If you’ve spent any time at all on TikTok recently, you’ll have seen plenty of videos from young people despairing about life in the UK. Videos with captions like “Why is everything so expensive?” “Why is rent so high?” “Why can’t I get a doctor’s appointment?” are going viral every day. With no clear answers, let alone solutions, to any of these questions, many are opting to leave the country altogether.
Now more than ever, young people feel as though they are facing these challenges alone. Without the social and community infrastructure that was destroyed by austerity, they have nowhere to go for support. And the hypercompetitive culture created by neoliberal capitalism — reinforced by a toxic “hustle” mindset pushed by some of the most popular voices on social media — encourages them to blame themselves when things get tough.
It would be easy to dismiss these trends as the complaints of young people unused to hard work. But their concerns are borne out by the statistics.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the UK experienced the longest period of wage stagnation in modern history. A study by the Resolution Foundation showed that by 2023, this flatlining of wages had left workers, on average, £11,000 worse off per year than if precrisis trends had continued. The same study showed that UK workers were £4,000 worse off than their German counterparts due to wage stagnation.
When inflation was low, this crisis went somewhat under the radar. The worst affected were groups like private renters, low-paid workers, and those receiving social security, which had been subjected to deep cuts by successive governments. But when prices started to rise, the squeeze between low incomes and high costs became clear to everyone.
Today a record 26 percent people say they are “struggling to live” on their current incomes — an increase of 10 percentage points since before the pandemic. The proportion of people who say they are living “comfortably” has fallen from 50 percent before the pandemic to a record low of 35 percent today. And things are getting worse. This quarter, official statistics showed the fastest decrease in households’ disposable income in two years.
The shock could not have come at a worse time. After the crisis, many households had been unable to save, leaving them vulnerable to increasing costs when inflation rose. Others had taken advantage of the post-crisis period of low interest rates to take on debt. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that a fifth of households had been forced to take on new debt to pay for essentials. This extra debt among the poorest households added up to around £2,500 per family.
Those on low pay were particularly hard hit. By 2022, 4.8 million workers were earning a wage below the minimum cost of living. Forty-two percent of those workers reported regularly missing meals due to financial hardship, and 56 percent reported having to use food banks regularly. Private renters have been squeezed extremely hard, too. Shelter reports that low-income tenants are spending up to a third of their income on rent, and the rate of evictions continues to rise.
As a result of these trends, we are a nation of embedded poverty. One in five people in the UK is living in poverty, amounting to more than fourteen million people, of which 4.3 million are children — that means a third of the children in the UK are living in poverty. What is remarkable about these statistics is how stable they have been over time — there has been no improvement in the UK’s poverty statistics for over twenty years.
Despite the derision they receive from well-off boomers, young people are much more aware of these economic challenges than previous generations. Forty-eight percent of Gen Zers report being financially insecure, with millennials not far behind, at 46 percent.
The housing crisis has hit them particularly hard. Over the past twenty years, the share of under-twenty-fives who own their own home has fallen from 24 percent to 10 percent. It’s all but impossible for young people to buy a house without support from their parents, and the number of first-time buyers receiving financial assistance reached all-time highs this year. One-third of both Gen Zers and millennials are still relying on their parents to support them with housing costs and bills.
To make matters worse, young people are facing one of the toughest job markets in decades. Geopolitical uncertainty, tax rises, and economic stagnation have discouraged many businesses from taking on new workers. Other businesses are opting to replace entry-level jobs with artificial intelligence. There has been a 33 percent drop in graduate job listings compared to this time last year, marking the lowest level of hiring since 2018.
Is it any wonder, in these circumstances, that young people are experiencing an epidemic of poor mental health? A quarter of young people aged sixteen to twenty-four now report suffering from some form of mental illness. Economic hardship is a big part of the story, with 57 percent of initial referrals to children’s mental health services coming from financially strained families. Fifty-four percent of young people have said that the cost-of-living crisis has negatively impacted their mental health.
Where are young people supposed to go to deal with their mental health issues? The National Health Service (NHS) has been in crisis since before the pandemic, and today a record 59 percent of people say they are dissatisfied with the institution. Everyone knows someone who went to the doctor to discuss their mental health struggles, only to spend two years languishing on a waiting list and receive six sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy at the end. For the millions of people whose mental ill health is the result of severe trauma, this is simply not good enough.
There is a deep and well-established link between poor mental health and poor physical health. Patients with severe mental health issues are around twice as likely to have multiple physical health conditions, when compared with the rest of the population. And once again, young people experience the most significant health inequalities: young people with severe mental health issues are five times more likely to have three or more physical health conditions than the rest of the population.
Far from reflecting underdeveloped coping strategies, or overly “soft” parenting, the mental health crisis being faced by young people can be traced back to the pathologies of the economy, and the society, into which they were born.
