Image: Desert Market II by Sparth
The only thing I feel confident about is that what comes after this will be very different. We’ve been on such a radical path of accelerating change over the past fifty years, I think the future is incredibly difficult to anticipate. There are some big, turning point questions like whether it will be a future of more energy or less, and how we will choose to organize our
One of the things I want to cultivate in my children is this willingness to continually start again. To respond to the actual reality around them and act accordingly. Many of us are living inside narratives which are created by others for their own benefit and even still are out of date. For any narrative to permeate the culture in an era of rapid change it’s almost out of date by definition by the time it has sunk in. The whole dominant story in the west of prosperity of ‘going to good schools to earn credentials to get a good job’ is the latest dominant narrative with regards to children and child rearing. In America, less so in Europe, the preposterous system of indentured debt slavery to un-bankruptable student loans is rapidly eroding the plausibility of that narrative with regard to higher education. The choice will be up to my children when the time comes but personally I will strongly advise them not to go to a private American university or take on any significant debt for schooling. It strikes me as an absolutely terrible choice at this stage.
Another narrative which we as parents wrestle with is the narrative of improving material conditions among the following generations, or the lack thereof. I am part of a series of steps downward in the material conditions of each generation, though still very comfortably middle class. My grandfather was much more conventionally materially ‘successful’ than either me or my father. My children, I predict will be less so still. This experience of the declining material conditions of subsequent generations is experienced much more painfully for people starting lower on the social ladder. For families that only achieved a degree of middle class comfort in recent generations seeing that slipping away from their children is a great source of unhappiness. I believe this loss of perceived (and real) material status and the sense of identity which came with it is a great source of the powerful political anger we are experiencing in the west.
The more I question the dominant social narrative the less convinced I feel that my children need to climb the economic ladder or cling to it in order to lead happy, secure and meaningful lives. In fact I think that the clinging to that system may be a great source of unhappiness for many of us, a kind of fighting against a powerful and inexorable tide. What will it mean to be happy in the coming future? What can we as parents do to prepare our children? The only answer I have is to prepare them to live among and adapt to change. As much as I feel that it is the parental role to provide a stable frame for child development, who are we to stay what that stability means in reality? Perhaps that stability simply means the presence and unwavering love of a parent amidst changing material circumstances, a kind of emotional bedrock. In many ways this is almost all we can reliably commit to providing, as the external world is outside our control to a great degree. In this case I have more questions than answers, but at least I can share the questions I’m asking, and perhaps you find them worth pondering too.
