January in Malmö brings with it the sudden ubiquity of bus-stop poster ads for loan-consolidation and comparison apps, all of which strive to portray your sudden need for such in the language of wellness and personal growth: “for when your life suddenly gets bigger” and the like, in a big friendly typeface above a photo of some guy smiling at the camera with a hint of panic and hysteria around the eyes that I’m sure I’m not imagining.
Over the weekend I wrote at Worldbuilding Agency about Scott Smith’s analysis of the “riskmaxxing” dynamic among younger people, and said that I don’t think things are quite so bad in the EU as they are in the Anglosphere. I meant it, too. One of the previous year’s surprisingly difficult lessons has been the need to stop considering reportage from the US (and, to a lesser extent, the UK) as in any way representative of a baseline for circumstances elsewhere.
Part of the difficulty, of course, lies in the realisation that you were still making that assumption, despite knowing very well that you shouldn’t. But the inertia of USian exceptionalism is nowhere more visible than its media, which for pretty much my entire lifetime has spoken of the state of the States as a benchmark for all others to measure against or aspire to—and it still does, albeit in a topsy-turvy way that I’ve come to realise isn’t even conscious on the part of its promulgators. Nowadays that benchmark is fentanyl, crypto gambling apps, and a government which has abandoned even the withered figleaves of neoliberal posture for a sort of whutcha-gonna-do gangsterism.
And, well: long time comin’, I suppose. It takes little effort to be saddened and disgusted, but from the outside looking in, it’s pretty hard to be surprised if you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention. It’s been argued that kids in the US now look to China—or at least the parts of China that China is happy to show off—as the image of futurity, in much the same way that I implicitly looked to the US as a British kid in the early to mid-1980s. Seen from that perspective, the desperate USian scramble after “AGI” makes a stupid sort of sense; one last grasp for a mirage labelled The Future. Good luck with that!
Back here in the Old World, meanwhile, the casino has yet to achieve full spectrum dominance—but you know what they say about betting against the house. Many people’s picture of Sweden still assumes a nigh-utopian social-democratic settlement, but that was already flaking away fast in the mid-Nineties; its Gini coefficient these days is just a hair better than that of the UK. Just in the five years I’ve been here, I’ve noticed a steady increase in sports betting and games machines, and seen the folk searching the litter bins for cans and bottles with a collectable deposit get younger and less obviously dysfunctional. Nowhere is immune to the rot, though some places installed better drainage back in the day. Trouble with infrastructure, though—literal or metaphorical—is you’ve gotta maintain it.
As Scott notes, the three coping strategies of the young—risk-maxxing, reform and exit—are all running out of road. But wherever you choose to look, the closer they are to the end of the road, the more ugly the electoral politics has become. There’s a chasm of wealth and political influence between the old and the young, and the old are not going to let go easily—not while there are still people ready to whisper in their ears and suggest a scapegoat.
The young will likely snap before the old let go. But exactly which way they break, after having tried all the other options, remains to be seen. There are claims that The Kids of Europe are gung-ho for a sort of muscular centrist federalism, and part of me would like to believe that.
The other part of me thinks about all those “Kamala is brat” articles we saw in 2024, and assumes that trying to read electoral futures in the brainrot tea-leaves of TikTok is probably a warning sign of incipient delusion.
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