It’s no secret that our world has changed dramatically in just a few short years. But these changes have been accelerating for a while now. I was born in 1996; this is most often considered the last year of Millennials although I have occasionally seen it placed as the first year of Gen Z. Whatever the case, this is the time period that grew up alongside these dramatic changes. I’ve never seen an airport without TSA but one of my earliest memories is 9/11. I didn’t have a cell phone until high school but it WAS a smartphone.
Technology has changed so rapidly, even in just the last 20 years, and it’s had such a profound effect on us, it’s no wonder our culture has changed dramatically too.
So many of the things we would consider counter-cultural are now the norm. What once would’ve marked you as an outcast or a rebel is now commonplace. Even being a rebel itself is considered a good thing. But in a world of rebels, are you actually a rebel? Or just doing what everyone else is doing?
What would counterculture really look like today and going forward? Does it still look like the hippies? Or like punk-rockers?
Culture Shifts Visible and Invisible
Let’s start with something that’s exceptionally common today, but was quite rare just a few decades ago: tattoos.
Mind you, I don’t particularly care if you have a tattoo yourself and will not judge you from the tattoos alone (Ideally, I’d never do it at all). But given their highly visible nature, I mean to use it as an example of a change in culture.
In 2006, 36% of 18-25 year olds reported having at least one tattoo. This is no majority, but it’s not exactly a small percentage either. And this was in 2006, I suspect that percentage has only gone up. I recall a conversation with my grandmother, “When I was a kid, you almost never saw someone with a tattoo; and when you did it was usually a very strange person.”
Tattoos are obviously very individual and each person likely has some kind of story behind each of their tattoos. Even if the story is just, “I like it.” But then, someone might also ask me why I’m wearing this piece of jewelry or what is printed on my shirt, or maybe why I’m not wearing any jewelry and have a plain t-shirt.
Because the tattoos are very individual and permanent (excepting the use of lasers to remove them), I find them to be a marker of a high interest in individuality. Rather than fitting in with a group, it displays a desire to stand out.
This is in keeping with common maxims or virtues of the day such as, “finding yourself,” or, “living your truth.” Such sayings are the less visible, but perhaps more impactful, mindsets that the rise of tattoo popularity represents. And they aren’t bad in themselves, but they do further display the current culture and its contrast to the, “new counterculture,” I’m getting at.
Marriage rates are also consistently down year over year. Having been 8.2 per 1000 total population in 2000, and 6.1 per 1000 in 2019 (It dropped all the way to 5.1 in 2020. Hopefully that was a result of people delaying weddings until the following year and therefore went up in 2021). Divorce rates are also down so that’s good… But this drop was from 48% in 2000 to 44% in 2019 and if marriage rates have also gone down, this is small comfort. After all, you can’t get divorced if you don’t get married. Compare it to Great Depression era marriage rates at 7.9 per 1000 in 1932. And a divorce rate of only 1.3 per 1000, or 16 percent.
Birth rates have also steadily gone down. The general fertility rate (that is, live births among women 15-44) actually went up one percent in 2021, the first increase since 2014. But if you go down ten percent, and then up one, you’re still down nine percent.
And speaking of birth rates, 1 in 4 children in the U.S. do not have a father, either biological, step, or adoptive. We have the highest single-parent household rate in the world.
Why Does This Matter?
“But Collin, why have you thrown out all these statistics? How is this relevant to your topic?” I hear you say. Well, my astute and inquisitive reader, now comes the fun part, where I start injecting my thoughts and perceptions, instead of just regurgitating cold data.
All of the above data was put there to show in numbers what we see with our eyes. Most people have a very individualist, dare I say, solipsistic, mind frame today. One often summed up when one utters the platitude, “Drop anything that doesn’t serve you.”
The marriage rate is lower in 2019 than it was in the Great Depression, one of the worst economic periods in American history. And it wasn’t even that long ago. That would’ve been my great-grandparents but for any elderly folk reading, that would’ve been your parents. This means that, despite it’s many faults, people were choosing to get married less often, and divorced more often, in the general prosperity of 2019 than in the poverty stricken uncertainty of the 1930s.
