It's Crybaby Time For Consumers

One major American city is nearly wiped off the map by a hurricane. A second is evacuated as another hurricane threatens it. Gas prices shoot up to record levels. So, does the economy collapse under these tribulations? Actually, as we learned a few weeks ago when the third-quarter data came out, it grew at a rattling 4.3 percent. One lesson of the months following Hurricane Katrina is that the American economy is remarkably resilient. It's a pity one can't say the same of the American population.This was the year when a crybaby culture took hold of the national temperament. Even before the post-Katrina runup, rising gas prices had produced a volume of self-pitying complaint more appropriate to the end of the world. In polls relating gas prices to consumer spending, people were vowing to cut their outlays to the bone, even while confessing they couldn't be bothered to carpool. Surveys fielded just prior to holidays found respondents saying they'd sit home (and sulk, presumably) rather than buy the gas to drive someplace for the long weekend. Every little blip in the Labor Department's new-jobs figures brought on a fresh crisis in consumer confidence, even as the overall upward trend in employment was prompting Alan Greenspan to rein in the economy. Then, when gasoline prices shot up after Katrina, consumers fell into an absolute swoon. The confidence numbers suffered their steepest plunge in living memory. Though it ought to have been obvious that gas prices would recede once the infrastructure was again up and running, 58 percent of respondents in a September Ipsos Public Affairs poll insisted the price rise would be "long-term." Polling by the American Research Group was typical in finding nearly half the adult population convinced we were in a recession (see chart in first column of the facing page).Despite such wailing and gnashing of teeth, the real-life economic numbers show that consumers en masse did not slam their wallets shut. Sure, some stores experienced ragged moments at the peak of the gas-price crisis, but the general tendency was toward more consumer spending, not less. One sign of this: Wal-Mart, thought to be particularly vulnerable to the Katrina effect on its core customers, posted a 3.8 percent gain in same-store sales in the third quarter, followed by an estimated 4.3 percent rise in November. Thus, people weren't changing their behavior in a serious way; they were just having a good old cry. Writing last month in The Washington Post, economics columnist Robert Samuelson tried to solve the mystery of "the gap between today's strong economy and sour public opinion." He speculated that people compare everything today with the late-1990s boom, when Americans imagined that "the business cycle was dead or dying" and the "central fantasy was that we could dispense with uncertainty and anxiety." A degree of nostalgia is perfectly understandable, as those days were nice while they lasted. But since we now know beyond doubt (and even suspected at the time) that the late-'90s economy was a bubble waiting to burst, there is something childishly irrational in holding it up after the fact as an ideal.If the crybaby effect were just a passing consequence of high gas prices, one would try to ignore it for the duration. However, the fact that consumers were so thoroughly undone by such a factor points to a deeper trend toward immaturity in the way so-called adults behave these days. People used to take pride in becoming grown-ups. Having left the parental home and set up housekeeping on their own, young adults would do their best to pass as real adults, even if they didn't altogether feel the part. Now, they're as likely to cling to adolescence (and to flaunt it) for as long as they can get away with doing so. In daily life for most of us, the culture war that matters isn't the one between a countercultural left and a traditionalist right; it's the one between the mature and the immature. A glance at the movie and television listings will tell you who's winning. Among young adults, the phenomenon of stretched-out adolescence feeds on itself as the median age at first marriage creeps upward. (The most recent Census data puts it at 27.1 for men and 25.3 for women, about five years older than in 1960.) They delay settling into family life because they feel less mature, which in turn means they postpone their contact with the maturing influences that naturally arise out of having a spouse and a kid. With biological clocks to worry about, young women are less keen on postponing marriage and kids than are their male counterparts. As the National Marriage Project at Rutgers has seen in its research, however, these women have a difficult time finding suitable men their age to marry. The lads are happily entrenched in their adolescent ways and see little incentive to leave that life behind. Nor does society lean on young men to become family men, as it did within living memory. Young women, too, endure less such pressure than they used to, so there are signs that (biological clocks aside) they're getting into the immaturity act as well. In their recent book What Women Really Want, pollsters Celinda Lake and Kellyanne Conway remarked on their finding that women age 18-25 are "somewhat reluctant to cross over the threshold to adulthood."Anyway, it's not as though