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“When surveys ask elderly Swedes whether they prefer to be dependent on their own adult children or the state,” Trägårdh told me, “they say the state. If you rephrase the question and ask if they’d like their children to visit them, they all say yes. So it is not that the elderly in Sweden don’t want to have relationships with their children. It’s that they don’t want to see them on terms and conditions where they are being reduced to a state of dependency in relation to their own children.”
The pressures of modern life, in combination with the persistence of social structures from the past, were changing young people’s experience of adulthood, essentially preventing them from growing up.
While individual Americans might be the most generous people in the world in their daily actions and deepest desires, they are stuck in a society that ensures none of the fundamental opportunities that people need to achieve even basic middle-class comforts. This condemns Americans to an anxiety-ridden battle where a person had better be special, because the alternative is not succeeding at all. The United States is remarkable among the advanced nations for the way it forces its people into lives so stressful they may have to turn against even their own values.
Wishful thinking can take a nation only so far. Ultimately hope has to be generated by the actual presence of opportunity. And if it’s really there, it doesn’t require constant psychological energy and enthusiasm, or a constant stream of heroic tales of survival against all the odds, to sustain.
