This is great from Carolina Bandinelli. It’s exactly what I planned my dying world zero book to be about, even if the project has stalled since I realised that my initial framing for the book was a terrible idea:
Think about what it means to live a life as a young adult after the 2008 financial crisis. Say you’re like me. You grow up with these ideas of finding yourself, studying abroad, landing your dream job, doing what you love. Since primary school, you’re told that everything will be fine, that the Cold War is over, that Europe is going to make it, that we all love each other. It’s the time of the United Colors of Benetton and Jovanotti.
But then you arrive in London, and there’s the financial crisis, and then Brexit, and now Covid. You realize that your pension is eroding and the world is ending. The vision of the world you have now is much, much darker in every respect. You realize that the dreams that you had – your ideal of the good life – were unsustainable and are now unobtainable. But you’re not fully clear as to what is to be done. This is the ethical paralysis facing Millennials.
The underlying philosophical idea was a straight-forward one: can neo-Aristotelian ideas of the good life be rescued as a practical ethic from their investment in a now precarious futurity?
Mark Carrigan 