marriage and parenthood are any guarantee of mature behavior. One increasingly sees parents of babies and toddlers who behave as though their demanding role excuses them from the slightest obligation to be considerate to other people. This was the subtext of a long article this fall in The New York Times about mothers taking umbrage when a neighborhood cafe in Chicago—beset by rambunctious children and their oblivious parents—posted a sign requiring that children "behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven." The sign prompted a boycott by mothers who found this rule uncongenial. Noting that children have a tendency to yell, Laura Brauer, a 40-year-old mother quoted in the article, asked, "What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?" This drew a riposte from a letter to the editor that ran in the Times later the same week: "What you are supposed to do, Ms. Brauer, is what my mother did: teach your child to behave in public or get a babysitter." Another letter-writer expressed regret that the matter was treated as a dispute between parents and non-parents. "It is more of a dispute between childlike parents and grown-up parents." And, indeed, it's hard to read about this episode without feeling the real crybabies in the case were the parents who felt they should be immune from criticism and were stung when they received some.Senior citizens, who used to be exemplars of maturity for society as a whole, have been contributing their share to the rise of immaturity. When you think about it, the change in old folks' role is a predictable consequence of the bigger shift in how American lifespans are structured in the modern age. People used to work until a normal retirement age and kick the bucket shortly thereafter. Now, thanks to the gains in longevity (and, in many cases, to earlier retirements), increasing numbers of Americans live for a couple decades with relatively few responsibilities. It ought not surprise us that this development has made the new generation of seniors more self-indulgent and less mature than old folks were in earlier times. At any rate, the geezer who's set on pleasing himself, and the rest of us be damned, has emerged as an all-too-familiar social type. Just try shutting a chatty one up at a movie or concert. Note that the new immaturity differs from the old-fashioned worship of youth. The old thinking implicitly understood youthful days as a wonderful period one could enjoy only briefly. The new thinking seems to be that one can prolong this phase of life for decades on end. One sees a visible manifestation of this in the proliferation of elaborate tattoos among young adults. A Harris Poll two years ago found that 36 percent of Americans age 25-29 have at least one tattoo. Needless to say, many of these tattoos are better suited to a twentysomething than to a fiftysomething. But it seems not to have occurred to lots of the twentysomethings that they'll eventually turn into fiftysomethings. Then again, the scarier interpretation is that the young folks have judged themselves correctly in assuming they'll have the predilections of a 25-year-old even when they're 55. One sees a corollary of this in the botox fad—which is something of an anomaly at a time when people seem otherwise quite willing to let their appearance go to seed. (Casual Friday long since morphed into Slovenly Monday-through-Friday, which is itself a telltale sign of today's immaturity syndrome.) If you're stuck at the emotional age of a teenager, it must seem absurd to look like a fortysomething. So, you alter your looks instead of your psyche. Among the more irksome features of the new immaturity is a dramatic increase in rudeness. An Ipsos Public Affairs/Associated Press survey earlier this year took note of the phenomenon. As you can see from the chart at left, there's a consensus that people are now more rude than was the case a generation ago. Thirty-eight percent said they'd "asked someone behaving rudely to stop their behavior"; 22 percent reported having "made a formal complaint about someone behaving rudely." It's not as if the survey's respondents claimed to be paragons of politesse themselves: 23 percent confessed to having "gotten impatient with someone in public and spoken rudely to them"; 13 percent admitted they'd "made an obscene gesture to another person while driving a car." If anything, that latter number sounds low. "Impulse control" used to be a hallmark of true adulthood. Broadly undermined by the rise in immaturity, it seems to vanish entirely when people get behind the wheel of a car. And, as the problem of road rage makes clear, crybabies with cars are a particularly dangerous demographic. While Americans notice and vocally object to rudeness, one nonetheless wonders how much they really care about the matter. The convention among adults used to be: I won't inflict my rudeness on you and, in return, you'll refrain from inflicting your rudeness on me. The social contract now taking shape is just the opposite: I won't object to your rudeness if you don't object to mine. You almost feel like a crybaby if you do make a fuss about people's rudeness—as if the breach of decorum is yours, not theirs.Good manners became a social fixture in the first place because they enable people to interact with a minimum of friction. The rise of modern rudeness partly reflects