The apocalypse won't save us

Ok, Millennial

Death on the Pale Horse, by Benjamin West,

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I’m going to keep this one short-ish, because I’m traveling with my family this week. But a few days ago I was chatting with a friend when I made a joke: What does it matter how I prepare for my kid’s future when the world will soon be a burned out cinder anyway¹.

Again, the context is that I was joking. But I quickly began thinking about how many times I’ve heard similar comments from a multitude of other parents of younger kids. Like me, most of the people I hear making these kinds of comments are joking. But also, we’re all kind of serious too? After all, there are many crises out there. I was referring to climate change, but there’s also the housing affordability crisis. A mental health crisis. A labor and supply shortage. There’s the war in Ukraine, which has reminded us that war is an ever present threat and that World War III is not off the table.

The list could go on, but the point is that there are so many things seemingly going wrong that it’s easy to feel like maybe the joke is true and planning for your kid’s future is pointless.

I get that feeling². But I also think that some of us millennial parents are over estimating the amount of chaos that’s headed our way. And the downside is that millennial parenting culture seems to be committing the same (alleged) error baby boomers made that led to the Ok Boomer joke, wherein boomers were blamed for not thinking about future generations. Which is to say, millennials may not be preparing realistically for the conditions our kids will inherit. And I suspect we’ll get our own Ok Millennial moment someday as a reward.

Let’s look specifically at climate change, because that’s what my joke was about. Recent years have seen a growing realization that we’re not going to limit global emissions enough to hit the targets set by the Paris Climate Accords, meaning we’re pretty much guaranteed some dire outcomes. I saw a lot of defeatism in particular earlier this year when the U.N. released a report arguing that it’s “now or never” to take action.

We’re already seeing the impacts of climate chaos, with things like the deadly floods in Pakistan. And we should definitely be taking whatever action as a society that we can to limit these sorts of events³.

But also, life is probably not on the verge of devolving into a Mad Max scenario for those of us reading and writing blogs like this. Is that fair to other people around the world? No. But if you live in the U.S. and have a college education or marketable skill, you’re probably still going to have a job and live in a house in 20 years. Climate change might hit some cities — Phoenix and Miami come to mind, for different reasons — particularly hard. But that doesn’t mean everyone will become vassals of climate warlords.

Why does this matter? Because it means today’s kids will still have to pay for college, apply for normal jobs, cobble together down payments for houses, figure out childcare for their own kids, and so on. And we millennial parents ought to be planning for that future, not for a future in which the world is a burned out cinder and nothing matters any more. Put another way, life might be hotter and harder in any number of ways, but the apocalypse is not going to liberate us parents from the basic responsibilities of setting our kids up in the world.

Speaking of things getting harder, another useful case study here is the cost of college. Over the last 20 years, the average cost of tuition and fees has risen nearly 180 percent. I know a lot of millennial parents who are preparing to help their kids through college, but fewer who planning for the possibility that costs will keep going up at this same pace.

I was fortunate to only have a small amount of student debt that my wife and I managed to pay off before I finished school. But I personally know people with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and am aware of people who have hundreds of thousands.

What if that becomes the norm? What are you going to do, fellow millennial parents, if an average education at a medium-good school costs $100,000? Or $500,000? If these numbers sound insane, consider how may times you’ve heard people say “a bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma.” So what happens when the masters degree is the new high school diploma and people are graduating with $1 million in student loan debt? I suspect our kids’ response when we tell them we’ve been squirreling away money in 529 accounts will be, “Ok millennial.” And then they’ll move thousands of miles away to the only city where there are still jobs and we’ll never see them again.

I semi-jest yet again, but the point is that college may well be harder to afford for our kids’ generation. But it’ll also still be important. If anything, it’ll be more necessary. The same thing goes for other big life events. Buying a house could get harder, for instance, but also more necessary for achieving financial stability. How are we millennial parents preparing our kids for such a reality?⁴

It’s certainly possible that we’ll rise to the occasion and solve some of today’s crises. I would love to see us fix the education system so people aren’t taking out large amounts of debt. There are lots of ideas about how to deal with climate change, if we would just do them.

But whether systemic solutions happen or not — systemic change is important but not really what this blog is about — the future one or two generations down the road is not likely to include a burned out cinder of a world where things like education and housing don’t matter. Fantasizing about the end of the world can be interesting or even fun, but we parents are going to have to keep parenting in a world where doing so may get harder. The apocalypse is not coming to save us.

Thanks for reading to the end of this post. If you enjoy Nuclear Meltdown, I’d be eternally grateful if you shared it with a friend.

Headlines to read this week:

Don’t Objectify Yourself

“Research has shown, for example, that focusing on the world outside yourself is linked to happiness, while focusing on yourself and how others see you can lead to unstable moods. Your happiness goes up and down like a yo-yo, depending on whether you see yourself positively or negatively in a given moment. This instability is hard to bear; no wonder self-absorption is associated with anxiety and depression.

Seeing yourself as an object rather than a subject can also lower your performance in ordinary tasks. Researchers have found in learning experiments that people are less likely to try new things when they are focused on themselves. This makes sense: When you pay too much attention to yourself, you ignore a lot about the outside world.”

Why I won’t turn my kid into an online influencer

“I think the most basic answer is that I didn’t want to foist a public identity on my kids at a point when they really couldn’t comprehend or consent to what that would entail. Put another way, kids typically don’t become influencers without significant intervention, or prodding, from their parents and guardians. And it didn’t feel like I should be the one making the decision about my kids’ careers, especially when the career in question comes with numerous perils.”

The liberal superego and the conservative id

“The idea is that people often want to do something, are fairly convinced it’s right, but social pressures are too embedded to allow them to act. This is the constant tug-of-war in the minds of the upper-middle-class who dictate both social norms and government policy, especially found in areas where ideological desire crashes against reality and causes real-world problems – in particular crime and education.”

1. This is a paraphrase, of course. I can’t remember my exact words, but I certainly didn’t write three drafts of it like I did with this blog post.

2. I’ve covered both climate change and housing as a professional journalist and I’m as concerned about these kinds of threats as anyone.

3. The first blog I was really serious about, more than a decade ago, focused on urban design, and specifically about limiting things like car oriented infrastructure. I regularly posted three times a day on that blog and basically treated it like a second full time job. More broadly, when I was at my last job I covered things like public lands, wildlife, and climate extensively. I even attended the Paris Climate talks in person. Climate change is an issue I care a lot about and spend a lot of time reading about. But I also believe in trying to have a specific and narrow focus for a blog, and in this case climate change is a big systemic issue that falls outside the regular scope of Nuclear Meltdown, which is explicitly about families and interpersonal relationships.

4. Suggesting specific courses of action is beyond the scope of this post, though I did float one in my last post (tldr: sidestep costly college for a high-earning profession in a trade).