I’m sure everyone has heard by now of the NYTIMES article on the plummeting life expectancy among middle-aged white people without college degrees. (The middle-aged black people didn’t make it into these stats because this phenomenon caught up with them earlier.)
This is evidence – in case anybody needed any more evidence – that there is no place in the 21st – century economy for people who have nothing but a high school diploma to shore them up against the tides of liquid capital. They turn into surplus people who self-destruct with drugs and alcoholism because capital doesn’t find them useful. This sounds cold but that’s what capital is like.
Middle-aged Hispanics are still resisting this trend because the extremely high value their cultures place on sociability reduces their alienation and provides a cushion against the especially negative effects of liquid modernity.
Clarissa's Blog 
I read the article this morning in the NYT. Anecdotally, the phenomenon is true. My mother comes from a family with eight kids. Of those eight, four died before they were fifty — one before he was 40 — because of drugs, alcohol, suicide, or health problems from previous use of drugs and alcohol. All were white. None of them had college degrees. All of them were traumatized from their childhoods. The other four siblings all had at least one of two things that were different from the dead siblings: either they went to college or they had children. My mom took some college classes (correspondence courses as an adult), but her whole thing was being a parent. She was still a drunk, but she had to at least minimally take care of us, or face losing us. Two of the others went to college. The last one didn’t go to college, but had children that she “lived” for, so she kept more on the straight and narrow.
I think that in my mom’s family’s case the clear difference was that some of the siblings felt like they had something to live for that was external to themselves (a meaningful career, cultural interests, or children). The other four did not. Oddly enough, the ones that died were the younger of the eight siblings who actually grew up with more privilege, born after the time my grandfather became somewhat successful. The kids born in the poverty era ended up having more ability to cope than the privileged kids.
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What a sad story. It must have necessitated an enormous effort on your part to overcome this legacy.
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“What a sad story. It must have necessitated an enormous effort on your part to overcome this legacy.”
Sometimes you don’t see how enormous an effort you’re making until much later. But you’re right — it was a tough legacy to get out from under. Once I got to 38 years old — the age one of my uncles died — I felt like I was walking over a grave. But I have a much easier life than he had, mostly because I got away from my family for a good long time. Plus, my husband is very loving and supportive — the dead relatives didn’t have that in their lives.
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America is entering its own “Brezhnev Years” according to this essayist:
http://notesironbound.blogspot.com/2015/11/americas-brezhnev-years-continued.html
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Read it, hated it, moved on. If there was ever a tortured analogy, it’s the one in this article.
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