When sexual freedoms increase, all others decline

(A sort-of sequel to my piece, ‘It’s not the Boomers fault, by a Millennial‘.)

The old generation wars have kicked off again on social media this week, and this time (a blessed break from Boomers v Millennials), it’s the turn of Gen X (born 1965-1981) to blame Zoomers (born 1997-2010) for “ordering too much DoorDash“ (a modern variation on the avocado toast / pumpkin spiced lattes theme that the previous generation got harangued about).

That is to say, the older generation believes the younger generation is spending too much of their money on needless self-indulgences like takeaways, and that is why they’re not getting ahead economically.

The younger generation has reacted in fury and frustration, countering that the economic climate is not what it was, and that no amount of skipping Starbucks or making their own avocado sandwiches (which sound disgusting, quite frankly - what’s wrong with cheese?) is going to resolve their financial difficulties.

The truth, as it often is, is somewhere in the middle: spending on delivery services is up amongst the young, but at the same time, opportunities for them have collapsed, and we’re only just seeing the beginning of the bloodbath employment-wise, as AI becomes more and more competent - a bloodbath that will disproportionately affect the young, because AI will take entry-level jobs before it takes more senior roles (although it will soon take many of those, too).

A major UK bank recently announced it is replacing all its “low-value human capital“ (entry / junior-level positions) with AI, and this trend will explode over the next years and decades. Predictive programming vehicles, such as 2024’s Subservience, warn us of an imminent future where AI lifeforms do every job, from waiter to builder to surgeon.

Moreover, the hospitality industry, that millions of young people have depended on to provide initial and bridging employment, is in a state of sustained collapse which is only going to get worse.

So, whatever way you slice it, opportunities are contracting almost everywhere, and this is not a temporary anomaly or a recoverable blip: it’s all by design, and the brutal truth is that we are in the midst of creating a “useless class“ of humans, that the job market no longer requires.

This class is, and will continue to be, composed disproportionately of the under-25s (too young and inexperienced - AI can do it better and cheaper) and the over-55s (too old and a liability - get someone twenty years younger).

In fact, there is now only about a ten-year window in which a job seeker is not afflicted by ageism at either end of the spectrum, since studies show many employers consider applicants “too old” once they hit 40, and this discrimination can even start in the late thirties.

To further exacerbate the growing employment crisis, many people in their fifties are being laid off(especially white men), a phenomenon that has exacerbated exponentially since “covid” and its ruinous effect on so many businesses.

These people - too young to retire and considered too old to rehire - are in a dire situation.

They get talked about far less than the struggling young, however, because it’s much harder to blame them for their own woes.

“Hey, Grandpa, why don’t you consider making your own sandwiches, you spoilt, lazy git?” isn’t really going to go down too well with someone who’s worked all their life, especially if the scolding voice is several decades younger than they are.

(I know of someone in his mid-fifties who was laid off and joined a recruitment agency as part of his employment search, only to be told bluntly by the recruitment consultant - aged about 25 - that, despite his decades of experience, “his age would count against him”. They never found him any work.)

Anyway, the point is this: whilst the cacophonous generation-based arguments centre relentlessly around money, employment, and housing, these debates invariably ignore one central factor in how we as a society have got into such a mess:

The unprecedented sexual freedoms granted to Western societies since the 1960s, and how these paved the way for the collapse of every other kind of freedom, especially economic.

One of the major drivers of youth unemployment is an over-saturated graduate job market. We have an ever-increasing supply of surplus graduates, and an ever-decreasing pool of graduate-level jobs (ones that are looking for humans to do them, at least).

15 months after completing university, only around half of graduates are in full-time work, and many send off hundreds of applications, never to hear anything back. These are emphatically not just graduates who went to subpar universities and studied fluff subjects, but to quote a recent report:

“Even respondents who had graduated with a first class degree, often from prestigious universities, and even in subjects such as engineering, computing, cybersecurity or other STEM sectors thought to be crying out for skilled workers, said they had been sending dozens or even hundreds of applications without getting an interview.”

