Oversocialization, the Shackles of the Millennial Generation
Uncle Ted was right about this one
Many times in the past, I've referred to an ongoing mystery, a strange and seemingly growing social condition that genuinely confuses me: why are so many of the people who should be the most confident in our society among the most insecure instead? What I mean is that, if you look at 21st century definitions of success, you'd imagine that they'd definitely people with degrees from fancy colleges who live in enviable urban enclaves and who have steady work in creatively or intellectually stimulating fields and are, if not affluent already, then at least on a professional path likely to result in affluence. These people are cultured, digitally savvy, fluent in the vocabulary of the upwardly striving classes, hip to what's cool in movies and music and clothes, deeply aware of the hierarchy of social status and how to navigate it, and in general would appear to be better equipped than most to navigate 21st century life. But you can already guess the punchline: many, many people who fit all of those criteria are among the most neurotic people I know, the most insecure, the least able to enjoy anything because of their relentless overthinking.
I think many other people have observed what I’ve described here and share my consternation about it. I think there’s a reticence to talking about it because, first, it feels impolite, and second, because the class of people who professionally analyze these kinds of cultural conditions are very heavily overrepresented in the tendency I’m describing. (They would be self-indicting in a particularly uncomfortable way, that is.) I also think that there’s a fear that if you talk about this stuff, you’re trying to backdoor your way into bragging about your own sense of confidence, that someone like me who points this dynamic out is just trying to assert their own superior sense of personal security. But I can tell you that I don’t really define myself as someone with any sort of outsized sense of self, and it won’t surprise you to hear that like many delicate snowflakes, any self-confidence I do have in my abilities is matched by many different forms of self-hatred. More than anything, I don’t think I’m in possession of any special sort of emotional security, I just think I have, like, regular human security. (I’ve mentioned several times how weird it was, for me, being in grad school when very close to 100% of my peers would loudly profess to having imposter syndrome and would sometimes express incredulity when I would say I didn’t suffer that way.) Of course, not saying that I’m unusually not insecure but rather that the level of ambient insecurity among my peers seems bizarrely high is just another way of describing the condition that puzzles me. Why are so many people who have checked so many boxes of late-capitalist meritocratic success such wrecks?
One plausible answer is that the very skills and sensibilities that allow people to climb these ladders also habituate them to doubting themselves constantly. Parents train the striving classes this way, and so do peers and teachers and our ambient culture, and being trained in this way trains us to train ourselves, to discipline our selves. Success in elite educational and professional milieus increasingly depends on an almost obsessive attunement to other people’s judgments, shifting norms, and invisible rules, so the habit of self-surveillance never switches off. Instead of arriving at a stable sense of having “made it,” these individuals internalize the idea that their status is always provisional, always subject to reassessment by peers who are just as anxious and competitive as they are. The result is a life lived under continuous internal audit, where confidence would require ignoring exactly the social signals they’ve spent years learning to decode. Fortunately, there is a renegade scholar who wrote cogently about this condition decades ago. Unfortunately, his name was Theodore Kaczynski.
To be clear! Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, is not a thinker I endorse, admire, or recommend on any general basis. He was a murderer and a crank, and much of his political worldview was reactionary nonsense. I myself am not an anti-modernity guy, though I am a “we need to count the costs of modernity” guy, and I don’t think a return to pre-industrial society is possible or even preferable. But like many cranks, Uncle Ted occasionally put his finger on something real. And, indeed, I am big proponent of the idea that we can and should embrace good ideas from bad people; the idea that to say “I agree with X about on issue but not others” is to endorse X in general is emblematic of an age of useless liberal moral hygiene theater and a maddeningly common bit of illogic. Hitler was a vegetarian, or whatever. Charles Manson wrote some good tunes. You get the idea. Kaczynski was deeply racist and borrowed a lot of his most famous ideas, and even the one I’m going to endorse here wasn’t his alone. But he was a keen observer of modern American neuroticism and its relationship to American politics, and I think he captured something very real in his analysis of the pervasive sense that we are richer and more technologically advance than ever and yet many people seem perpetually miserable.
Where I think his manifesto gets things most right is when he talks about what he called “oversocialization,” a concept that, stripped of its context in his ideology of apocalyptic techno-primitivism, describes an emotional and psychological condition that has come to define the Millennial experience.
By oversocialization, Kaczynski meant the internalization of social norms to a pathological degree. The oversocialized person does not merely follow rules; they experience rules as moral absolutes and violations of those rules as deep personal failure. They feel guilt, shame, and anxiety not only when they hurt others but when they imagine (often incorrectly) that they might have violated some invisible, constantly shifting social code. Oversocialization, in this sense, is less about being polite than about being haunted by the possibility of being impolite; to be oversocialized is not to be considerate of others but to be motivated by the fear of appearing to be inconsiderate of others. Oversocialization is an obsession with formalities and rules that have no purpose other than to seem to instill meaning onto the madness of the social world. Oversocialization is an example (to borrow the words of John Updike) of the mask eating the face. Oversocialization is a profound form of missing the forest for the trees; social rules exist, ultimately, to service human emotion, to help us treat others in a way that we would all prefer to be treated. (They often fail in that regard, but….) The oversocialized become slaves to the rules themselves rather than to the ultimate intent of the rules, which is the human beings on the other side of those rules. And, to be clear, this is a thing that was done to them, not something they did. Oversocialized people are often annoying and frequently could do more to be self-critical, but they’re ultimately products of their environment. And for the kinds of people I’m writing about today, the environment relentlessly points in the direction of anxiety, insecurity, and constant self-questioning. Ultimately, no one suffers more due to their condition than they do themselves.
Millennials are, by and large, profoundly oversocialized. We are burdened with a belief that there’s a far more stringent, intricate, and unforgiving set of social rules than actually exists and that we’re perpetually on the verge of violating them. The result is a generation riddled with social anxiety, chronic insecurity, and the persistent, gnawing suspicion that someone, somewhere, is mad at us. Not “might be mad,” but is mad, right now, about something we did, or didn’t do, or failed to anticipate, and everybody else knows or soon will know, and then they’ll be mad at us too. I don’t, at all, think this is unique to Millennials, and if you wanted to argue that each successive generation (and thus Gen Z) is worse off in this regard than the last, I probably wouldn’t fight you about it. But I am a Millennial, and we are now at the peak of our influence in culture, and I think the normalization of limitless insecurity that comes from oversocialization has all manner of bad downstream effects. I feel exhausted by living among people who are incapable of experiencing ordinary human conflict without internal crisis, I terribly miss the wisdom that says that difficult people are ultimately often the most rewarding to know, and I feel very real sympathy for those who cannot leave themselves alone, who cannot simply enjoy anything because they spend every waking moment overanalyzing whether they said or did the right thing when what they said or did was perfectly anodyne. Oversocialization is truly the shackles of my generation, and I don’t know how it gets fixed.
