Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Bring back The Grand Adventure! Culture has lost all its fun. Millennials are the canary in the coal mine, mass hipsterism & pop-pessimism are our death twitcheshttps://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1041721074054918144 …

"Culture has lost all its fun" <-- I usually don't respond to claims like this bc I think ppl don't really mean them. But in case you do mean it, I'm curious which metrics you think are worse? I am skeptical but maybe I'm not understanding the claim.

I *definitely* mean what I've said here — I think it's reflected in the data on entrepreneurship and surveys on how students perceive the meaning of their own education process, but also the shift toward risk-aversion & "safetyism" that's discussed in Jon Haidt's new book.

So the claim is, roughly, “Americans are getting less adventurous / more risk averse” ? Hm, I don't know. The one trend I can think of that I agree indicates lower value on adventure is in the risks parents allow their kids to take...

But the story Mason’s telling (about stats like those) is the US valuing risk/adventure less. That's what I'm expressing skepticism about, relative to other factors, like wage stagnation, rising education & health care costs, political polarization, immigration policy, etc.

I don't think these elements are unrelated. I actually suspect that rapidly increasing education costs are driving the culture shift, though I'm not confident about that!