When you read about boomers who made it, it's always something like, "So when I was 19 I smoked dope with this guy at a gig and he said this company he had just started needed a few more guys, so I was put in charge of international sales, even though I knew nothing about that, but everything was taking off everywhere and soon we were selling millions so I quit college and bought a ranch and the rest is history."
Whereas zoomers now have to compete against 500 Indians for every basic job.
A couple of months ago, I read a few pages of Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, and something stuck with me. He talks about how a perfectly competitive market is one you don't want to be in because your efforts are high and your rewards low.
Well, it seems to me that much of the youth's complaints about today's society could be traced back to this dynamic. Damn-near every waking hour is spent competing for something, and often for worse rewards than their parents received.
Got to eat healthy and hit the gym to looksmax, got to jestermax on dating apps, got to go to nice places to improve your social media, got to get an advanced degree and contract debt to have an ok job, got to bring your cognitive A-game to work, got to bring your sexual A-game the first time, got to be funnier than her options, got to manage your sleep and recovery to compete better.
None of this is mandatory, and some of it is not unique to our time, but both the reward for competing well and the penalty for competing badly are greater than ever. So you kind of have to compete.
As Michel Houellebecq famously observed in his 1994 novel Whatever, liberalism is the extension of competition to every domain of life. Infinite optionality means zero loyalty, and zero loyalty means infinite competition.
I suspect that some of the youth's inclination toward socialism is longing for some respite, even as the long-term effect of the remedy might be worse than the disease