Opinion Young and always restless

For years now,we’ve heard the gripes by and about millennials,the offspring of the Great Recession,caught between childhood and adulthood. Their plight seems so very 21st century: the unstable careers,the confusion of technologies,the delayed romance,parenthood and maturity.

Many of the same concerns and challenges faced the children of the industrial revolution,as the booms and busts of America’s wild 19th century tore apart the accepted order. Each New Year’s,young men and women filled their diaries with worries that seem very familiar today: They found living with their parents “humiliating indeed” and felt “qualified for nothing”. Others moaned: “I am 25 and not in love yet.” Gathering over beer or cigars,they complained about how far they were from marriage,how often they switched jobs.

The idea that millennials are uniquely “stuck” is nonsense. Young Victorians grasped for maturity as well,embarrassed by the distance between their lives and society’s expectations. These Americans were born into an earthquake. During the 1800s America’s population exploded from 5 million to 75 million. By 1900 nearly as many people lived in New York City as had lived in the entire country during the revolution. The nation went from a rural backwater to an industrial behemoth,but every decade the economy crashed.

For rootless 20-somethings,each national shock felt intimate,rattling their love lives and careers. Many young adults could not accept that their personal struggles were just ripples of a large-scale social dislocation. So each New Year’s,they blamed themselves. In a January 1,1859,entry in her journal,19-year-old Mollie Sanford,stuck on a Nebraska homestead in the middle of a recession,castigated herself for not being “any better than I was one year ago”.

Romance worried them above all. Today some fret about the changing institution of marriage,but we are used to such adjustments; 19th-century Americans were blindsided when the average age of marriage rose precipitously,to 26 — a level America didn’t return to until 1990. In a world where life expectancy hovered below age 50,delaying marriage until 26 was revolutionary. Cities brimmed with bachelors and unmarried ladies in their mid-20s,once a rare sight. In their New Year’s reflections,men and women noted that their parents had had children by their age.

This social change brought personal turmoil,especially for young women. Marriage meant love and family,but in a society that discouraged ladies from working,young women were dependent on their husbands. Remaining single meant economic and legal instability,and the perception of childishness. While some looked for love,others looked for jobs. Before the modern era,young people found work within family networks,labouring at home or on a farm,pausing for “elevenses” (a late-morning whiskey break) or an afternoon nap. The industrial economy changed that. The good news was that there were more jobs; the bad news was that they were isolating and temporary. For young people this meant chronic instability.

Today’s young adults are constantly rebuked for not following the life cycle popular in 1960. But a quick look at earlier eras shows just how unusual mid-20th-century young people were. A society in which people married out of high school and held the same job for 50 years is the historical outlier. Some of that era’s achievements were enviable,but they were not the norm. The anxieties that 19th-century young people poured into their New Year’s diary entries are more common.

Grinspan is a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution The New York Times