Geopolitical events shaping young adulthood?

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Yeah, for sure the 80s movies are very upbeat. The 70s ones are pretty pretty upbeat for the most part too. I mean you’ve got Jaws, The Godfather, and the Exorcist in there, but they are counterbalanced by Star Wars, Grease and Smokey and the Bandit, not to mention Animal House and Blazing Saddles!

I think it would be an interesting project to track the national mood using movies and pop culture. Probably a little more than I can take on right now, but I be someone has already done something similar out there.

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That’s insulting. I was a young person. I was paying attention. I did feel optimistic. I definitely felt more optimistic then than I do now.

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This might be interesting for any data nerds out there: Happiness and Life Satisfaction - Our World in Data

I haven’t waded thru all the data myself.

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Maybe I missed it but it doesn’t look like there’s any survey data from the USA. The surveys are mostly from other parts of the world.

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Or…in retrospect they were right. It all worked out to be good enough to go on with life, maybe have kids and enjoy the process.

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Think you just missed it. There is a lot of data from the US. You just have to interact with the different graphs, etc. It’s not US-centric.

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I remember the 70’s as an absolute blast. I did not pay attention to world or local events because I was too busy with typical teenage concerns as were my peers. If my parents had any angst, they never showed it. I graduated from HS in '76 when we were busy celebrating disco and the bicentennial, then college in '80 where I was too busy earning a degree and falling in love to notice anything else going on. Both DH and I got great jobs upon graduation, and the 80s and 90s were very good to us. Only much later in my life did I slow down enough to pay attention to world events, and I only started paying any serious attention to politics after 2016.

So, I guess I haven’t been paying attention most of my life because I’ve lived in a bubble. Eventually, we brought a child into that bubble. But he doesn’t trust that sphere since he watched those towers fall on 9/11 and saw tears in adult eyes. He may not have understood at that age exactly what was happening, but those tears frightened him. Then the recession of 2008 hit, and while his bubble didn’t burst, he watched classmates lose their homes, friends move out of the neighborhood, neighbors’ marriages fall apart. He wanted to know if that could happen to us. He worried. Then he attended a high school far away that immersed him in a community of teenagers from many different countries and walks of life who cared passionately about things he knew nothing about firsthand. His school wouldn’t let any of its students remain ignorant of social issues or ignore what was happening in the broader world, and it impressed upon each student their responsibilities as global citizens to care and do. During those away years, our son grew up physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually. By the time he made that college choice we couldn’t understand, he was his own man with his own world view, and he thought deeply about things that barely hit our (well, my) radar screen. Now, from his military perch, he is briefed about world events regularly. His job entails understanding that there is real evil in the world, some of it directed at us. Every day, his unit needs to be preparing and prepared both offensively and defensively to deal with whatever comes our way. He knows monsters are real and bubbles are dangerous. He is a much more serious young person than I ever was. More of the world has and will reach his doorstep than mine. And, his time horizon surpasses mine. What he sees in that future is what led me to post his concerns about children upthread.

I never felt the need to pay too much attention to world events when I was young because as @dietz199 posted everything always seemed to work out OK and nothing “out there” seemed to threaten the good life I was lucky enough to have. Of all the events I’ve lived to watch–foreign wars, assassinations, riots, Chernobyl, temporary gas shortages–only 9/11 brought real danger to our shores, but I was no longer a kid when that happened. Now, climate change, increasing resource scarcity, terrorist threats, and the widening health, wealth and education disparities are here and have significant ramifications for the future of the whole planet. These serious things aren’t just going to go away. It isn’t going to be OK without dedicated, unified, intelligent efforts to change entrenched patterns of thinking and behavior, and there is very little of that to be seen. I think people of every age need to be very concerned about these things that not only threaten our quality of life, but the very existence of the planet.

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I misread what you wrote. My bad.

@ChoatieMom You were lucky, and most high school students in the 1970s may not have paid attention. However, 75% of the high school graduates were going out into the world in the 1970s, and their blissful ignorance generally ended. Even for most of those who went to college, the ignorance was ending. My aunt was very active when she was in colleges in the early 1970s. She even has a very thick FBI file to prove it…

But the drop in college activism after the early 1970s was pretty marked. I think that it had to do with general pessimism. Activism is the result of believing that you can change the world. I also think that students being killed while engaging in protest, without there being any repercussions added to a sense of despair among student activists.

I also think that the shock of Nixon’s massive landslide in 1972 induced a lot of despair. Student activists lived in their own kind of bubble. Learning that, despite the massive antiwar and civil rights protests, they had done little to convince the country that changes needed to happen probably contributed even more to a sense of “things are terrible, and we cannot change it”.