Gen Zers have been forced to deal with a traumatizing pandemic, which created a dramatic interruption to their formal education; in some cases, it derailed their future plans altogether. If they do attend university, they find themselves weighed down by vast amounts of debt in a tertiary education system that is more geared toward saving money than supporting learning — only to enter a job market in which entry-level roles are disappearing by the second. If they choose not to attend university and stay in their hometown, they’re likely to face a “place-based” employment penalty of as much as £1,500 per year.
If they do manage to secure stable, well-paid employment, they will still struggle to cover their basic costs. People under thirty spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent — higher than for any other age group. As a result of these high costs, the share of young people living with their parents has risen by a third over the last twenty years, which often has a negative impact on their mental health and relationships. Without the persistent house price inflation experienced by boomers and Gen X, millennials have become the first generation in the history of modern capitalism likely to be worse off than their parents. And Gen Z is likely to experience the same fate.
What makes these experiences so much worse is that young people are increasingly experiencing this economic turmoil alone. The individualistic ideology embedded by neoliberalism has reached its apogee with Gen Z. Margaret Thatcher famously told the people of the UK that “there is no such thing as society,” in a bid to cultivate a kind of rugged individualism that would encourage people to compete, rather than cooperate, with one another.
The hypercompetitive economic conditions experienced by the younger generation, combined with the breakdown of the social infrastructure that once gave us a sense of belonging and community, not to mention the toxic competition of social media, have ensured that Gen Z is a generation of which Thatcher would have been proud.
How did we get here? Thatcher devastated the labor movement, which had provided people with voice, representation, and camaraderie at work. She sold off billions of pounds worth of council housing, only for these homes to end up in the hands of extractive buy-to-let landlords. She unleashed the destructive power of the finance sector, centralizing economic activity in London and sucking wealth into the capital. And she sought to create a “property-owning democracy” in which workers identified as “mini-capitalists,” seeing their fate as tied to those of financial markets, rather than that of their fellow workers.
Where Thatcher destroyed the economic basis of many communities across the UK, austerity tore apart the social fabric that held people together in spite of economic dislocation. Two-thirds of council-funded youth centers in England have closed since 2010, and research shows that young people affected by these closures performed 4 percent worse in exams at sixteen and were 14 percent more likely to commit crimes.
The closure of Sure Start centers had a devastating impact on the mental and physical health of both mothers and children, as well as exacerbating a loneliness crisis experienced by many young mothers. And the institutions supposed to support those on the sharp end of Britain’s poverty epidemic — from social care to the NHS — are all facing deep crises.
The destruction wrought by Thatcherism and austerity is well documented. What is less well understood is how these changes were driven by a neoliberal ideology that places competitive individualism at the heart of social life, and which is driving young people to despair today.
Neoliberals tell us that every worker is a potential entrepreneur. The job of the state is to create the right conditions to allow these potential entrepreneurs to compete with one another. As people compete, the market will reveal their value — those who succeed will rise to the top, while those who fail will sink to the bottom. And the harder a worker competes — blinded by the idea that one day they, too, could become a capitalist — the easier they are to exploit.
Those who are reliant upon state support are not competing in the game, so they must be encouraged — or, ultimately, pushed — to do so. Those who participate in unions are not competing in the game; instead, they’re working together to try to change the rules. So they, too, must be punished. Anyone who doesn’t buy into the ideology of “work hard, get ahead” has to be disciplined — whether by their teachers, their bosses, politicians, or their fellow citizens — into competing like everyone else.
One way in which this discipline is meted out is through shame. If you’re on benefits, you’re lazy, says our political class. If you’re not working evenings and weekends, you’re a slacker, says your boss. If you’re not “hustling,” you’re a loser, says Andrew Tate. In short, if you’re not playing the game, and winning, then you’re worthless. And if anything goes wrong, you only have yourself to blame — there’s no safety net to catch you if you fall.
It is unsurprising that this kind of competitive individualism is creating a deep mental health crisis among young people. If you’re not winning, you feel a deep sense of worthlessness and despair, driven by your internalization of society’s warped view of human value. But even if you are winning, you’re constantly terrified of losing your spot at the top — so you’re constantly working harder to keep hold of what you have. And if you’re in the middle, just struggling to keep your head above water, with barely enough to live on and not enough time to support meaningful relationships or participation in your community, you probably feel as though life is pretty meaningless.
Young people in the UK are facing a profound economic crisis. But they’re also facing a deep crisis of meaning in a world that teaches them they have to compete to prove their worth. The economic and social institutions torn apart by successive governments must be repaired. But so, too, must the social bonds that give us all a sense of community and belonging. In an economy designed to drive us apart, coming together is a radical act.
Great Job Grace Blakeley & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
