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Notes -
What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
I don't buy the idea that there was a life script. At least in my own family, my impression is people used to move around and change careers a lot more. They got married earlier, but not necessarily right out of high school.
My maternal grandparents got married in the 50s. My grandmother had a few different jobs and lived in a few different places before getting married in her mid 20s. My grandfather joined the Navy after university. After the war, he tried a few different businesses which didn't work out. He married the secretary of someone he did business with and ultimately had to move from his small town to a big city in order to work as a surveyor.
My paternal grandfather became a reporter after graduating from law school and then moved with his brother from their small city to a bigger city. The brother had first worked as a farmhand on the other side of the country and then later went to graduate school. My grandfather moved to another city where he met his wife while covering an event she was attending, and then they moved to another city, bought a newspaper which he and his wife ran for a while, then started running a new insurance company and then moved yet again back to the big city.
The only family member I have that worked in anything like a factory was my great grandfather who was trained as a bookkeeper but worked in a meat packing factory during the depression. But this was a horrible job that was wrecking his body, so he became a farmer.
When I hear about their life stories, I see people trying out several different careers paths, trying out several different places to live, trying to figure out who to marry, and for many women, deciding whether to sacrifice their careers by getting married.
In my family too the life script is questionable. My dad's mother's family fled Ukraine ahead of the Nazi invasion and my grandmother ended up marrying a much older man because there were no more young men in the ussr. Her dad was murdered by the communists. Her husband died of tuberculosis and she raised her two kids on her own. She was a respected civil engineer and my dad married very young and was able to uproot and get the family into the West into a much more prosperous life. Sometimes it pays to take drastic action rather than keep plugging away where you are.
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