Today’s article deals with the two divergent directions that many young Americans are taking after they finish college. Here I am particularly focusing on those American college students who have the financial resources through their families to go away to college and live in dorms or apartments. Simply put, many of these young Americans come back home after they get their degrees, not to visit but to live, and of those, particularly with the boys, many refuse to go to work. They simply veg out and lean emotionally on their parents. This posture of living at home after school in a vegetative state is distinct from those students who don’t have the financial resources to go to college away from home, who go to college as commuters and usually work as well and who continue to live at home after they have finished school until they become financially independent and/or live with a romantic partner. On the other hand, another group of young Americans put as much distance, emotionally as well as physically, between themselves and their parents and get a job some place far away. Many of them have strict times during the week when they will acquiesce to talk with their parents on the telephone. Many of them cut off communication with their parents altogether. In other words, they ghost their parents on an ongoing basis.
Both of these postures are pathological for the individuals involved, and have, by extension, negative effects for their entire families, as well as for the whole society. They are both forms of behavior that are symptomatic of an individual not growing up emotionally. Now I know that in Mexico as well as other more traditional Latin countries, most university students do live at home while they are going to university. And when they finish their studies, many continue to live at home unless they get involved with a romantic partner, usually through marriage. But they usually don’t veg out and do nothing. They continue their studies into graduate school or get a job. So, there is less pathology involved in Latin cultures for a typical stay-at-home student while he is studying or after he finishes studying. Now a few students go to graduate school in the United States, particularly if it is in the area of medicine, but this is definitely the minority.
Anyway, I bring up this discussion of young people in Mexico and other Latin cultures for a reason. By being able to make a comparison between Mexico and Latin America, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, in terms of behavior of college graduates, we can perhaps get a better understanding of this unusual behavior that is afflicting certain groups of American young people. So can we point to any differences in the lives of Latin and American young people that could account for the differences in behavior that we have described here. One thing for certain is their relationship to their living environments. Mexicans and Latins in general have a much more grounded relationship to their living environments than do Americans. This is strangely true even in a modern city like Mexico City. Although some neighborhoods have been transformed by sterile modern high rises, many still have charming homes and quaint apartment buildings. There are many traditional monuments and statues throughout the city. And although some of the art today is abstract, much of it is based on flowing blendable continual traditional native-American motifs – motifs that are very grounded in nature. Think of the wonderful murals placed on the sides of monumental Mexican buildings.
Descending into even deeper levels of understanding, I would submit that Latin culture has always been able to live with the perishable effects of traditional natural living environments better than American culture, and has always resisted to a certain extent, attempts to repress it and to cover it over fully with a layer of modern technology. More so than Americans, Latins seem to resist becoming robotized. It is as if they have developed a traditional natural mindset that exists at this point independently of the influences of the modern technological living environment in which they feel compelled by circumstances of modern life to live. It is as if they are somehow more susceptible to the imprints made and preserved by the remnants of traditional natural cultures that have resisted and that continue to resist the ongoing steamrolling developments of modern technology.
Getting back to the original topic of this article, if American youth are unable to retain significant aspects of traditional natural culture, even as the external world becomes more and more technologized, then it is inevitable that, at least for many of them, they are going to drift into a more and more intense experiential vacuum where they hover over the external world without grounding in it. And then they have the two possible reactions that I have previously discussed. Either they can immerse themselves in the numbness of the vacuum, become not only financially independent but also emotional independent, and keep their distance from their family or else they can come home and cling to the emotional and financial grounding provided by their family. It’s a terrible choice to have to make.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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