There is something about excessive entertainment that seems to stifle the maturing process in a young person. It is so much easier to hide in a kindergarten of constant entertainment, than to engage, as Luke Power puts it in his article below, with something like what Chesterton called the “strange, strong meat of reality”.
The American educator Neil Postman famously addressed this question in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. He saw that excessive immersion in TV was inducing in us an artificial bliss (which he compares with the soma drug of Huxley’s Brave New World) which stifles our engagement with the real world around us.
Roll on the clock thirty plus years and TV looks like a very soft drug in comparison with the bliss inducing potential of the online cornucopia. And so the portmanteau term kidult has been resurrected by the marketing industry to describe an adult section of the market that has the tastes and interests of kids. (The term goes back to the 1950s and the discovery by TV producers that some of their children’s programmes were a big hit with adult viewers.) But while the phenomenon of the rise of the kidult might be good for the world of marketing and entertainment, it is not good for the world of work, nor for the human soul.
Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: post-pandemic edition reviewed here by James Bradshaw, investigates the troubling phenomenon of the ten million or so “unworking men” (for it is men) who should form part of the US workforce, and who are instead devoting nearly a full eight hour day each day to socialising, relaxing and leisure. For Eberstadt this “mass retreat from the workforce” is not merely a logistical or a social problem, it is a civilisational problem. It seems that what these “unworking men” lack is the strength of character to “show up to work, regularly and on time, drug free.”
While play is an essential part of a child’s development, it is a sign of maturing that a child switches gradually from play to work (though, of course, play, rest and leisure form an important part of the adult life also). The ability to work hard and well seems to be the hallmark of human maturity. That so many men in the USA (and presumably throughout the Western world at least) now lead the lives of children must have huge implications for the future.
Jeremy S. Adams’ Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation reviewed here by Margaret Hickey looks at the “infantile individualism” which has been engendered in America’s young by a total immersion in online entertainment. This produces an “emotional and intellectual atrophy” in these “hollowed out” kidults which stunts their desire for and interest in the higher things of the spirit and the big questions of life.
They appear very much like the soma drugged citizens of Brave New World: indifferent to everything except intense, and fleeting, pleasure – the perfect subjects of a totalitarian domination, the perfect ants for the hive.
These analyses might leave us profoundly depressed and despairing for the future. And we would be right to despair if there was not a profound restlessness built into the human heart (as suggested by the title of Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey’s Why We Are Restless reviewed here by Luke Power). There is a hunger for Chesterton’s “strange, strong meat of reality” over soma induced anaesthesia, because we sense that God – the only source of true bliss – lies at the heart of difficult reality.