Post-it Pessimism

Back in August, NPR asked the under-40 set some questions:

If you're under 40, how have concerns about affordability shaped your life? Have they changed how you typically vote? Delayed a big life decision?

The whole exercise seemed calculated to bring out the gloom in people, and judging from the responses, it did.

The answers are short; they're presented as if typed onto Post-it Notes, and all of the responses printed in the story fit on to one or two of them. And because it was simply an open call for responses, they are, as NPR points out, not a representative sample.

But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028.

I'm not so sure about that. Mainly because while it's clear that the respondents aren't a representative sample of the American public, it's also likely true that they aren't a representative sample of NPRs under-40 audience. Remember the questions were asking about how financial concerns were shaping people's lives and politics. Audience members whose response was "I've got this," or "I think I'm managing," wouldn't have written in... there would have been no reason to.

Not that there's nothing there. American economic policy has been something of a train wreck for some time now. But that's because, as I remember George Will putting it once, American society doesn't really take steps to avoid problems; it allows them to happen, and then cleans up the mess. And there are plenty of recent examples of that tendency. It's also worth noting that the American political system apparently thrives on pessimism, stoking it at every turn to raise the stakes of elections. Once the message from any given candidate is that a win by the other will be the end of the world as we know it, it is any wonder that people's views of the current state of the world are more easily predicted by their partisan identities than the actual fundamentals?

And the media isn't blameless here, either. We all know that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a common journalistic outlook, but there's also the habit of talking about issues in terms of "how worried people should be" in order to convey a sense of seriousness to the audience. It might be good for that, but it also conveys the sense that anxiety is, in and of itself, as appropriate response to the broader world, even though there's nothing about change that requires anxiety. In fact, anxiety tends to push back against the idea that change is possible.

It's this passivity that eventually becomes the problem. The collective we, as in American society as a whole, and I count myself in that number, have made a myriad of individual and group (if not collective) choices that have brought us to this place. And to the degree our choices have brought us here, they can take us somewhere else. It's going to be slow, and it's likely going to be expensive and/or painful. And I think that's what's really in play here... the "young" people who responded to NPR's call for input are seeing that the pain that other people are working to avoid is going to be visited upon them later. And they're understandably pessimistic about that. But I'm not sure of the utility of constantly reminding people of that, or of presenting it as the outlook of entire age cohorts, rather than just a self-selected sampling.