Many young people claim they never want children, or at least greatly prolong having them, in favor of financial and personal gain. This, combined with lack of marriages, is setting up for a very lonely generation.
Many want to be strong and independent, but to be strong and independent, is also to be alone.
The New Counterculture
Fortunately, the new counterculture is actually still fairly common, but I predict that it will wane ever more quickly over this decade and coming decades.
This emerging counterculture is an antidote to the supreme emptiness and loneliness that is a result of our modern, isolated lifestyles.
And that means that it looks more wholesome than what we’d typically consider counter-cultural. More and more it seems the people who will go against the grain are the Hobbits. The little folk who love their homes, live simply, and follow closely their customs.
These are the people who get married, despite economic strife or their own desires, have children, despite economic strife and their own desires, and love their neighbors, despite economic strife and their own desires. In fact, spouses, children, and loving their neighbors ARE their desires. So when I say, “despite their own desires,” I mean only the selfish things that come from the dark parts of ourselves. It is virtuous to deny these things.
They do not live for themselves but for each other and do their best to hand that down to the children they so lovingly raise.
This lifestyle is going to be especially important, I find, for the young people.
Here’s one more point of data for you: Gen Z, the current teens and young adults, are reported as the most lonely in history. 56% reporting having felt lonely at least once or twice a month during childhood. This compared to dramatically lower reported rates from baby boomers.
Do you suppose that goes away when they get older? Unfortunately, many people, young or old, have become detached from the real world. The kids may have returned to in-person classes since 2020 but this may be the only human interaction they have at all. Going home to interface with their friends, or unknown avatars, on the internet. For some, scrolling and posting on TikTok for a few likes is their only outlet. For some, not even a regular family at home means they’re not lonely. For some, it never stops and the internet is making it worse; possibly even causing it.
Being in the new counterculture, they will have to interact with other people face-to-face and it’ll be far more satisfying than interacting with their phone could ever be.
The teens will have to interact with other young adults 3, 5, even 10 years their senior. And this will have a very positive effect on them. There is a big difference between a 16 year old and a 26 year old and much happens and changes for a person between those ages, but this is not so big a difference that it feels like they grew up in a different world; as is the case when teens interact with their parents or parent’s friends.
This is absolutely crucial, this will give them friends (insofar as a 16 year old can be friends with a 19, 21, or 26 year old), and perhaps more importantly, role models that aren’t so far from their age and that aren’t social media, “influencers.” As we all know, celebrities no matter the age, are very rarely good role models. But someone who is part of their community, has a personal relationship with them, and who more or less has their head on straight, can be.
If you want to find the new counterculture, it won’t be in your face like countercultures of the past, you’ll have to seek out, and earnestly and compassionately join, a more traditional community. But be careful, if you do that, then you’ll be part of the new counterculture.
There’s still room for individuality, it’s not a hive mind, and this individuality makes the community even stronger. You can be strong and be yourself, but you will be intertwined with a community that, in part, relies on you. So you will have to use your strengths in service of the community and you will also have to change yourself in order to fit in well enough to be a part of it. Strong, but not entirely independent. And thank God for that.
The new and upcoming counterculture is far more human than our digitized world. Instead of throwing daggers at each other online, or blocking someone and effectively ending that person’s existence to us, we’ll have to work out those differences. Because even though John Doe is kind of obnoxious and Mrs. Smith won’t quit the pointless and erroneous gossip, we’re still part of the same community and so must learn to love and forgive each other. And when disaster strikes a family, and the best, and maybe only, option is divorce, there is a support system that can come together to help the grieved parties and especially the children that so often get caught in the crossfire.
It is a very strange and upside-down world we live in that I call families and close communities the counterculture, but it’s the one we increasingly find ourselves in nonetheless.
This new counterculture is one where people live simply, fall in love, start families, and are kind and forgiving to one another. Something this world could use more of.
But don’t despair. After all, it wasn’t the wise and immortal elves, who live far detached from the world, or even the bold Numenoreans who, for all their virtue, couldn’t resist the temptation of power, or else the vice grip of apathy. No, it was the little Hobbits, who almost no one outside their borders had ever heard of, who destroyed the ring.
Until next time, God be with you.