the fact that people don't necessarily interact with each other when they're out in public. That's one consequence of technologies like the iPod, which allow them to stay in their own personal bubbles even as they jostle through crowded public places. Peek into a cafe where tech-laden consumers congregate and you're apt to see something like the "parallel play" that's characteristic of toddlers who aren't yet socialized enough to interact with each other when they're at the playground: They're in the same place, doing much the same things, but they aren't engaging one another. Under the circumstances, they're unlikely to feel the need to master a code of etiquette—and, hence, more likely to bellow into their cellphones in all sorts of public places.If growing immaturity has been a boon for industries that profit from it—video games and show-offy "extreme sports" quickly come to mind—it's a death sentence for institutions that depend on grown-up sensibilities. An art critic for the Chicago Tribune, Alan G. Artner, took note of this reality in a column in September. "Simply put, the arts of museum, concert hall, opera house, theater and library have smaller audiences than they once did because growing older no longer means growing up." In an era of "arrested development," he wrote, people increasingly stick with the pop-culture genres of their youth instead of growing into the more demanding forms long seen as "the cultural heritage of adults." One could say something the same about newspapers as their circulation figures dwindle year after year. This industry used to view younger people's indifference to newspapers as a stage they'd outgrow. Now, even the near-invincible obliviousness of newspaper publishers cannot blind them to the fact that young people aren't outgrowing much of anything these days, and certainly not their lack of interest in the daily paper.Say what one will about the ad industry, it has been much more nimble at pandering to a perpetually immature audience. Looking at current automotive commercials, to take one obvious example, one would suppose that half the cars in the U.S. are bought by teenage boys. The old car-as-mistress school of automotive advertising was silly in its own way, but it at least addressed the consumer as a grown-up of sorts. Not so with today's car-as-plaything genre and its images of drivers zooming through town and country at top speed (and, in the case of one Buick spot, seeming to take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier). The phenomenon is scarcely limited to advertising that targets younger adults. Ads aimed at baby boomers routinely urge them to regress to the youthful stage they inhabited in their supposed glory days of the 1960s—or flatter them (as recent Ameriprise retirement-planning commercials did) by suggesting they virtuously managed to avoid growing up at all! In earlier times, lack of inhibition used to be scorned as a symptom of arrested development. Nowadays, ads laud it as a sign of personal authenticity. The new immaturity is more problematic, though, for marketers in the adult-vice sectors (notably alcohol and cigarettes), which must scrupulously avoid any appearance of catering to underage consumers. When 27-year-olds have the attitudes of 17-year-olds, it's tricky for a brand of beer to bond with them without also appearing to appeal to real 17-year-olds.Is there reason to hope (or, if you're among the immaturity-profiteers, to fear) that society will soon outgrow this stage? Not an obvious one. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you'll recall, pundits were forecasting an end to irony and a permanent sobering of popular culture. And, as you'll also recall, the sobering lasted about a month before we got back to juvenile business as usual. If anything, technological trends seem conducive to further entrenchment of a crybaby culture. In the old days of three-network television (and no Internet at all), the paucity of choices meant in practice that we all had to accommodate ourselves to mass-market tastes. While bad for our leisure-time pleasure, this was probably good for our character. If nothing else, it taught us to be patient—to wait until a song we liked came over the radio, for example. Now, with hundreds of television channels, satellite radio and potentially limitless podcasting options, we can suit ourselves all the time. While good for our leisure-time pleasure, this is probably bad for our character—and for the odds of an early reversal of the new immaturity. Of course, it's hard to complain about such matters without sounding like a querulous old grouch. In other words, as the culture of immaturity has spread, its detractors (likely sensing the futility of their resistance) have come to sound crybabyish in their own right.Even the Dark Ages eventually came to an end, though. Perhaps the adults who now read nothing more grown-up than Harry Potter will decide they're ready for literature that wasn't written mainly for 11-year-olds. And maybe we'll see a backlash against immaturity by kids who now are growing up amid infantile adults. A motto for such a movement: Don't trust anyone over 30 who acts as though he's under 30.

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It's Crybaby Time For Consumers

Mark Dolliver

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Mark Dolliver