I’ve just come across a rather striking fact: The End of Angst.
But first, some background: Every year since 1976, the Monitoring the Future Study has asked around 3,000 U.S. 12th graders how important various things are to them. It seems everything is getting more important. Well, not quite. 13 of 14 issues have become more important. The only exception: “Finding purpose and meaning in my life”.
Do students today have “purpose and meaning” solved, or is it that they can’t see the point? What has driven this rather extraordinary change in attitudes?
Oh, the angst. Or lack of it.
(Data are available over the fold.)
|
% “Extremely important”
|
1970-76
|
2000-05
|
|
Being successful in my line of work
|
55%
|
62%
|
|
Having a good marriage and family life
|
72%
|
76%
|
|
Having lots of money
|
17%
|
26%
|
|
Having plenty of time for recreation and hobbies
|
24%
|
33%
|
|
Having strong friendships
|
61%
|
65%
|
|
Being able to find steady work
|
64%
|
66%
|
|
Making a contribution to society
|
18%
|
22%
|
|
Being a leader in my community
|
7%
|
15%
|
|
Being able to give my children better opportunities than I’ve had
|
51%
|
66%
|
|
Living close to parents and relatives
|
9%
|
17%
|
|
Getting away from this area of the country
|
11%
|
14%
|
|
Working to correct social and economic inequalities
|
10%
|
11%
|
|
Discovering new ways to experience things
|
20%
|
23%
|
|
Finding purpose and meaning in my life
|
64%
|
58%
|
Two points:
1. Is the change statistically significant? What about the change in the first question? Both seem to have changed about about the same percentage.
2. When you are worried about being able to make a living and raise a family, worries about the meaning of life tends to recede. How do you think the poll would come out in a third world country? I think what this shows is a rising degree of economic insecurity.
I want to know what other phenomenon this is reflecting. In my experience with teenagers (I teach middle school and spend a fair amount of time on the internet helping high schoolers who are freaking out about college applications), very few of them have the perspective to understand what these adult-lifestyle issues really mean. They’ve bought into the paradigm they were raised with, or the one that dominates their school culture, and they’ve bought into it so completely they don’t even know it’s just one paradigm among many. (An example is the incredibly credential-driven nature of a lot of today’s teenagers, at least from the relatively affluent areas. They assume they have to go to top-name colleges, that double majors are better than single majors, that you have to have a grad degree to be successful (one degree good, two degrees better!). But it’s not based on any comprehension of the educational quality of top-name colleges compared to other options, or the relevance of majors to careers, or of graduate degrees to employability. In fact, often there is no relation, and they’re quite startled to be confronted with this fact.
I say this by way of underscoring that they’ve bought into a paradigm so completely they don’t see it in operation. But it’s not their paradigm, necessarily; with age, experience, and distance, I expect (hope, anyway) that many of them will generate new paradigms. It’s a parental and community paradigm.
So I wouldn’t look to the teenagers to answer why these changes (once, of course, I had answered the question about whether there are statistically significant changes). I’d look for what cultural forces they’re reflecting. And I’d be intrigued to follow up with the same cohort in 5, 10, 20 years, and see where their values stood then.
(I’m also pretty amused that “living near family” and “getting away from here” are both more popular, and relieved to see the numbers are small enough that they’re in no danger of overlapping.)
Do these kind of questions have much predictive validity for actual behavior? When “Having plenty of time for recreation and hobbies” goes up by 9 points, does that mean young people actually spend more time on recreation and hobbies? Or do these kind of trends just reflect fads in what people think they are supposed to say in answer to these kinds of questions? I suppose it’s marginally useful to know what people think they are supposed to say now as compared to in the post-hippie era, but it all seems like pretty weak tea unless there’s more here than meets the eye.
For example, are women really less happy now than in 1972? Or has the spread of feminism made it seem less fashionable to say you are happy? Who knows?
In contrast, you can’t outsmart an IQ test. You don’t say to yourself, “Well, what I really feel deep inside is that the cube root of 27 is 4, but I know that society wants me to say the answer is 3, so that’s what I’ll say is the answer just to make myself look good.” If you are smart enough to figure out the answers they want on an IQ test, well, then, you’re smart. And if you can’t figure out what they want, then you’re not smart. That’s why the U.S. military spends a fortune perfecting the IQ test it gives everybody who hopes to enlist: because IQ tests have demonstrated predictive validity. Soldiers with IQs of 90 accidentally shoot each other more often than soldiers with IQs of 100, and on and on through a long list of important real world behaviors.
There are some fairly reliable paper tests of honesty, for instance, but the problem is that can be outsmarted. They are prone to rare but catastrophic failure, when some Ahmad Chalabi type uses his enormous IQ to figure out what kind of answers make him sound honest.
It seems interesting that 12th graders in both intervals rank “Good marriage and family” on top of everything else, including success at line of work (which retains relative importance 4th in both intervals), or contributing to society.
Also, finding meaning and purpose in life, while moving down, still has a relative higher rank than having (“lots of”) money, for example.
One would like to know more on the sample (student population profile.) Are there similar surveys for older population (with all limitations that apply to such surveys)?
“I think what this shows is a rising degree of economic insecurity.”
My goodness! We all see what we want to see, don’t we?
My first instinct is that the decline is due to the fact that 12th graders no longer perceive themselves as in any immediate position to give their life a greater purpose or meaning. They know they want career success, they know they want good relationships and friendships, but they probably also know that their generation isn’t expected to think of themselves as adults until about 30.
In the 1970′s, a 12th grader could reasonably expect college to be the stepping-stone between adolescence and a meaningful adulthood. Now college is the part of adolescence that happens after high school, before a mid-20′s “self-exploration” (read: waiting tables), and totally apart from the realization (usually somewhere around 26), that one needs to go to graduate school if they’re going to really make anything of themselves.
I’m 23. When I graduated high school, I knew that I wanted to have fun in college (and that an undergraduate degree would not prepare me for a meaningful career). When I graduated college, I knew I wanted a job that would prepare me for graduate school. It’s only now that I’m choosing a graduate school that I’m actually considering it a step towards “meaning and purpose” in my life. Maybe I’m myopic and immature, but I’m hardly an exception in terms of my generation.
Clearly, this is a sad time. Children no longer listen to their elders, and everyone is writing a book.
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