Stendhal and the Youth-Spoiling Attack of Unhappiness

In his classic The Red and the Black Stendhal, writing of the inner turmoil of his anti-hero Julian Sorel, remarked how "engrossed in the difficulty of deciding on a calling" he suffered what goes with it, "that great attack of unhappiness which comes at the end of childhood and spoils the first years of youth in those who are" not saved from that particular misery by being rich. It is rare we see anyone so forthright about the matter, not least because those of conventional views prefer to think this is not the case--that any "normal," properly brought-up, "well-adjusted" young person does not feel that way, is instead wholeheartedly eager-beaver to throw themselves headfirst into the Rat Race the way "society" demands, and that anyone who feels the least bit differently has something wrong with them, something shameful. Indeed, Theodore Dreiser, who wrote with exceptional frankness about his experience of that youth-spoiling unhappiness in his memoir A Book About Myself, expressed again and again his sense that feeling this way he thought there was something wrong with him for doing so.

Yet such feeling is probably the most natural thing in the world. After all, here is a vast system of which a young person knows little into which society demands that they not just fit themselves but do so enthusiastically--all as the little they know of the matter is likely to include something of how brutal and brutalizing, how alienating and even mutilating, this all is. A desire to throw themselves headfirst into such a situation is what is unnatural, with, contrary to how the conventional would like to equate intelligence with conformism, and the most intelligent with ultra-conformist overachievement, the intelligent may be especially likely to shrink from the demand, because they have a better idea of what is in store for them, and the faculties for questioning the world around them. This probably goes double for those who combine intelligence with a comparative lack of privilege. The youth from the working class home may well become the ultra-conforming scholarship student the proponent of aspirationalism smarmily holds up as a "success" story with which to "inspire" their inferiors and shame dissenters. However, because of how they have already taken some of life's hard knocks with all the cynicism this teaches, because the path is so narrow and self-denying and unappealing and hard to stay on and easy to get off of the more in as it never simply comes down to the talent and hard work their elders are always talking up, because people will always be there to "remind them where they came from" and tell them to go back there (the cold shoulder what they are more likely to get than the helping hand when they need it), what promise they ever showed may be far more likely to conduce to the trampling of their hopes. Likewise the independent, the introverted, the creative have a tougher time accommodating themselves to the demands than those who are not--especially as such traits will have likely subjected the possessor to a tough time in school, and even at home, long before they have got into a position where they make any really serious career choices. And of course, we live in a time in which the demands are getting more exacting, all as the rewards get smaller and more remote and more uncertain as, in a time in which college degrees can seem like another asset bubble and many respond by going for the safest-seeming of the assets in that class in the form of paper issued by the most "respected" institutions, the competition is ever more intense, the bill and its associated debt burden mounting, the odds that the gamble on a high-paying job waiting for them pay off decline, and the job itself seems another miserable trial as entry-level positions in the more prestigious professions and firms subject them to gratuitously stupid brutality to prove their commitment to them, because they can--all as at any level short of the absolute top people who actually work for money watch the gap between their income and the cost of living widen from year to year. This, too, dampens whatever enthusiasm there may be for living up to society's demand--and to all evidences is dampening it to a greater degree than before.

Indeed, we see evidences that young people are increasingly resisting the demand, from the chatter about a "Gen Z stare" to how Americans who do not watch anime have learned the term "hikikomori," and that the phenomenon to which the term refers is not some uniquely Japanese exoticism, but also Made In The U.S.A. (the way so many things aren't, anymore). But so far as I can tell this has made the excoriation of those who fail to conform more intense, rather than led to any greater frankness about the matter--leaving the national discussion about this matter as shallow and vacuous as . . . well, the national discussion about every other thing there has been a national discussion about within living memory.