Is life more or less difficult for young adults in today's world? Lonely

  • Thread starter Thread starter catholic-heart
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
catholic-heart said:
Do you think that it is harder to be a teen or young adult today than it was in the past?

By this, I mean in terms of loneliness, social interaction, living as a devout Catholic, etc.

I know many people will have varying opinions on this. I can see both sides. On the one hand, yes, young adults do seem lazier than in past generations; they live at home longer, many don’t want to work, spend way too much time devoting their lives to technology, etc.
Click to expand...
As a Gen Xer, I work with a lot of millennials and Gen Z and I respect them as colleagues for their work ethic and intelligence.

I am loath to label young adults as lazy knowing full well that Gen Xers like me have been labeled as slackers by the older generations. I remember when I was a fresh graduate from University and couldn’t find a job. I had to live with my parents for a while. There are hard workers and lazy people in each generation.

Truth is every generation faced challenges other generations didn’t have to face.

For example, my generation was the first generation to experience employment insecurity. We know that the time for employment with one employer and retirement with a full pension and a gold watch has long gone the way of the dodo. This is the age of temployment and a lay-offs are so common nowadays.

Add to that the rise of automation and employment become even more uncertain.

It’s like a glass half full thing. More opportunities but also risks and uncertainties.
 
catholic-heart said:
Do you think that it is harder to be a teen or young adult today than it was in the past?
Click to expand...
I been around awhile . Yes. Just look at photos from decades gone back…

It’s the Quantity and Volume of Problems which have been increasing / along with a loss of love…

_
 
catholic-heart said:
Do you think that it is harder to be a teen or young adult today than it was in the past?

By this, I mean in terms of loneliness, social interaction, living as a devout Catholic, etc.
Click to expand...
No, it was just as hard in all the past decades back to at least the 1960s.

Trying to reconcile the hippie free-love era with Catholicism was a lost cause.
 
Last edited:
Families are smaller on average than they used to be. A typical family seventy years ago may have had 8-10 members. Today it’s averaging about 4 nuclear members.

I would say that the tightest bonds are family bonds, then close friends who have been known since childhood or the teenage years.

At some point in the 1990’s I noticed that kids didn’t seem to be playing outside very much anymore. Especially in the middle to upper middle class neighborhoods. I just figured it was the proliferation of cable TV (all day cartoons) and air conditioning. :man_shrugging:t3: I wonder if kids missed out on developing friendships.
 
I’m not trying to just compare and say that youth now have an excuse to feel like they are worse off. I’m just observing that it seems like, in previous times, society as a whole felt a little less lonely, in a sense.

As I said, most people seemed to get married and have spouses right when they entered adulthood. Not saying married couples can’t feel lonely, but it is a different loneliness than having no one at all, which is often the more common experience today.

I realize that loneliness has always existed, but I wonder if it is more common today as a result of technology and society now.
 
Yeah, I think this plays a huge role as well. Whereas people in the past had larger families and were out making friends from a young age, youth today didn’t grow up in the same atmosphere or with the same expectations – even when we have friends now, the friendships are often not as deep as the friendships of, say, a grandmother and her childhood friends.

Now, many young people hang out with friends but don’t hardly converse about anything above the superficial, or they spend the entire time on their phones scrolling through the internet instead of paying attention to eachother.

Yes, people need to figure out better ways to connect, but right now, they are not connecting well and this is why I feel that today is more lonely in general than in the past.
 
Last edited:
Again, I don’t understand what you are comparing or using as your experience. You are young I am going to assume because you said you are in college. What experience of then vs. now do you have? How do you know that married loneliness is different? It is still loneliness.

Loneliness is loneliness. Not more lonely or less lonely depending on your state in life. Some would say being lonely when you are married is worse. But it is still loneliness.
 
@Irishmom2 I’d disagree that some types of loneliness aren’t worse than others. I would say an elderly person who has zero family and zero friends, as well as no social interaction whatsoever would feel a greater loneliness than someone who has their family at least even if they aren’t on the best terms or feel misunderstood. There are degrees of severity in everything.
 
