Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden
internationaljournalofwellbeing.org
internationaljournalofwellbeing.org
So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
So, if you are looking for some future phase shift, you are searching for the wrong thing.
Also, most of the developing countries will be in that situation in ~20 years. Most underdeveloped ones will get there in an extra decade or two.
Saying the "boomers ruined everything" is not sophisticated, we can't move forward from a blame game, we have to diagnose the actions and actors that implemented them, but of course this is much more challenging.
Ancedotally, I know plenty of poor boomers. Have you seen who works at a Dollar Tree lately?
The popular dialogue that boomer=rich and greedy, millennial=poor and exploited is not productive, it's a fabricated generational war that distracts us from the real issues.
And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.
Some elements of the generation before. It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few. There were some elite people with a plan, many more who bought the propaganda they were served, and a lot who had nothing to do with any of it.
Also, it's worth noting (to help build empathy) that you and me likely have been suckered by propaganda for things that the next generation will curse us for, but we just think we're being sensible and informed.
The least you could do is blame an ideological faction of that generation (e.g. neoliberals), rather than blaming the whole generation itself. Among many advantages, that names the problem in a way that can solve it.
The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. Shifting the blame to the actions of the few is an easy way to absolve yourself of the blame. Who allows the few to take those actions? How did those few come into power to be able to take those actions? Once the actions were taken, why were they not corrected if the entire generation disagreed with them?
Maybe in the future the generations will blame my generation for a bunch of wrongs, even if I personally may not have contributed to those wrongs, I will still share the burden of not doing enough to prevent it.
That's an illusion. I think what you're really doing is putting unreasonable demands on the entire baby boomer generation, then blaming them for not succeeding at an impossible task. I mean, seriously, you really think, say, some boomer factory worker in Ohio is to blame for not foreseeing the effects of some 1980-era policy on 2026 or even 2006? They didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we have.
It sounds like you're really holding tight onto blame, but what good does that do you? It solves no problems, and at best, alienates people from you.
I understand the desire to find an entity or group of people to blame, but they were acting in their own self interest at a peak time, they didn't know the party would be over soon, for many of them, it still isn't.
Is it though? I have a feeling that previous generations were simply happy with less. Now we are so connected and everybody wants what they consider the standard according to social media: huge house in the most prominent city in their country, N exotic vacations every year, meaningful job, etc. But this would be a pretty tall order even 20 or 40 years ago.
They could also afford to buy houses on minimum wage salaries.
I have a much higher salary than my parents, and I'm theory I can get more things from further afar, but I still live in a much more precarious situation.
I'm older now, work with a lot of great young peers. Their lifestyle though at that age is nothing like mine was. I worked through school (admittedly because I wasn't very good at school). My first real jobs just barely paid for everything. First apartment was pretty, spartan. Eating out or going out was infrequent. I liked sports, but when I did go to sporting events I was in the cheap seats on the cheap food promotion night.
That's not the lifestyle I see today. I don't blame younger folks for wanting it, it's shown to them everywhere. But the expectations are different and living them has financial consequences too.
They blamed social media for Americans.
And the fact that salaries don't really grow for years now, while the productivity, and so the generated wealth, does.
I loathe the "pop critique" employment of the phrase, but this is definitionally late-stage capitalism.
obviously capitalism is named as such because it is founded upon the concept of (private) capital. capital serves to lower margins and increase profitability. it has been remarkably successful and has immensely raised QoL for virtually the planet's entire population. we are now reckoning with its inevitable consequences. manpower is unreliable. it gets sick. it has children. it has eccentricities. it is fundamentally unpredictable. Capital seeks efficiency and reliability. What percentage of the population is capable of building data centers? Of engineering massive scale LLMs?
What happens when Capital no longer needs labor?
without human influence or directive, capital ceases to be become anything meaningful beyond [insert data type] at which point, it spreads like a cancer, ie: universal paperclips
Capitalism is revered due to how it has significantly impacted the living standards of populations that participate in it. But increasing the living standards of populations was never the purpose of capitalism, it was a simply a side-effect.
Capitalism left to it's own authority creates payment in company scrip and company towns. Capitalism WANTS labor trapped with company script/company towns. Just because society outlawed that doesn't mean Capitalism isn't working in other ways to recreate that. What Capitalism does not want is empowered labor or labor lifted out from dire situations. Society is what has done that, not Capitalism.
Without strict government oversight Capitalism is horrible and gives horrible results to society at large. It just has done an incredible job of painting modern society as Capitalism and claiming all benefits of things that aren't inherently from Capitalism but from Government oversite.
It's real estate value all the way down. Apartments getting tinier while getting more expensive, homes being out of reach or taking up an enormous amount of total pay in order to finance.