It would also be a total mischaracterisation to say these graduates are “holding out for their dream job”. Many have long since given up on that and are applying for literally any job - and many can’t even get that.

The days of “just take any job until something better comes along” are long gone, and statistically, it is now harder to get a job at McDonald’s than it is to get into Harvard, whilst overall, the proverbial AnyJobs (bar work, shelf-stacking, kitchen cleaning) that some well-meaning individuals imagine can simply be snapped up by anyone willing to do them, are often the hardest to get, because they have the highest volume of applications.

For example, the budget supermarket Aldi reports receiving several hundred applications for a single ‘store assistant’ (shelf-stacking) role. University graduates are not preferred for such work. They’re considered over-qualified and seen as a bad bet to take on and train, as they will leave the minute “something better comes along”. And yet, the proverbial something may be a long time coming, and for increasing numbers, may never come along at all.

So how did we get here? How did we convince so many teenagers to delay adulthood by 3-4 years (or longer) by going to university, racking up huge debts whilst doing so, when the data has been there for years showing this isn’t the best route to a secure economic future for most?

Put simply, it was via the promise of sexual freedom. And I’m not saying people go to university simply to sleep around (although universities strongly encourage them to, some now even handing out “shag packs“ to their students), but rather, the fact that young people are able to easily access uncommitted, consequence-free sexual relationships is the specific factor that makes mass attendance at university (rather than most people settling down with their high-school sweetheart) possible.

Until the 1960s gave us the pill and legal abortion, if young people wanted to enter an intimate relationship, as the large majority of young people have always wished to do, then they were required to make a lifelong commitment to another person in front of all their family and friends, or risk huge stigma and social ostracisation. For most, the risk of illicit sex simply wasn’t worth it, so they got married.

Children usually followed fairly quickly afterward.

Consequently, in 1950, around 60-75% of 25-year-olds were married parents.

Today, that number stands at just 2-7%.

Young people who are married with children are extremely unlikely to go to university, as anybody who’s attended one can attest: the only students who were married or had children were mature students who had come back to university later in life. The standard student profile was, and is, young, free, and single - and that’s a vital part of the appeal.

To funnel half the population into university (a target set by Tony Blair in the 1990s and that was achieved in 2018), the social engineers had to offer unfettered sexual freedom as an incentive, or this would never have happened. That is to say, they had to tell young people that sex had now been completely untethered from commitment or responsibility - and certainly from children - so they didn’t need to limit themselves in life by settling down early.

So, rather than proposing to them, youngsters could instead breezily dump their sixth-form girlfriend or boyfriend (everyone I know was warned about the “dangers” of going to university with a boy/girlfriend at home, and that they would be missing out on the full uni experience if they didn’t go single), and defer committed relationships until “later”.

However, if it had continued to be the societal expectation that sex was reserved for marriage, and if the pill and abortion hadn’t arrived, then this message could not have been successfully delivered. Hence, university would have remained the preserve of a select few, and the vast majority would have stayed in their hometowns, begun working and earning in their teens, and typically married their first boyfriend or girlfriend in their early twenties.

With this model, there were not only far less useless graduates, but also far less competition in the workplace overall, because so many young women were at home looking after children, rather than competing with men for jobs.

So, the social engineers offered these women “liberation” from early marriage and childbearing via the pill and abortion, and offered “independence”, specifically through university and the pull of a glittering career. That worked reasonably well for one generation (the Boomers) and has been an increasing disaster ever since, hitting the younger Millennials and Zoomers hardest of all.

Social engineers have openly, laughingly, confirmed this was the plan: Nicholas Rockefeller, of the eponymous dynasty, admitted to film director Aaron Russo that his immensely wealthy and influential family sponsored feminism in order to increase the tax base, drive down wages, and get the children away from the parents and into state indoctrination centres (daycare, school) as soon as possible.

Women going to university also leads predictably to a dramatically lower birth rate.

