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I think we have been institutionalized to a very large degree and that’s why COVID responses didn’t really form the ad-hoc organization. Most of us don’t do that anymore and in fact it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost. In fact the skills that form group cohesion are being eroded as well, which is why the cry-bullying seems to grow by the day. Such a thing cannot work in a situation where members of the group hold autonomy. They’d simply kick the malcontents out. But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.
I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?
What about stable diffusion for art? Surely the barrier to entry for art is very low and falling rapidly! I was always rather hopeless at drawing but a decent GPU is within reach of most. Or Midjourney? Or writing a story with a word processor?
I disagree with all the other comments on here. I was just in East Asia for half a year, no one cooks at home- people don't even have ovens in their homes, and food is so good and plentiful and cheap there that no one eats at home. Americans cook way way more than that, everyone I know from my mom to my brothers and sister to my friends in NYC to my friends in the midwest are into cooking their own food. Eating out is very expensive in the US. My dad, recently deceased, ate out every meal of his life after leaving home, but he was particularly rich and an outlier in many other ways. Everyone else in my family cooks for themselves and their families.
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I met this woman at a friend's birthday party who was early 30s, corporate lawyer, she said the last thing she had cooked herself was something like 6 months earlier and it was an egg. She and her partner just order out for every meal. Very real in big cities in America.
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Less and less, I think. I have friends with persistent delivery habits, and though I regularly cook for myself, I'm tremendously lazy about it - fry some meat in a pan and have some kind of simple starchy carb with it.
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It's a significant decline from the Boomer/Xer generation from my read.
I haven't met a single zoomer who can cook. When they attempt it, it's aggressively bad. Millennials tend to be outliers - either they are horrendous cooks who subsist mostly on takeout or they consider cooking a hobby and absolutely crush it (my friendsgivings are almost universally excellent for every dish).
When it comes to DIY items it seems like everyone gives up and has someone else do it for them. Some folks can't even be bothered to get multiple quotes. I know that I personally am absolutely shitty at maintaining a house compared to my parents, and I'm still the guy people call about house problems etc.
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In the full sense of "buy fresh ingredients from a grocery store and prepare a meal from scratch" I would say the proportion of Americans that regularly do that has been in continuous decline since at least 1945. The idea of a nice home-cooked meal to a typical Amerikaner might be a can of tomato sauce heated up in a pot with some prepackaged meatballs served over spaghetti with some mozzarella dust from a jar sprinkled on top, so about the only skill needed is knowing how to turn on the stove and boil noodles. If our hypothetical home cook decided to splurge and get better tomato sauce it might even have recognizable bits of vegetables in it.
Well if there's a pan involved, then it's cooking IMO. I put vegetables and meat in a pan, stir it around a bit, rotate at times.
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Within certain classes of people generally no. Between fast food restaurants, full service restaurants, meal prep/delivery services, ready-made meals, frozen meals and meal replacements it is quite possible for Millenials and Zoomers to never operate anything more complicated than a toaster, a microwave and maybe boiling water on a range. Especially if the skillset was not deliberately passed down by Boomer/Gen X parents whose own skillset may be lacking/atrophied compared to their parents' generation. What level of cookery is necessary to prepare a dinner of hamburger helper or pasta from a box paired with sauce from a jar, after a breakfast of cereal from a box with toast and a lunch of factory sliced cold cuts/cheese/bread sandwich and a bag of chips?
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Ironically, if I haven't inundated this forum enough with his blog, Greer makes much the same case, arguing that modern victimhood isn't a cultural quirk but a pretty reasonable response to a society where the most effective way to get things done is earning the sympathies of the vast, impersonal powers we all live under.
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