Last edited:
Irishmom2 said:
The question should be more on how to connect,
Click to expand...
I think this is the issue. 👆

Back in my day, we had block parties, crime watch gatherings, Church picnics, and generally speaking, more social gatherings. When my parents were growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to belong to a bowling or golf league.
 
TV has been getting blamed for everything bad in society since the 1950s up to about the time everybody got a computer and a smartphone so the blame shifted over to that.

Technology isn’t the problem. It’s just the latest scapegoat for people who have trouble connecting. There are people who are good at connecting with others who can be on social media for a couple hours and then go out and make real life friends all over the place. Same with TV, my in-laws had it going from the minute they woke up till the time they went to bed and they also had dozens of real life friends and activities all over their town that they were involved in up until they got too ill to continue. When I was in college, I ran the TV in my room all day long when I was there and still had lots of friends, dates and stuff to do.
 
Last edited:
A few years back the wall street journal did an investigative story on the pokey-man phenomenon where young persons would search for gold coins in random places. (I guess.)

The article featured a picture of mostly thirty-somethings male/female searchers near central park west.

They were all staring down at their phones.

After some questions about the game, WSJ asked one of the males what his other aspirations were. He responded that he would like to meet someone someday for relationship/marriage.

Looking back to the picture, I could see there were several attractive ladies standing right next to him.

Just saying.
 
I think communication technologies make it easier for a person to maintain connections nowadays than in the past. Its just that people don’t reflect on and appreciate how good they have it.

Nowadays, we do have technologies that keep people connected.
When my grandparents got married, my grandfather shipped off to fight in the Pacific theater of WW2 just a couple short weeks after their marriage. Letter writing was the main form of communication, But can you imagine the pain and loneliness that is felt waiting to receive a letter that is already 8 weeks old by the time you receive it? There was no skyping, or opportunities for at least an email. If you had a spouse engaging in hand to hand combat as the soldiers in WW2 engaged in. Wouldn’t you desire some form of communication from them more often than every couple of months? The wait for a letter would be excruciating and filled with loneliness.

My husband is an immigrant. He has the opportunity to speak with his mother from across the world, face to face, on a daily basis. I am going out on a limb and say that my husband is the first generation of immigrants to have this luxury. Generally speaking, immigration broke up families. My great grandparents immigrated from Italy, they never returned and left their entire immediate relatives and relationships behind. There was such a time in human history, where moving a couple hundred miles from your ancestral home, meant that you are actually now far, far away from home. Your only communication with your family is going to be via hand written letters. And it may be years before you have any opportunity to see them again face to face
 
Last edited:
Life is much, much easier now than it has ever has been in the past. It’s that very ease that makes it seem difficult, because young people have an incredible amount of leisure time to think about things and make choices from a vast array of options. Much of that time is spent (or wasted) on a desperate hunt for entertainment, which creates confusion.

More people live in cities, in close proximity to other people, than ever before; so it’s fascinating that so many people are lonely, because that can only result from a choice for solitude. We shy away from other people and prefer our own way — that’s a symptom of original sin. On the other hand, our craving for company makes us conform to others in ways that compromise our values, which we then recoil from eventually, and the cycle continues. C.S. Lewis (not a Catholic, but an inspired thinker) wrote that only a life centred on worship can cure loneliness. Even then, we will always have lonely times during our lives, when we cannot be in complete communion with anyone.
 
Last edited:
I wish I had the ability to keep in close contact with people far away when I was a young person. We had to spend .25 cents or more per minute for phone calls, did not have email or text or skype or social media
 
jzea1992 said:
But it’s not just lonely for teens and “young adults”. It’s lonely for all ages
Click to expand...
And people who are not necessarily “alone” do suffer from loneliness. If one is married, one might not be lonely for a spouse, but one might wish for some non-romantic friends who share your interests.

I personally have found technology a godsend in that regard, of having people online who I can keep up with and chat with daily, even though we’re at a distance and we don’t have a lot of social time to spend.
 
Remember the days of the 1010 numbers? Cheaper long distance rates per minute?
 
Yep. And calling cards! Those were Feature Group dial codes (I worked in the competitive Long Distance industry!)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top