suffering from psychological problems, or simply "refusing to grow up," rather than in any way responding to limited and unattractive choices, or worsening social conditions. The result is that I was quite struck by an essay by one Nicky Reid about the matter in which she dared to argue that "Adulthood is a Racket That Millennials are Right to Reject." I doubt that her argument will make any of "the sanctimonious adults" she talks about question their attitude toward young people who refuse to fall in line with societal expectations--but anyone more open-minded about the possibility that something more complex is happening here than simply "kids with bad attitudes" acting out ought to give her concise, forceful, and never dull essay a read.