Courtney Martin introduces her new book, The New Better Off, with this staggering statistic: nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe that the next generation will be “better off” than their parents.
That reality provoked Martin to probe more deeply into what the expression “better off” really means to our society. Ultimately,The New Better Off proposes a more holistic view of human happiness, rather than the hamster-wheel of work and money that drives our modern idea of success. I liked the book so much I blurbed it, and Martin recently took some time to answer a few questions from CityLab. [...]
think we need to redefine "better off." We may, in fact, have less money. Fewer of us will own homes. Millennial men, in particular, will probably lead lives that are much more focused on domestic tasks and care-taking than the lives their fathers, and certainly grandfathers did. But to my mind, none of that is inherently negative. It's an opportunity to re-evaluate how much money, house deeds, and job status actually matter in the larger picture of how you want to spend your finite energy and time. [...]
In my reporting, I found that people are really gravitating back towards the local—local food, local community, local investing. As globalized as the world is, and in fact, perhaps because it's become so globalized, people are remembering how critical it is to know your neighbors and experience the daily kindness of public life on the city streets. Research shows that having local connections makes people safer, both in terms of crime and natural disaster, but it's something even less transactional than that. I think people crave the emotional connection of being from a place and from "a people," as it were.
No comments:
Post a Comment