My debut book, ‘The Age of Deferment’, can be purchased here:
https://hangthetraitor.gumroad.com/l/theageofdeferment
It is a powerful eye-witness account of the years 2008 to 2023, covering the economic and social characteristics of that era.
What follows is an extract from the chapter entitled, ‘The Family’…
During The Age of Deferment, the institution of the family was relatively unaffected by developments in technology. That is because one did not generally mix with one’s family online. The internet was a landscape where each user was a distinct individual — a single digit in a digital world — with effectively no past. At least, the culture of the internet downplayed the importance, if not the existence, of one’s past. Erasure and deletion were its prime modes of operation.
As such, the family, the prime social vehicle through which we experience the past, had little to do with the digital realm. To understand how the family might have changed during the years 2008 to 2023, we have to look elsewhere.
Through the family, as institution, were expressed some of the prime forces of the age. It saw developments during those years which had not been seen before.
The form and function of the family adapted to the socio-economic developments that I have been describing.
In some respects, it enforced these developments. For instance, the great majority of parents acquiesced in encouraging their children to attend university, which represented a great leap on the trends of the past.
In other respects, it protected against these developments, and softened the harshness of their effects. The so-called ‘housing crisis’ of those years would have been far worse if huge numbers of families had not allowed their ageing children to stay at home long after it would have been healthy and good for them to leave.
To visualise neatly how the quality of family life may have changed during the era, one could think of the American cartoon sit-com, The Simpsons.
This show, which began life in the late 1980s and was extremely popular with Western audiences, peaking around the year 2000, portrayed a notional ‘normal’ young family living in small-town USA. Theirs was a chaotic but comfortable life, which ultimately, through the archetypal emotional travails of father and son, mother, daughter and baby, showed to society the comforting face of fraught but unbreaking contemporary family unity.
To extrapolate out from The Simpsons and find the archetype of the family at the end of The Age of Deferment, one need only re-insert into the cartoon show the one important element of reality which it was missing: the passing of time. Then, twenty-odd years later, one finds a family that, on the surface, bears a strong resemblance to its former incarnation of the 1990s, but that underneath, and inside, is utterly changed.
The father, Homer, has now retired. He continues with his famous addiction to TV and donuts, on which he spends an increasing proportion of his generous pension from the nuclear plant, but for some unknown reason, even though he has grown enormously obese, he has not suffered a fatal heart attack. His days are spent entirely on the sofa.
His wife, Marge, is bored to death, and suppressing her guilt at the misery that surrounds her, she obsesses over trivialities: board games, trauma and emotional gossip from her past, her adult children’s health. She spends a great deal of her time researching her ancestry and constructing a family tree which, from top to bottom, displays no distinction whatsoever.
The life of her son, Bart, is of course a total mess. Reeling from failed relationships and a stream of meaningless jobs in his twenties, now 35, he spends much of his time in his room playing video games. His father doesn’t even bother to attempt to strangle him anymore, and neither parent has any idea how to communicate with him.
Frustrated at how her parents have indulged and molly-coddled her obstreperous brother, Lisa is the only child who has managed to move out. She finds herself in the nearest big city, working in marketing and paying a frightening amount each month in rent. She engages in a series of flings with dishonest men but shows little interest in seriously looking for a partner.
The youngest child, Maggie, is just as irrelevant as she always was. Some time in her late teens, she discovered a mild talent for music. She spends her days uploading videos of herself playing guitar and singing quietly on to the internet. Inevitably, she gets nowhere with this. She works evenings at Moe’s bar and spends all her money on clothes. The Simpsons manage, just about, to remain civil with each other, but each family member is forced to bury an unholy and worryingly unstable amount of disgust and hatred at the situation.
Forgive my digression into the realm of make-believe. But in my experience, the fortunes of families during The Age of Deferment often approximated to some kind of cartoon horror. By 2023, many families were living out their own version of a Halloween special of The Simpsons.
What should be understood is that during the era the family was a vehicle of decay. It harboured both its own decay as a social institution, and the decay of wider society, whose embedded ideology and (primarily economic) expectations had become unfit for purpose. I said in the introduction that during The Age of Deferment an active hiding from reality was practiced on a mass scale. The domain in which this primarily took place was the family.