One might argue, “well, what’s the problem with people delaying settling down until after university? They’re still only in their early twenties then, they’re not old!”.

Yet their age upon graduation isn’t the issue: early-to-mid twenties is indeed when people have historically got married for the last few hundred years. So it’s not that people are too old to get married when they complete their studies, rather it’s what they have been doing in the years leading up to this age, i.e., it’s that once they have got used to casual, consequence-free sexual relationships (by which I mean, no formal commitment such an engagement/marriage and no pregnancies), they are decreasingly less likely to make - or to want to make - such a commitment.

If they don’t make such a commitment, children are less likely to be born.

If children are less likely to be born, then we reach the situation we are facing now where the white birth rate is 1.4 and falling.

If large numbers of young people are not getting married and not having children - and they are not (marriages and births are both at the lowest levels ever recorded) - then what defines them in a world where they struggle to get even the most basic entry-level job? Internet scrolling? (The sad reality is that is precisely what does define the day-to-day life of many, especially since “covid”, and is what WEF spokesman Yuval Harari confirms is the future for “the useless class”.)

There is certainly some truth to what older people say about budgeting, and that they themselves spent less money on such things as takeaway food when they were in their twenties.

Yet we have to explore the real factors behind their youthful frugality, and not just go with surface explanations like: “they were less lazy”.

Older people were, overwhelmingly, more frugal because they were saving for the future. They were saving for the future because they saw a future.

Younger people, increasingly, do not.

We are not talking about dramatic seventeen-year-olds here who’ve just discovered existentialist philosophers, we are talking about real adults pushing thirty (the oldest Zoomers are turning 29 this year) who see no professional future and no personal future.

If they cannot realistically expect a decent, stable job that pays them enough to have a reasonable quality of life (and realistically, millions cannot), and they cannot expect to have a decent, stable relationship and children if they want them (and, realistically, millions cannot) - what’s there to save for?

What’s the point?

That’s primarily what’s driving the increased spending on “luxuries” like takeaways amongst Zoomers, not the fact that they don’t know how to make a sandwich.

It’s not about moralising and preaching about whether they “should” feel like this and hauling out the Four Yorkshiremen impersonators to tell us how, when they were young, they survived on a half a packet of razor shavings and a clip ‘round the earhole and they damn well liked it - it’s simply about observing what is actually going on. It’s about acknowledging that it’s much more serious than a generation being lazy or lacking in budgeting or culinary skills. Those are fairly simple skills to teach. If that was the extent of the problem, then frankly, there would be no problem.

But there is a problem: a huge and potentially civilisation-decimating one.

And it’s this...

We as a society have collectively destroyed the primary thing that has given young people’s lives meaning for most of human history, which is finding a partner when they are young and energetic, and channeling that energy into building their own home and family, supported by a network of extended family and friends.

We have taken that away with the pill, abortion, and wall-to-wall propaganda starting more or less the day they are born telling them how wonderful casual, consequence-free sex is, and how they will completely ruin their lives if they settle down young - see: Friends, Sex and the City, Girls, and a million other examples.

Billionaire social engineers did not spend such a fortune on this programming because it does not work.

They facilitated it, and made it so socially iconic, precisely because of how devastatingly well it does work.

We cannot then smugly finger-wag at people whose brains were still years off being fully formed as they consumed hundreds of hours of this programming, all throughout their most neurologically formative years, for being programmed by it.

Not to mention the thousands of hours of programming they received through the government indoctrination camps known as schools.

For a modern young person, what their parents were like or the messages they tried to instil often pale into insignificance compared to the dominant cultural messages they received from school and the mass media. An average family these days only spends about 45 minutes together: this can never compete with the hours and hours daily young minds spend being marinaded in, and manipulated by, schools and screens.

So, the under-30s have virtually all been programmed to believe that settling down young is the death knell for ambition and success, and that qualifications and career are the holy grail of existence.

