A potentially cataclysmic social emergency looms behind the health and wellness crisis afflicting Americans, bearing profound implications that threaten the personal freedoms of all. As more citizens lose their personal agency due to obesity, autoimmune disease, and other mental and physical issues now commonplace today, dependence on government is bound to increase. Nowhere is this more obvious than in a pending labor disaster that will only worsen as Millennials hit middle age.
Anyone who has lost a job and struggled for months to find another understands the immense stress that comes with being unemployed. But a far more sinking phenomenon is plaguing too many Americans today: the physical inability to hold down a job. This can usher in feelings of sheer terror as basic staples of survival such as food and housing drift out of reach.
Too Weak to Work
“The proportion of working-age men out of the workforce – unemployed and not actively seeking employment – has reached unprecedented levels,” Steven Malanga writes in a timely article for City Journal. “Though the rates lessened somewhat as COVID abated, they still linger distressingly above historical norms.”
The reasons are varied, but they all point to a fundamental decay in modern American society.
“Ever more adults are unemployable because of worsening social dysfunction, changing youth attitudes toward work, and university and public school failures to prepare students for labor-market realities,” Malanga emphasizes. “Drug legalization has made it harder to find laborers who can pass drug tests – essential to work in industries like construction and transport – leading to worker shortages for key jobs, including truck drivers. A crime spike, meantime, will likely create a new generation of convicts, among the toughest people to employ when they reenter society.”
Collapsing Health of Young Americans
It would be a grave error to dismiss all this “dysfunction” as mere personal failing. Something far more sweeping is going on. A surge in citizens unable to carry their own weight appears almost inevitable in a nation that has allowed the mental and physical health of its citizenry to disintegrate. While individual responsibility is of course vital, the sheer scale of the obesity and opioid crises reveal problems endemic to our society at large.
The shocking rise of cancers and autoimmune and other chronic diseases among the young is another disturbing marker.
“At the start of the clinic where I see patients with colorectal, stomach, pancreatic, and other gastrointestinal cancers, I remarked to a colleague, ‘Every new patient on my schedule is under 45.’ She replied, ‘Three of mine are… this is too many young people with cancer.’” So begins an Aug. 14 article at the medical website Stat News authored by Dr. Nicholas DeVito, assistant professor of medical oncology at Duke University Medical Center.
In July, the American Cancer Center released a major study revealing that Gen X and Millennials have a higher risk for 17 cancers that had been in decline among previous generations of Americans. Stomach, breast, liver, testicular, kidney, pancreatic and throat cancers all were listed.
What Happened to Our Flying Cars?
The conclusions are unavoidable: Young American adults are plagued by historically poor levels of health in the technologically advanced United States of today. That sure makes it harder to be a productive employee. How long will it be before this creeping disaster reaches a tipping point? And what happens then?
Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute reported in 2022 that 73% of the US food supply is ultra-processed. Unnaturally long shelf life and the freedom from cooking and cleaning that comes with ready-made meals are irresistible developments for a culture that has been obsessed with the illusion of modern convenience for well over a century. A major psychological examination of 1960s cartoon sitcom The Jetsons and what it still has to say about the American mindset would not be out of place.
By the way, did you know George Jetson was born on July 31, 2022? The show was set in a 2062 future that is not turning out as TV-dinner 1960s America had hoped. Instead of flying cars, young Americans have stomach cancer and type 2 diabetes to look forward to – and more big government as their health continues to plummet.
“Direct disability benefits are only part of the support that the nonworking receive,” Malanga writes in City Journal. “Most are also eligible for food stamps, government health insurance, and housing subsidies. Many nonworkers live in households where someone else also gets government aid.”
As the crisis worsens, citizens must ask themselves a question: Are the societal “advances” we dreamed would grant us more free time and more personal liberty instead sapping our individual capacities and furthering our dependence on a centralized bureaucratic state?
