In accordance with our over-medicalized, over-psychoanalyzed, overdiagnosed society, it's pretty clear that my generation (Gen Y, the millenials) has suffered from some pretty severe financial trauma. We've been savaged in rapid succession with the one-two punch of decadent irrational exuberance and systematic economic collapse. History can already boast that these weren't any mild swings either. No one really can predict how major trauma in youth will manifest itself in adulthood since individuals cope with stressors differently. But one thing we do know is that these sort of specters haunt people in some capacity throughout their entire life. And the long-term ramifications of my generation's financial afflictions remain extremely unclear.
Now every generation can claim that they've profited from fat times and subsisted through dark days. Those who grew up in the 1920s had a starkly opposite experience in the 1930s. Back then though, the insularity of society perhaps isolated people enough so there wasn't the same sort of collective trauma my generation may be facing. The financial meltdown was worse 90 years ago, but the mechanics of society: mass consumption, consumerism, industrial norms, work habits and networking were all so vastly different then that today's problems might be far more amplified and projected psychologically. The major difference? We are the first generation where mass media certitudes have ingrained within us certain irrevocable, perhaps unrealistic, assurances about our financial well-being. Invest young in order to profit when old. Minor stock fluctuations pale in importance to the inevitable long term bonanzas. Prosperity wasn't to be earned as much as it was an inherited societal right. But over the past 8 months, all that has been cast asunder. And while our parents are ostensibly the main victims of the current financial crisis, one has to wonder about what the long-term psychological consequences are for their children.
You can't tell me that Jim Cramer barking financial assurances of wealth each day on cable followed by sober laments of a complete confidence failure in our financial system won't screw with our perceptions. Or that there are detrimental aspects of having politicians brag about America being the strongest economy in human history that will never fail now demanding trillions of dollars in bailouts to save the same Wall Street that sustained us a decade before? Or that laughing off a decade of corporate excesses as a beneficial symptom of prosperity followed by the reality that we may be staring down a new depression, that we need a new new deal while we watch our parents retirement savings disappear won't severely cripple our financial outlook and approach for decades to come. There are bound to be deleterious psychological affects to all this bipolarity, and it will make us cynical at best, disengaged at worst.
After all this, are we going to be saddled with such trust issues that there will always be a significant segment of my generation that will sit on its hands, dare not to enter the stock market and even such other less calamitous financial arenas such as 401ks which we now perceive as too volatile and risky? If anything, we have prided ourselves as being the echo of the baby boom while striving not to be a clone. If that pattern continues, we're going to do everything in our power, subconsciously or not, to not repeat the financial mistakes and recklessness of our parents generation. The result may be an attempt to rinse ourselves of the financial bipolarity of our youth and young adulthood. What this means in the long-term is anyone's guess, and could be as simple as a greater proclivity to save since we have already been burned by the alternative, clamoring for a more European style pension system, or complete overhauling our financial priorities.
And just as we still don't fully comprehend how the proliferation in medical bipolarity and similar societal/psychological conditions and their pharmaceutical salves might affect future society and subsequent generations, we can only guess what long-term harm our youthful financial trauma will have on America's economic landscape and overall health in the coming decades.