Barry ClemsonPublished on May 07, 2025, last updated May 07, 2025.
Keywords: Modern society, culture, unnecessary, new story
“People don’t mind hardships. In fact, they thrive on hardships. What people can’t stand is to feel unnecessary ... and modern society has perfected making people feel unnecessary”.
This quote from Jonathan Smucker captures a central problem with modern societies.
Remember George Bush’s advice at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq ... he advised everyone to go shopping.
When we feel unnecessary, anxiety, depression, and mental health problems inevitably follow. Consider all those offspring of the very rich. Very few of them manage to become reasonable human beings or to make a beneficial contribution to the world.
I grew up in very different world ... rural Alaska. At age seven my six-year-old brother and I were using a “misery whip” saw to cut spruce logs into stove lengths and then splitting so they would fit into the wood stove. We didn’t complain about this because we knew that it was keeping the cabin warm and cooking our food.
At age fourteen I spent the summer working full time in the local gas station and afterwards helped in building our new house. Then after school my brother and I installed the siding on our new house. Father showed us how to do it and then we competed the job without further supervision.
At age sixteen we came South so our parents could attend Penn State. My brother and I got after school jobs to help pay the bills. My paychecks were simply handed to Mother for groceries until I finally left home at age 23.
Contrast my experience with that of most young people today. I hear young folks literally screaming in protest if they are asked to cut the grass. Cleaning up their room or cleaning the dishes after dinner is considered a big imposition. Parents seem to enable this sort of idiocy by doing everything for their kids.
We seem to have completely lost the notion that everybody should help out. And we therefore become unnecessary.
in Anchor Point Alaska we went to school by dogsled, including crossing a sizable river. When we met a huge bull moose on the trail, there was no one to rescue us. We climbed a tree and waited for the moose to go away.
When our team and Raymond’s team collided and the two teams tried to kill each other, we either separated them or we would have dead dogs. We were seven years old and we managed to separate the teams.
Our playground was the wilderness on one side and the ocean on the other. Whether we went to the ocean or to the wilderness, we could be certain that we would be completely alone. There was never anyone to rescue us if we did something stupid or foolish.
Again, contrast this with the experience of our children today. We have become a society that protects children and youth from all difficulties. Even the youth sports are organized and run by adults ... youth are given almost no opportunities to exercise discretion and decision making ... and therefore have great difficulty growing up.
The end result of protecting our children from any and all difficulties is illustrated by the incident a few years ago of three teenagers on a railroad trestle when a train came. The teenagers tried to outrun the train and one of them succeeded. The other two died.
The village of Moose Pass has a train trestle that we used to cross all the time. There are at least three ways to avoid being killed by a train crossing the trestle. You could jump into the lake, you could climb down into the underside of the trestle, or you could even stand on the very edge of the trestle and the train would miss you by a few inches. I can’t imagine even a seven-year-old in Moose Pass getting killed by a train ... and certainly none of us would have tried to outrun a train.
We are perhaps the first culture that has deliberately protected our children and youth from all difficulties, dangers, and decision-making situations. As a consequence we have hordes of 30 somethings babies.
Humankind finds itself today in a planetary emergency which can be characterized as a changing climate, pervasive pollution, and ecosystem destruction ... and an economic system which depends upon policies which worsen all three of these threats.
Young people are waking up to the fact that our current societal trajectory is destroying any possibility of a desirable future for them. If we can show our youth a feasible pathway toward a desirable future, they might thereby find that they are very necessary indeed.
The new story that we need to enact to save ourselves, to achieve a desirable future will indeed involve meaningful hardships and sacrifice.
