Posted by dj on June 17, 2000, at 22:06:56
On the razor's edge
Today's graduates are entering a winner-take-all world,
says Prof. Thomas Homer-Dixon -- and most
are painfully aware they've already lost the game
Thomas Homer-DixonSaturday, June 17, 2000
Globe and Mail
My heart sank. The student sitting across the desk from me in my university office couldn't raise her eyes to meet mine. She wasn't more than 20 years old, but her body and demeanor conveyed unspeakable weariness. Her expression was flat, her voice a mumble, and from the way she was hunched over, I thought she wanted to curl up and hide in her chair.Clearly, she found it painful to talk, but bit by bit I learned about her problems with her course work, papers, and exams. She told me that she would go over the same paragraph in her textbook a dozen times without grasping its content.
She was terrified by the essays she had to write and deeply embarrassed by the deadlines she'd already missed. And she seemed almost paralyzed by lethargy, sometimes staying in bed 12, 14, or more hours a day.
Then, as she slid a doctor's note across the desk toward me, she burst into tears. The note, from her psychotherapist, said she was clinically depressed.
It's June and on campus I see students in gowns and mortarboards on their way to what should be triumphant graduation. But more than ever, I'm struck by the anxieties that many are carrying.
When I began teaching at the University of Toronto 10 years ago, I saw perhaps one seriously depressed student a year. Now, I sometimes encounter 10. True, I'm teaching more students today than I did then, but that fact by itself can't account for the increase. Nor can our greater willingness to be open about our mental problems.
I'm convinced there's a real trend here, one that says something very troubling about the kind of society we're creating for our children.
The trend shows up in scientific data. Careful studies of societies around the world reveal a sharply rising incidence of major depression.
Whether in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, or Lebanon, in each successive generation a larger percentage of people experience at least one severe episode of depression -- and it strikes earlier in their lives.
A study in United States in the late 1980s, for instance, showed that only 1 per cent of Americans born before 1905 had experienced major depression by the time they were 75. However, among people born after 1955, 6 per cent had been depressed by the time they were 24. A later U.S. study showed that men and women under 40 were three times more likely to become severely depressed than those over 40.
What's happening here?
It's likely some people have a genetic tendency to be depressed; some are more innately susceptible than others. Yet our genes change very slowly and cannot possibly explain why the rate of major depression is rising so fast.
For an explanation we must look elsewhere -- at the social and environmental factors that combine with genetic susceptibility to push some people over the edge into depression.
Some experts speculate that low levels of certain industrial chemicals in our environment may be having malign neurological effects.
Others point to social changes, such as the erosion of the nuclear family, the decline of religious communities, and (especially for women) unattainable standards of beauty. I think that at least part of the explanation lies with certain features of everyday life in modern society. An ever-quickening stream of new information technologies -- from e-mail and the World Wide Web to the lowly cell phone and Palm Pilot -- allows each of us to connect with more people, manage more information, and make decisions faster. And it's easier and faster to move ourselves and material goods anywhere in the world. Most of us like these technologies and the advantages they bring. But they also quicken the pace of our lives, overload us with information, rob us of quiet time to reflect, and widen the gulf between winners and losers. And the remorseless competitiveness of our economy and society makes many of us feel worse about ourselves.
Here's the point. I've been struck, again, by things my students say -- not just the students suffering from depression, but many others, too. By the time these liberal-arts undergraduates reach their second year, many realize they've already lost the game of life. The gap between students who get 90s and those who get 80s is widening, and by graduation the merely very good can see options disappear and doors slam shut. While a few of their peers -- especially those with As in math, computer science, or economics -- look forward to lucrative, exciting careers in dot.coms and business consulting, many of the rest have no idea what they're going to do. They know they'll find work, because the unemployment rate is relatively low, but the jobs they see open to them -- as nameless information pushers in corporations and bureaucracies -- lack appeal.
Meanwhile, they confront an unrelenting barrage of news, publicity, and advertising about lifestyles they can't hope to achieve.
The symbols of success and affluence are all around them all the time: The streets are full of BMWs and Porsches driven by rich, dynamic twenty-somethings; megabookstores burst with racks of magazines announcing the most exotic getaway spots, filled with photographs of glorious clothes and houses; and television, a place of escape, is populated by beautiful people who rarely seem to work.
By creating huge, integrated, and efficient markets, modern technologies have helped create a winner-take-all economy, in which the people who are best in any particular field are able to reap huge returns, while those who are just slightly below the very best are rewarded with far less. Incomes rise rapidly for people in the highest echelons of our economies, while they stagnate for many of the rest. My students know this, and it scares them. They also know -- and it also scares them -- that our society offers immense rewards to people with certain kinds of cognitive abilities and temperaments.
It's an ideal place for people who are hyper-rational and hyperkinetic -- those with finely honed analytical skills and agile, pragmatic minds who thrive on speed and change, and those who are attractive, socially adept, and perpetually optimistic.
It's far from ideal for people who are shy, cautious, and emotionally sensitive, and it's no place for those susceptible to deep sadness. As someone very close to me who suffers from depression once said: "This society isn't designed for people like me."
The rest of us should heed her words. It's possible that the rising rate of depression is like the proverbial canary in the coal mine: These statistics may be a warning that we're creating a grossly unbalanced social milieu, one that offers little space for people with certain kinds of personality. And these people, the ones we're leaving behind, could turn out to be vitally important to all of us -- not just because we should care about our fellow human beings, but also because they're a source of an emotional sensitivity and richness that might be key to all our happiness in the future.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His latest book, The Ingenuity Gap, will be published by Knopf in October.
poster:dj
thread:37668
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/37668.html