Why are young people checking out (part 1)

It appears that the edifice of the social contract was primarily tied to home ownership.

Now that's presumed (rightly so) as an impossibility, it's no surprise just how quickly people are checking out entirely.

From [this tweet](https://x.com/meta_nomad/status/1996311731253977415
)

I think this is a very interesting factor to explain the obvious decline in motivation in young people when it comes to participating in society. For context, I am 25 years old as of writing this, incredibly cynical about the future of society—which is different from human nature and from the Universe which I think are both inherently Good—and I don't think that this cynicism is particularly uncommon, though my particular views are definitely atypical within my age group.
This piece isn't specifically about me, but I have to pre-empt with that because obviously, I will tend to defend why younger people do not feel inclined to "contribute to society", a term which puts all the shame and burden on those who are formally or informally dropping out, as opposed to the broken system which people don't want to contribute to anymore.

There's an idea that the young don't want to participate in society because we have been brainwashed to hate capitalism. In some limited sense this is true, because the media we have been exposed to, and even the teachers who taught us classes, definitely tend to frame society as a pretty nasty collective, which is self-serving and crushes people's souls all in order to maintain itself. The fact that shows like the Simpsons and South Park, which are directly aimed at satirizing mainstream culture, have become so popular is indicative of how deep the cynicism towards our society has become, that it has become another kind of mainstream, and thus ironically co-opted into the same capitalist machine it seeked to critique.
There's a lot to say about how cultural trends always go from one excess to another, squashing away nuance in the name of spreading the most viral memes, and for sure, there is a lot of that going on with how younger people relate to the system at large. They haven't thought through things by themselves, instead they have been deeply influenced by the ideas of other people and then learn to engage in various identity and social games. In other words, people are far more mimetic than they would like to admit, and this includes the whole attitude of hating on the modern world.

But. Those ideas couldn't spread if they didn't find some type of soil to root themselves into, some type of discontent or alienation which didn't already exist. Discontent can become a negative spiral, as we tend to create what we focus on in our lives, but it would be incredibly dishonest to say that there aren't genuine reasons for why younger people feel cynical about the state of the world.

I can't speak for everyone, so I will simply voice out my opinions and what I see. The point about home ownership in the tweet in the beginning is important to examine, because I believe that it leads to a feedback loop of worsening trust. When people look at the prices of real estate, and conclude that they cannot realistically own one because of how the prices keep increasing, and all the interests you need to pay on top of that to pay back the mortgage, people don't see why they should bother working so hard if any sense of stability is always going to be too expensive for them to afford. So as the tweet mentions, they check out entirely, because it is not just the price of the median house which increases, but also the lower percentiles.

Declining motivation towards work

It doesn't help that in the EU, low-paying jobs are not much higher than unemployment benefits, which means that the calculus for working hard is even more skewed towards not giving a care. A full-time low-paying job will require 40 hours of your time per week, if not more because of the commute and the tiredness and stress that ensue, which in total might only give you a 20 or 30% increase on the money you would get if you were unemployed. Can you really blame people for not wanting to got out there and work in those circumstances?

This is the typical right-wing argument, I know. The problem is that the right-wing then argues that we should cut out unemployment benefits altogether, so that people are forced to work and contribute to society to live within it. The problem is that this doesn't address the fundamental problem of human motivation: it's taken for granted that work sucks and is alienating, and political measures then move around a few incentives so that people feel more inclined to work than not, but the basic reality of humans being surrounded by work they do not want to do is never recognized for what it is.

But why did previous generations seem more functional then? The main reasons that I can see are the following:

People had way more income relative to housing, food, and other necessary expenses. The cost of living has increased a lot over the past decades, as we can see from the fact that it was the norm back then for a single income to provide for a family of four, as well as own a house and a car. Nowadays you basically need both parents to be working, unless the man earns a lot of money.
They were more used to pushing away their problems and their trauma. This is seen as being "tougher", but this led to all kinds of dysfunctional families later down the road, which manifested in alcoholism, familial abuse, and normalized misery. Not that those who are over-sensitive and make a big deal of everything which happens to them, in the name of "expressing your feelings", are any better. The opposite of one excess isn't healthy either of course, but my point is that the greater visibility of symptoms isn't necessarily a sign that things are getting worse, it usually means that they are getting less repressed.
Social media didn't exist to accentuate people's problems by draining away their time and energy, make them feel worse about their life by comparing them to unrealistic standards, spread the insane obsession with mental illnesses, and give people someone or something to blame, which nowadays is usually "capitalism" or something adjacent to that. Older people like to point out that the young are addicted to their phone, which is very true, but in my experience, older people are just as addicted to theirs, it's just that this phenomenon has happened after they settled into a somewhat comfortable life position, which means that they are still somewhat functional.

No matter how you make sense of the fact that people seemed more functional a few decades ago, the fact remains for me that functional does not imply healthy or conscious. People went from numbing their problems through alcohol and cigarettes, to now using the internet, social media and porn. Maybe one is more "functional" than the other in a limited sense, but all of them are coping mechanisms from an alienating life.
Those coping mechanisms can be rationalized away if you have a somewhat stable living situation, but if you don't, and if home ownership seems to get harder and harder as the years go by, why bother working hard at a job you hate?

This is not a defense for hedonism and rejecting all forms of work. When I ask "why work hard?" or "why think so much about the long-term if it isn't guaranteed?", I am not implying that the solution consists in maximizing pleasure in the short term, and that work is always bad, I am simply saying that people only have so much time and energy in their day, and if most jobs can only provide money to people working in them, and they are getting worse and worse at even doing that one thing, it's natural that people are dropping more and more from the game of money and careers.
Pleasure for its own sake becomes addictive, it makes us crave more and more, and more and more numb to conscious experience. The remedy to a world where the long-term is uncertain isn't crude hedonism, it's instead conscious experience. To spend time with our friends, or feel the soft warmth of the sun of our skin, or to marvel at the radical fact that anything exists at all, and that I get to be conscious of that, those are experiences which are valuable in and of themselves, and which do not depend on a system to provide for us.
Dropping out of the game of money and careers shouldn't be done out of a petty need for life to be easy, instead it should come from a higher desire to live truthfully to ourselves, something which our world denies us again and again, because it isn't useful to society at large.

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Motivation Collapse Economy Housing Crisis

2025-12-08