People who own aren't living off their own labor's fruits saved for the future but on the massively increased value they're selling something they didn't have to pay nearly as much for. (not talking about inflation but actual hours of labor)
You have middle aged people doing not much better than introductory jobs because the people who needed to retire haven't.
The CEO pay multiple is just ridiculous.
I say this as a home owner, let the market crash, I dont care what my house is valued as it is an asset not an investment.
This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dramatically if we do so, we will devalue significant assets of a large number of active voters and political contributors.
I'd love to see some ideas on how to pull this off, because we need them.
However, it's more nuanced. I can support risking that my house gets less worth than my mortgage, because I consider the probability of not being able to pay off my mortgage very low. I am guessing that people who feel less secure financially do see a house as a last-resort asset, even at the price of their children not being able to afford a home. And that's the root cause that should be fixed with policy I think.
(Edit: To clarify, when I hear devaluing housing, I’m interpreting that as an enormous price decrease. The impact to us is that we wouldn’t be able to sell our house for anywhere near the cost we paid for it. We didn’t buy as it as an asset but we also didn’t plan for it to become a huge loss that could have instead gone into retirement savings.)
I think you meant "blamed Americans for social media" but at this point they both kinda fit
Yes, "interesting" is the right word. The government is talking about suspending cell phones for kids in connection to that. But honestly, what's really scary right now is how many kids and young adults seem to be "zombified" (for lack of a better word), and how bad this turns out later in the job market. Tomorrow I need to have a serious talk with my boss about how we should not hire a prospect because of total lack of in-person interactivity. Immigrants from war and poverty-stricken countries are over-represented in our "successful hires" pool because they still know how to speak.
On the other hand, the rest of the world never know about the latest bi-monthly school shooting in the US.
Wishing it away doesn't make it any less true.
Sweden has always had a fairly high crime rate. Immigrants didn't make it worse, but blaming them just made an existing problem more visible.
And yes, 2nd generation immigrants are clearly over represented when it comes to crime, in Sweden and every wheee else.
In Sweden these issues are pronounced because of a ridiculous taboo that existed 1995-2020 to even discuss this problem.
But it turns out, if you import >1 million people from dysfunctional societies with entirely different cultures, while sticking your head in the sand, you will faces issues…
FWIW I am from Sweden, was born in 1986. These problems were obvious to me.
The other point was that the arrival of immigrants did not increase the crime rate.
I always find it funny to read the statistics about how life has never been easier when society is in clear disarray and the opportunities that existed just a few decades ago simply evaporated.
The actual title of the paper: "Flourishing in Sweden: Great overall — but not for all"
But the poster clearly knows what kind of title makes a post fly.
> ... our findings highlight notable disparities—particularly among young adults—that underscore the need for more targeted efforts to promote flourishing across all segments of Swedish society.
More than enough work out there actually pays well in isolation to live a decent full life, it’s just relatively local housing costs it probably sucks.
And not just for young people. We’re fully in an environment where how good and flexible your life is is highly dependent on when you bought a home, or if you own a home.
but yeah, it would be great to see comparison with country which has much less immigrants compared to Sweden like Finland (or Poland), Finland seems like great comparison
also for people unfamiliar with situation in Sweden, this movie is great to illustrate what's happening there - Play (2011) and situation in the last 15 years got only worse than it already was when they shot the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1376717/
So, on the existence of god, we have two possiblities: God does exist, god doesn't exist.
1. If god doesn't exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a false god as the center of life.
2. If god does exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a real god as the center of life.
In that discussion, god's existence in fact doesn't matter, it leads to the same outcome.
If God does exist and is our creator, then we're designed to recognize him (at least to strive to, or have some innate need to); failing to do so or radically abdicating from this need would lead to disaster.
In other words, in the God-exists scenario, we are not merely observers of a phenomenon who can be detached from it.
Other cultures don't and didn't relate to their deities in the same way. Do we then have to assume they all suffered lower life satisfaction than a 11th century German peasant because of their detachment from a singular god the creator? Why didn't they strive for the relationship you're describing?
Trying to put God with a capital G at the center of our lives as some innate need doesn't make sense from a historical context.
I don’t know about religions in the general sense, and you’re right to point out that I very much have the “Abrahamic world view”, though my case is much much more specific than that but that’s not relevant here.
What we might more safely assume is that the Creator is revealed through history and a group to whom it he’s not revealed might pursue him more ignorantly (I appreciate the language might sound offensive or condescending but that’s not the intention) but in that pursuit they’re still better off than someone who willfully rejects him.
This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.
> This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.
I don't know what you mean by this. Particular God's importance rose and fell out of fashion in ancient societies.
So just avoiding the truth does the trick