A modest proposal for sensible social policy
Yupspawn of conscience, among whose ranks I presumptuously count myself, are in dire straits these days. NEETification and the effective shuttering of all previously reliable fallback options have put us at an impasse. We were born into a carrot and stick situation: You cannot save the world. Get it out of your system in your teens, then sell your soul for a nice suit and a job pretending to use a computer. Many if not most of us were prepared to put up with this, or at least thought we were. But the carrot never emerged. To put it in boomer terms: Lucy pulled the football away.
The emergence of the appropriately vile neologism 'adulting' has garnered significant notice and now it turns out none of us are fucking. When possible, we choose to live in our parents' houses instead of in slums with landlords breathing down our necks. Our loan payments are bigger than our grandparents' mortgages. Shockingly, we don't spend much.
The fear, of course, is that we might become working class. Specifically, that we are permanently unskilled. Professional opportunities have boiled down to engineering and medicine, and the latter only due to a massive private insurance bureaucracy.
We are told to learn to code, but commercial applications of computers are clearly tapped. Our present computers do basically what we want them to; my primary interest in their further development is entertainment, and with predatory market tactics becoming the norm I'm skeptical of that industry's ability to reproduce itself in the long term. Interesting projects in computing are mostly open source, which is great but doesn't pay the rent. Software engineers and developers are routinely put out of jobs as products consolidate and the idea of silicon valley is laughable to anyone who doesn't have an in and the means for a generous initial outlay. Housing is up everywhere, but the entire west coast is now utterly implausible. But then, last time housing went down... Oof.
If we had had better sense as teenagers, we might have found positions using wolfram alpha to help Northrop Grumman get the exact spatial coordinates of the nearest orphanage. Maybe. If we kept our mouths shut. Hindsight is 20/20.
In any case, it's clear there's very little to actually *do*. Notions of labor's defeat seems less and less triumphalist as our bizarrely atemporal postmodern era extends infinitely in every conceivable direction. Stories emerge from every left groupuscule of small, ineffectual groups becoming insular and imploding on themselves. In the lives of the working class, no Left is anywhere to be seen except in the occasional wounded look after hearing the word "retarded."
There remains only one solution for the millennial generation, for its working class and those who do not yet know themselves to be working class. Only one that reflects our current situation: We must formally extend childhood indefinitely.
This wouldn't have to be accomplished all at once. Eggheads are good with this kind of stuff, there are many people who spend a lot of time and energy pretending to work on legislation. Say, every ten years, child labor laws expand to encompass five more years' worth of children. In most US states, this would raise the working age to somewhere between 19 and 21. This labor taken off the market, I have it on good authority that capital would automate and consolidate to recoup output. Ten years later, raise it to 26. Repeat as necessary, and try to keep the guys at the top from nuking each other's factories to start the game over again.
You could accomplish the same trick by lowering the retirement age, of course. But being a retiree just isn't as fun as being a kid. Of course, this specific implementation would be ineffectual for the millennials, though they would win themselves a reprieve from the predations of their zoomer gravediggers.
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
baratheonpilled
