The (Perpetual) Infantilization Of America

This is not a new story.

I have wanted to write about this concept for a while, but it felt like a heavy lift and a boring one at that, because most people kinda sorta believe this is happening, and everyone has their own culprit for what’s going on. The phones! The parenting! The libs! The nationalists! The fathers! I get it. It can get boring, so I don’t want to belabor this that much.

Instead, up top I just want to underscore that this is most assuredly not a new issue — here’s a 1939 paper with almost the same title as this 2025 post. And it’s almost an universal truth that every generation thinks the generation 1–2 back of them is lazy and entitled, which is the highest of ironic comedies, because usually the generation they are complaining about is the one they raised, or at least their own children raised. So it’s almost a self-own in some respects, although no one entirely seems to realize that, or passes it off as “Well, not my grandkids…” I get it.

It can be hard to look at the “girlie” subculture on TikTok and Instagram and not think, oh, OK, young women seem to be infantilizing themselves. But then young men, often up until age 49, play video games for 12 hours a day and have essentially dead-end white-collar jobs or Amazon fulfillment jobs. So both genders, in a vague aggregate, are doing…