How We All Got So Rude and Cringe

it's not just the 1%...not even close...

White Lotus Series 1 Cast - all cringe, all the time

How did we reach a point where incivility, rudeness, and the self-absorption required for each are as likely to come from the old as from the young (who have the excuse of immaturity)?

It’s not reducible to “selfishness.” Selfishness is simply an outcome that restates the problem of weakly connected, low empathy societies (often those recently devastated by invasion, colonialism, or war).

And American civility weakened from within, without a violent civil conflict.

Much of the blame connects to how we think about age and aging.

Let me explain how I got here.

In my 2022 research on older Americans, I learned that age strongly aligns with classic notions of individualism and the primacy of individual agency as the real prize of modern life. ‘The more empowered you are to do whatever you want, the better’ we have been told for generations now (and my grandparents would disagree). The 20th century, in many ways, was the launch of overlapping liberation movements, most of which are still ongoing. We are drunk on personal autonomy.

[Insert grumpy anthropologist].

Growing older has lent men (and many women) maximum relative agency in most human cultures (i.e., relative to their youth). In subsistence-based societies, this was a pure age-based status within resource-sharing clans and had little to do with wealth or income accumulation. However, most human societies also encumbered those elders with more significant obligations as they aged into elder status. One of the most central obligations of the elder has been to enforce social norms and coach naive youth in relatively slow-changing adult behaviors required to contribute to the group. This requires spending time with youth, observing them, and carefully intervening. It required extended copresence. Elders in most societies once lived enmeshed in the lives of youth, not forced to ‘catch up’ twice a year on holidays or less frequently or, in tragic cases, never at all. You must also be trusted as an elder, or no one will listen.

But what if society morphs into a loose association of social network CEOs who are primarily interested in their personal lifestyles rather than social norms?

Then what?

This norm of no-norms has prevailed since the Boomer generation aged into elder status, and it is at the root of most local—and national-level political problems we are dealing with right now. The last generations, who honestly believe in deep intrafamilial obligation, are primarily dead or gone. The usual social variables are not really at play in this shift. It is a naked, societal obsession with lifestyle curation with minimal social obligations. We all love it. Let’s be honest. This truth is so uncomfortable that we refuse to face it, let alone imagine a different way of living together across the ages or simply in broader, tight-knit networks of mutual obligation that we choose.

One reason that older Americans voted for Trump in such large percentages is their obsessive belief in the power of individual autonomy sans the slightest interference from the state. This old demon in America is rooted heavily in the history of our violent frontier and the small farmer’s “off-grid” homestead. Yet, for a long time, even this suspicion of the state did not conquer the bonds of family. Family was too crucial for survival until the mid-20th century. By then, we had rolled out massive federal and state entitlements as safety nets for the poor, weak, and elderly. Now, family was optional as a survival tool.

Once family becomes optional, the elders become optional members of our social lives. And the state becomes more crucial, ironically. The state essentially replaces the old people.

And more than one anthropologist will back me up when I say that once elders are optional, you have hollowed out the entire spinal cord of interpersonal respect in any society. It will only thrive in two forms - the peer-to-peer gang and the bureaucracy. If you can disrespect an elder just for being older and “cheugy,” you have a modern form of social unraveling, not one born from the usual suspects: famine, plague, or war.

America has created an aging process that undermines our most basic forms of relational coherence beyond the romantic couple and the parent/child dyad. As we empty the nest, retire, and experience spousal death, each stage reduces our net total social obligations at the individual level. The primary exception is the aging family business patriarch or matriarch. In its place, older Americans put leisure activities and media consumption (much more than any other age group but teens) ahead of socialization, often unconsciously and with a fair bit of regret. Others love their 55+ rec centers and Netflix.

As I explain in my recent book, modern youth culture has sustained ‘youth contra elder’ age-based social segregation since the 1940s for no reason other than the demands of education-based income growth, labor market evolution, and the consumption both facilitate. Maximizing individual autonomy delinks people from all temporal constraints on personal lifestyle provided by traditional, time-intensive social obligations. It enables lifestyle-based over-consumption (i.e., the engine of GDP growth in modern societies).

As a market researcher who conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of baby boomers early in my career, I can not easily describe to the non-Boomer how much the average Boomer hates their parents, at least one of them. This hate is not for the usual reasons but because of their parents’ values and value system. And I mean real hatred and disgust, not just annoyance or irritation. This intergenerational parent/child malaise has significantly improved with younger age cohorts because modern parents are better adapted to a world of rapid change (i.e., they know that the rigidity of conservative societies is maladaptive).

Readers may agree or disagree with the long-term societal value in the Boomer rupture of traditional values. Still, their generation set in motion a perpetually reproducing, mass youth culture of norm-rejection that seems normal and progressive to many but has been a crucial muriatic acid on local communities.

This age-based segregation is carved into our lived landscape. It is geographic (or perhaps residential). It has created two Americas - one with less empathy for youth and one with less respect for elder wisdom. As Boomers aged, their individualism simply ran free and wild as they retired, disconnected from any proper understanding of their grandchildren’s world.

A broader age cohort of Gen X and Boomers exhibit high rates of childlessness (i.e., they never raised any children) or only had one child, contributing to relative disinterest in youth issues.¹ This only ensures that millions of elders are both disconnected and have little reason to connect with youth.

Making Kids Optional

Some grandparents try harder to understand the reality of today’s youth and do, but no one surveys this tricky, intangible behavior. Grandparents’ physical segregation well beyond a 30-minute drive from their grandkids ( a distance my research has shown is essential to intra-family visitation) makes it implausible that they can meaningfully surveil and intervene in their grandchildren’s lives (and many parents do not want this ‘dated’ advice either).

If you grew up like my maternal grandmother in a large working-class family, lived at home until marriage, then raised a family and took care of your ill spouse, the increasing ‘agency’ or freedom from social obligation you received as a widow may have been enjoyable, even ecstatically so. But she never yearned for this or expected it. Ironically, the Greatest Generation was among the first to experience this bizarre decline in social responsibility as they aged (even though they were raised in a different world).

Now, we consider it a civil right.

The problem that America’s aging process feeds is excessive autonomy. Yet, freedom from social obligation is ultimately a trap. It hands you enormous amounts of leisure time, sure. By itself, this autonomy will not make you happy or happier. We know that functional relationships of mutual obligation make humans happiest.

Decades of living with radical autonomy will also make the inevitable temporary period when you suddenly have to deal with a painful family obligation, like care for a dying parent, all the more strange, stressful, and perceptibly onerous. You may realize that your social responsibility muscle is weak and atrophied (or it never developed, which is my case). You feel guilty that the family obligation annoys you (or you are accidentally callous). And the aging adult with a family obligation intruding on their personal life has far less real help with that family obligation today due to everyone’s precious ‘schedules.’

We are not taught to prioritize this fundamental social fitness because America worships autonomy and agency, not social obligation. The latter is a “drag,” a “cramp in my style,” or whatever today’s teens call it (I looked in slang dictionaries but could not figure this out).

The great challenge of the 21st century in America will be to talk ourselves back into tighter relationships of kin and nonkin that slowly heal us from the adolescent autonomy we’ve turned into an adult way of life.

This is not about returning to the past.

It is not about joining mystical, violent religious movements like the New Apostolic Revolution.

Check out my new book (click the banner below) for more on the 20th-century slow creep of modern individualism as a civil and consumer right. It’s a story-driven, data-rich tour through everyday American life, with many tangents and side branches.

1. My 2022 national survey discovered that 27% of adults now 50-79 never raised kids at home. n= 2983 adults with a high school degree or older.