However, unless a young person is exceptional (and, by definition, the vast, overwhelming majority of people are not), then, even if they are eventually able to find a stable job (which in itself is becoming less and less likely), they are are not going to find deep, enduring life fulfilment solely in their career, as very few people in history ever have. For most people, work has always been a means to an end - and that end is supporting the things that do matter: namely, family, and what springs from that - community, culture, tradition, faith.

Take away the first one (marriage and children) and all the others unravel and disappear, as they largely have. Even the decreasingly few young people who do settle down and have children often report feeling lonely, isolated, and overwhelmed, with no access to the kind of support structure human societies have traditionally provided to young parents.

There is a widespread dismissive, callous social attitude now, including not infrequently from people’s own families, that, when it comes to children, “you chose to have them, they’re your responsibility”. The implications of this attitude are a major driving factor of why so many people decide to have just one child - or none at all.

Leading on from this, I often hear young people, and aspiring parents, being scolded with: “well, if you wanted family support, you should have stayed in your hometown, not gallivanted off to the big city seeking excitement”.

Well, what about those people who really wanted to stay in their own hometowns, but it was everyone else who left?

I love my hometown. I can get embarrassingly emotional merely at seeing it on street view (I sometimes look up my old childhood home, and feel irrationally annoyed about what the new owners have done to the windows). I would have loved to have stayed there, and made efforts to do so, getting a job at 18 rather than going straight to university. But by the time I was 23, all my family and friends had left. So, inevitably, I left too.

Millions of people are now in that position. There is no cohesive home community for them to return to and begin their own families. Everybody’s gone.

If these were simply fringe and atypical examples, it wouldn’t much matter, but they are not. Fractured, scattered, non-existent communities have become the norm - hence why so many seek out online communities instead - and the implications are catastrophic - yet it seems almost a taboo to discuss why this has happened.

I have observed that most people are very willing to volunteer their opinions on the economic and employment struggles of the young, but very few wish to confront their personal lives, and what a shocking, scandalous, historically unprecedented situation it is to live in a society where the vast majority of 30-year-olds (adults not far off middle-age) are not married.

No advanced society has ever seen such a thing. There is no reason to think any society that produces this outcome has a flourishing future ahead of it. The white birth rate is already 1.4 - once it declines to 1.3, this is known demographically as critically lowest low, which means no society historically has ever managed to turn it around and hence has died out. We are on the precipice of that right now.

Often, using a personal example can prove more powerful than bandying about statistics, so here is one: an old friend of my family’s, now in his seventies, grew up an only child and hated it, so vowed when he grew up, he would have a large family. He went on to have seven children, the oldest six of whom are currently aged between 35 and 50.

Do you know how many grandchildren this man has?

One.

One grandchild. And the parent of that child is the only one of his seven children to be married.

I doubt we would be able to find any other society in history where a person could have six middle-aged children, all physically healthy, and just one grandchild. It’s extraordinary. It’s scandalous. And if we don’t turn it around urgently, we’re in real trouble.

We have to go right back to basics: what are children being taught in their earliest, most formative years about what’s important in life, and what is most likely to bring them enduring fulfilment, meaning, and purpose (all much better terms than the vague and ephemeral “happiness”)?

“Career” has only ever been the route to lasting fulfilment for a small minority, a minority which is now dramatically shrinking with the advent of AI and a generally over-saturated job market.

Hence, we must find something else to offer the young if we do not want them to give up altogether. Like every other past generation in human history, they need something to live for, and that thing needs to be deeply human. We cannot write millions of people off as semi-cyborgs who spend 15 hours a day interacting with screens and call it a life, even if they are earning some money.

We’ve had decades of the blame game now and so I think we’ve collated quite enough evidence to conclude it isn’t helping anyone. The generation wars are a manufactured artifice by a devious and frankly genocidal elite who want us constantly at each other’s throats (Millennials blaming Boomers, Gen X blaming Gen Z, Gen Z blaming Boomers, ad infinitum ad nauseam) because this stops us doing the one vital - now urgently vital - thing for our individual and collective survival: uniting, understanding - and, ultimately, fixing what has clearly been deliberately broken.

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