I've been noticing this for at least a decade now: people don't seem to grow up anymore. When I think of my grandfathers, who were born in 1898 and 1905, respectively, I remember serious men. They were good-humored, but they were adults and they carried their weight in the world. My father, born in 1935, also has that seriousness. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what it is that men under 70 lack now, but it is definitely something important.
You mention that men under 70 lack a certain something. Are you sure it isn't that men have gained something they didn't have in the past? I have thought a lot about how the human condition has changed over the years. I feel the most important change is modern human's ability to think in the abstract.
If you were to ask a pre-modern human to group a chicken, a crow, a stick, and a tree. They might group the chicken and the stick together because they would use the stick to kill the chicken and make a meal. Whereas a modern human would most likely group the chicken and crow, and the stick and tree together.
The tendency to think abstractly has exploded over the last hundred years or so, and it has fundamentally changed how we see and react to the world. A great explanation of this comes from the Ted-talk of James Flynn.
This comment reminded me of the 1997 episode of The Simpsons, "Homer's Phobia", the adults thought the best way to ensure Bart would grow up to be a proper man was to send him off to war to kill someone, but lacking a war they go hunting so he can kill a deer instead.
>> My father, born in 1935, also has that seriousness. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what it is that men under 70 lack now, but it is definitely something important.
It is absolutely not “calcified melancholy”. My father is a deeply religious man, has a degree in chemical engineering from MIT, was a professor of Hematology for 40 years, and was incredibly highly respected by everyone who knew him, and in particular by his church community. He studied Latin as a child, is an avid bird watcher, and has lived an extraordinarily happy, meaningful, and impactful life. His has been a life of service and of joy. I’m afraid that rich lives like his are becoming a thing of the past.
The PhD to community leader pipeline nowadays is a lot smaller. Most of them now end up being adjunct professors or something.
I’m not sure how much Latin and Church play into things (I did both growing up and it’s not much to write home about) but I think the decreasing opportunities for a rich life have more to do with the systematic de-skilling of the professional and academic middle class. Society can not countenance regular individuals with that much leverage and influence so it does everything in its power to reduce engineers, teachers, etc to cogs in a machine
How life sounds like an interesting one. I wonder what drove him. My experience with seriousness is one as a consequence of loss and an obsession with becoming skilled enough to prevent history repeating itself.
