Too Much Independence?

This post is the first in a series of articles about social atomization in the US.

“Fasten your own oxygen mask before assisting others,” they tell you on airplanes. If you black out for lack of air, the logic goes, you won’t be able to help anyone at all, so look out for yourself first. Theoretically, the oxygen benefits should sort of trickle down—the instructions are rational—but I find it hard to imagine a mother who would not strap the lifesaver to her child’s face first.

The self-centered oxygen-mask instructions have become the standard approach to life and relationships in the US today. Accumulate a stable income of your own before starting a family. Put education and career before friendships and dates. If you do pursue relationships, make sure that they stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. Prioritize individual responsibilities over politics and causes.

It is a time when many people, of all economic classes, are struggling for air. From the Occupy Wall Street protesters who want jobs and places to live to Ivy Leaguers whose ideas of being situated involve university tenure, law-firm partnerships, establishment in top hospitals, etc., it seems as if everyone wants to move up; nobody is settled. It’s as if life has become a permanent state of emergency to which people respond by focusing on themselves. Not helping the situation is the tendency toward the collection of data on everything from SAT points earned to steps walked and stairs climbed; these empirical leanings place quantifiable personal achievements over imponderables of great importance, including such fuzzy abstractions as morals and ideals.

Taking care of oneself has become the cause and the struggle.

The Turn Toward Independence: A Shifting Cost-Benefit Analysis

Being independent is more important than it once was. In the past, women largely depended on men for financial support. A relationship was key to a woman’s stability. Now, at least in the Western world, unless the relationship leads to marriage, it risks undermining a woman’s individual stability by stealing her away from school and work.  What once was key to security is now a threat.

In the much-discussed New York Times article about “hookup culture,” or casual sex, among college students, reporter Kate Taylor described young women at the University of Pennsylvania as regarding “building their résumés, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn.”

 “We are very aware of cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down,” Taylor quoted one student, “A,” as saying of relationships, “so no one wants to be too tied to someone that, you know, may not be the person they want to be with in a couple of months.” Another interviewed student saw her plans to go to law school as a blockade to starting a relationship in college.

I’m not interested in the sexual preferences of college students, nor do I think that one can extrapolate from news stories about the dating styles of women at Ivy League schools to US women in general. What interests me about the hookup culture articles is that they are an example of the way people prioritize individual achievements over relationships.

Young people not only defer dating; they also postpone marriage and childbirth. At the time of a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 21 percent of Millennials (people who came of age around the millennium and were 18 to 29 at the time of the survey) were married, as compared to 29 percent of people of Generation X and 42 percent of Baby Boomers at the equivalent age, according to a Pew report on Milliennials. People also have children later and more often resort to assisted reproductive technologies, whose use doubled in the last decade, according to the CDC.

In delaying childbirth to establish themselves financially and professionally, parents subject reproduction to a cost-benefit analysis. A woman weighs the costs of declining fertility with the benefits of the career advances and savings that another full year at work could provide. Childbearing becomes a deliberate, rational act, as opposed to sex itself, which, despite whatever rational conversations about children may have taken place between partners, is in the moment, a sensual, intuitive thing. I certainly don’t say this to encourage unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancies; rather, I want to make the connection between rationalism and having children later in life.

Granted, weighing the costs and benefits of relationships is not a new thing but an old idea leftover from the days of marriages arranged to keep money in the family. The difference today is that the conclusion of the cost-benefit analysis is not "marry someone else" but “stay single.” New or not, the problem with these cost-benefit analyses is that they discount what can’t be measured, things like warmth of feeling and love, things that require a certain faith or reliance on intuition. Maybe relationships don’t make total sense. But do they need to?

Independently Poor

The employer-employee relationship has also weakened and turned to its own version of hooking up: part-time employment. Hiring a cohort of part-time employees gives a company the benefits of having employees they are needed without the cost and commitment of responsibilities like paying for health insurance or contributing to retirement funds. Part-time work, often without benefits, is on the rise according to The New York Times Economix blog and other sources (though the rise described has to do with the Great Recession and not necessarily with a longer-term trend), and many of those who work part time do so not by choice but because they cannot find full-time work.

More generally and beyond the most recent recession, with the widening gap between rich and poor and the decline of middle-income jobs, people can depend less on their employers for economic security. Globalization did away with the idea of US factory work (à la Ford Motor Company) that paid a living wage. Downton Abbey-style live-in help (though of course Downton Abbey doesn’t represent the US or reality), in which families of servants counted on employment and room and board from wealthy families, is relegated to television and the homes of the unusually rich. Call it the employer-employee relationship or call it the relationships among the economic classes: the relationship between the rich and poor is dysfunctional.  The weakening of class distinctions may give some people a chance at the American dream; it may also make life harder for those who remain on the lower rungs of the workforce.

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On both individual and societal levels, we are failing to cooperate and work together. Much of this probably has to do with the Great Recession and scarcity of resources—in case of an emergency, fasten your own mask first. But as I’ll discuss in a subsequent post, there was a time when altruism, or helping another at one’s own expense, was an ideal to which even the elite college students were encouraged to aspire, whether or not doing so made sense. A state of emergency was a time not to hunker down but to stick out one’s neck and demonstrate one’s chivalry. In this time of too much independence, the ideals of chivalry and altruism have weakened.

There’s a cost to this tendency toward independence. Less dovetailing of lives. Loneliness. A sense that everything important depends on what happens to you and the resulting anxiety. Independent striving alone doesn’t account for anomie and similar complaints, as I’ll discuss in a subsequent article. Post-modernism, cynicism, and a preference for hard truths over ideals also contribute to the way things are, and no list of factors will ever fully capture culture.

I have no prescription for changing the way we live and certainly don’t want to return to a previous era. My only exhortation is that people not discount the immeasurable benefits that relationships of all kinds can bring to our lives.