COMING UP SHORT: WORKING-CLASS ADULTHOOD IN AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY - JENNIFER M. SILVA

I got this from the library because I was stoned and saw a quote on Twitter I thought was smart and noticed the book it was from was in the SPL system. It turned out better than I could have expected, this book is very insightful. It also happens to be quite short and easy to read in a day or so. The book is basically an academic paper fleshed out. Silva interviewed 100 working class young people about their lives and analyzed the results. She’s trying to figure out how young people, working-class young people, think of their lives now that it isn’t possible to participate in the traditional markers of adulthood, like owning a house or having a stable job or being financially comfortable. I’m a “young” person who’s too poor to have a kid so I’m pretty interested in analysis w/r/t this situation. Silva develops her ideas, at first, along very familiar lines. She charts neoliberalism and the defeat of organized labor, “Bowling Alone” style social isolation, and the world-historical wealth inequality that’s taken root here in the USA since the mid-70’s. Again, that’s pretty familiar territory for me, if you look back over this list, the recent economic history of the West is a leitmotif. Silva’s okay on this stuff. The book, thankfully, is short and not billing itself as a deep dive into macroeconomics of the last 50 years, what she is quite smart about though regards how “Neoliberalism, then reigns not only as an abstract and removed set of discourses and practices in the economic sphere but also as a lived system of meanings and values in the emotional sphere.” And it’s these lines of inquiry that Silva really nails. She’s able to put her finger on something I’ve definitely noticed over the past decade or so, what she smartly calls the “therapeutic narrative” as a way of organizing and understanding one’s life. In ages past, one would build meaning by integrating into a community and partaking in externally visible markers of adulthood and status, like having children. Now, because the economic reality precludes all that for so many, what young people instead do is build narratives of growth and overcoming adversity, like alcoholism or abuse, and allow this to structure their lives and to give it meaning. This also connects, for me, to the recent explosion of discourse around “trauma” and “working through one’s personal trauma” and bringing a “trauma informed” mindset to the world. I’m very sympathetic to this line of thinking, I feel like I see examples of it everyday in both myself and my interactions with my friends who are in the same boat, economically. Silva correctly connects this to the very atomized view of the world neoliberalism posits and reproduces. Like Thatcher said, there are only individuals. Silva is wise in showing how this dynamic operates across both gender and race lines in terms of the sorts of relationships young people engage in. There’s a consistent cultural message, which itself is a vital component to the economic regime, that trusting others is very dangerous and unwise. The message is sent over and over again that government is useless and cannot be changed, collective action is for suckers, and it only makes sense to operate at the level of the individual. Capitalist Realism, a term Silva doesn’t use, makes alternatives impossible to conceive. One must focus on oneself. Which is why the mainstream version of identity politics is so unhelpful politically. Instead of pushing for a world without the sort of cut-throat, winner-take-all Thunderdome-Capitalism, it seeks to correct 500 years of exploitation and subjugation by tinkering with and adjusting (think of shallow “representation,” or the “More!Women!Drone pilots! meme) the system as it currently stands. Since everyone, YT and Black, has internalized the messages of “you’re on your own” this approach pleases no-one and further entrenches the hell-world. I’d really recommend this to everyone. It’s short and packed and surprisingly expansive, I’ve found myself mulling the implications often since finishing it. I would quibble with her strange definition of “working class” as “someone who’s father doesn’t have a college degree,” as well as the fact that you don’t learn this is the definition she’s using in the text of the book, rather, it’s tucked in an appendix. But I think the insights stand and the book remains very useful. Finally, I felt very seen when she listed some of the ways that people have found alternate solutions to the Therapeutic Mindset problem, one couple wasn’t rich enough to reasonably have children but have instead devoted large portions of their lives to, “Cultivating their selves alongside each other, rather than anchoring their commitment in shared obligation...They are the embodiment of pure relationship.” Which is, maybe, what K8 and I are doing (though I am interested in acquiring a kid, I suppose at that point our relationship will no longer be “pure”). The other anecdote that stood out was about how someone found relief from this constant neoliberal individualizing drive in the Noise music scene in Richmond, VA. I know some people in the Noise community here in Seattle and, before the plague, always enjoyed and sought out those grimy basement shows because, as the interviewee had discovered, they do offer a brief tonic from the anxiety and anomie of modern life. 100 working-class young people.