Against Scold Mentality

I suppose this is a companion piece to “The Red Pill is a Depressant”

Over the weekend, a youngish woman went viral for talking about her lazy morning. The woman, who declared herself to be 29 and single without kids, celebrated her ability to sleep in, watch Netflix and learn new recipes without the stresses of romantic and parental relationships. She was not — to be clear — opposed to getting married and having kids — either in an individual or a societal sense — but she was enjoying her freedom to relax and have some fun without the obvious time constraints of motherhood.

Poor lass. She didn’t know what she was getting into. Big right-wing accounts began to reupload her video with commentary on the emptiness of her existence. Within hours she had become the physical embodiment of the archetype of the rootless millennial woman — sliding towards middle-age without more solid relationships in her life than, perhaps, ownership of a cat. Boo! Shame!

“Living a hollow life is a weird flex,” wrote Ian Miles Cheong, who spends his entire life posting engagement bait on Twitter. “Some of us want meaning in life and purpose outside of Beyoncé,” argued Elijah Schaffer, who does exactly the same. “Men need to start bonking women on the head and dragging them back to their caves again,” proposed Joel Berry, who later clarified that he meant men should be “confident and assertive in pursuit of a good marriage” (you could have just said you were joking, Joel). 

Me? I thought this was unfair. Frankly, I didn’t have the right to think anything else when I was a single, childless 32-year-old man spending my day vomiting comical amounts of bile. Unless someone was injecting crack into their schlong I was in no position to judge (and even then one doubts that being judgemental would have helped).

But it was also unfair because (a) she didn’t say that being lazy was all her life amounted to and (b) she didn’t say this was her purpose in life and that she never hoped to do anything else. Granted, I’m not sure why she made such a bland video, and there is something unhealthy about the compulsive need to document everything that many of us feel — I appreciate the irony of saying this on Substack — but that is not such a grave vice that she deserved to be plucked from obscurity and treated like Emmanuelle Goldstein by engagement farming pseudo-personalities. 

Still. It would be dishonest to clap my hands and end the lecture here. The Ian Miles Cheongs of the world might be more interested in their Twitter engagements than in people getting engaged but it’s true that marriage rates are declining, and birth rates are declining, and that people even have fewer friends — the latter being a fact that neatly precludes the hopeful argument that alternative ways of being have flourished in some kind of counter-cultural revolution. I’m in no place to moralise about this peculiar state of affairs but I think you’d need to have will.i.am’s optimism goggles soldered to your face not to see the potential for large-scale middle-aged and elderly loneliness, depression and neuroticism coming (even larger, that is, than we have nowadays) — not to mention a social care crisis further down the road. The extent to which I hear people in their thirties talk about “adulting” as if they haven’t been adults for longer than a lot of teenagers have been alive suggests it’s not entirely unfair to think there is a certain amount of delusion about how old we are pervading millennial spheres.

But I’m getting tired of the fearmongering, finger-waggy response to this that has been developing online. Get married and have kids or you’ll end up sad and alone. Now that’s a thought that’s going to have the ladies skipping down the aisle! What an enchanting perspective on life. It really doesn’t matter that in many cases people will end up being sad and alone. If you present them with an aggressively negative argument for an alternative — which, when it comes from single people, also has the vague air of “get in the van or else” — they are going to prefer being sad on their own terms. In an article I wrote for The Critic last year I poked gentle fun at people with “rhapsodic notions of their future on a little farm with ten children and a wife who somehow keeps her figure” but at least those guys have something to believe in. The TikTok trawlers are just unattractive scolds.

Men can face this as well, of course, if from a different direction. People will make fun of incels in their mothers’ basements and then be surprised when young lads gravitate towards Bugatti-wielding sex weirdos instead of the people who keep hectoring them. What reason did they ever have to like you?

So, what is the problem Ben? First of all, it’s obvious that there are structural as well as psychological factors here — student debts, housing prices and stagnant wages making it more difficult for young people to settle down. Sure, you can point out that people in much poorer countries get married and have kids in more difficult conditions, but if you want to live in a first world country you have to accept that people will have first world expectations. I’m sure the decline in social capital is an important — and self-perpetuating — factor as well. People used to meet at church or the pub and now the church is empty and the pub has shut.

What about those psychological factors? I think the feeling is that people have become a little too romantic. Too idealistic. Too convinced that they should seek the perfect situation in life or the broadest range of experiences. 

Well, it can be true. I’m the last person to suggest that people — myself included — always know what’s good for them. But when has a rich romantic view of life been overcome by scowling realism? If marriage and parenthood have value, it is not just in the anxious self-interested terms of companionship and material support. Sure, those terms are relevant. They always have been. But in an age bled of the transcendent, a romantic counter-narrative is what is needed more than a realistic one — because people need inspiration to choose risk and inconvenience (when they have the choice at all, of course). Fear just encourages siege mentality.

I’m talking to a wall here, to some extent, because scorn and aggression provoke more of a response than anything positive. Hell, even here I’m being scornful and aggressive about scorn and aggression…

Do you have a problem with that?