BTW, I was a teen in the late 1970s, but, as I have mentioned, I was not in the USA. The 1970s for Israel was one hell of a roller coaster ride. Post 1967 euphoria to the shock of the 1973 war to to major political shift in 1976, to the euphoria of the peace negotiations of 1977-1978.

The 1970s weren’t depressing as much as they were exhausting. Not that the 1980s were all that more relaxing, for me at least…

Of course, living in a bubble in Israel, especially then, was practically impossible (except if you are from an ultra-ultra-orthodox group), because it’s a small country, there is universal conscription (almost, see above for ultra-orthodox), and everybody knows everybody (even more than expected by the size of the population).

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And Love Story, the saddest movie of all time…

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How is my statement insulting? You said yourself:
“But that’s just my perception. I’m sure if you were majorly impacted by some of the events in the 70s your perception would be different.”

You also stated that you were class of 82. That means you were either a child or a young teenager in 1970 (depending on if you graduated college or high school in 82). I was class of 75 (undergrad) and was fully adult for most of the 1970s. I graduated into a major recession. So, yeah, my perception would definitely be different from yours. The 70s were not a time of unbridled optimism.

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There is a large socio-economic component to whether or not you found the 70’s terrifying or not.

I remember HS classmates agonizing over their “terrible” lottery numbers (which for the young men meant the draft). Yes, educational deferments- for the middle class and affluent. Escaping to Canada-an option for sure, but if you were from a blue-collar family where Dad had worn a uniform, grandpa had served, and both grandma’s were in the service (nurses, supply clerks, etc.) that was an agonizing choice. What kind of traitor runs to Canada to avoid serving his country? But who wants to add to the body bag count which was solemnly recited every night on the news?

I think we all understate the impact that our family situations had on whether or not we found things terrifying.

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I think people underestimate how much 9/11 affected both Millennials and GenZ. I have often called Gen Z the PTSD generation. Not old enough to remember 9/11 but inherited all of the stress of it. D18 was young but in school during the DC Sniper. Add on to that Sandy Hook and Parkland. Lockdown drills where you huddle together to hide from an active shooter. Jumping when the fire alarm goes off. Now they have also had a pandemic. They have not had it easy. It doesn’t surprise me when every young woman I know runs out and gets an IUD and says she doesn’t want kids.

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To the original question, my kid hasn’t really talked about this in terms of wanting kids or not. However, events have had a profound influence on her learning and awareness. We have been talking about Russia and Ukraine in this household for years, and how understanding flow
of money and financial interests of politicians, how funding of campaigns and dark money matters. She has grown up with some sense of shock at how people including her peers
are so quick to embrace hyperbole and division without understanding even the basics of what is happening or seeing the nuances and really understanding issues. They have witnessed how politics of hate and fear can suspend reason. Also, seeing that democracy can be fragile and informed citizens are critical for democracy, and how media todoy can undermine that. I think she is much more informed and has a more nuanced understanding and concern about the world than I did at her age. And frustration too, but so far she doesn’t discuss how all this impacts her plans to have a family… she’s a typical teen in that sense–she says she wants to see more
of the world and have more adventures before she thinks about that.

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I also think one has to add in that CC isn’t a great sample of the population. In some parts of the US, thinking is very very different than in others.
CC skews left and more people are from the Coasts than normal demographic representation. You can see that in comments in the threads. Totally fine but if we are broad brushing the last 50 years, we’d have to include the rest of the people who would never find themselves on CC.
On our last road trip we drove down the East Coast on a college tour during Covid. Pittsburgh was the dividing point, South of Pittsburgh and very little masking or talk about it. We walked into a hotel in Nashville with masks and we were the only people wearing masks and there were dozens in the lobby/bar listening to music. People stared. A lot.
Where you live, where you were raised and how you engage with your environment will all have effects on how you feel about geopolitics. Add in the human element of choice and you never know what you’ll get.

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Just popping into say both my kids want kids and would be great parents!

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I’d also add about the nuclear threat… I agree that we don’t need to panic. To be complacent and assume it can’t or couldn’t ever happen is a mistake. We need to continue vigilance and efforts to make sure it doesn’t happen. Putin regularly run exercises involving nuclear weapons under the very flawed “escalate to deescalate” theory, right? Diplomacy has been for decades and will continue to be critical, which is why it is good we are starting to recover some of the gutting done to our diplomatic presence in the world.

I accidentally stumbled into reading Ken Follet’s new book Never not knowing what it was about. Not saying that is a likely scenario but it was a little unsettling and a good reminder.

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You don’t have to go out and buy an electric vehicle now to go a little greener. Unless you already have very fuel-conservative driving habits, there are probably ways to drive in more fuel (and therefore money) saving ways without taking any longer to get where you are going. Basic car maintenance like keeping enough air in the tires can reduce your fuel bill (and improve safety and reduce the how often you need to buy new tires).

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